Magdalene Lampert
Magdalene Lampert is giving a talk entitled “Language and Teaching: What is There to Teach?”
She began by giving a short introduction in Italian and then asking the people who don’t speak Italian to guess what she said. It was reasonably possible to do so, given the constraints on what people say in such settings (thanking the introducer, the organizers, and expressing gratitude for the chance to talk about her recent work) and the number of cognates that Italian and English share [something, I hasten to point out, that has pretty much never been of help to me in learning Chinese, not that I’m bitter or anything]. The point is that learners bring a great deal of prior knowledge to learning, and it’s a nice demonstration of that fact.
She pointed out the distinction between preparation for doing well in school and for doing well in contexts outside of school.
Teachers tend to have little experience working in any domain besides school and tended to be very good at doing well in school, but need to be prepared to teach their students to be good at solving problems in complex domains outside of school.
[this didn’t get published at the time—thought I’d lost it, but was saved as a draft]