Episode 60 – F. Joseph Merlino – “The Case For Repurposing Education”
This month, Mark talks with F. Joseph Merlino about the work he has done using grants from the National Science Foundation to reform math and science education. They talk about his work in Egypt overhauling their whole education system, working with the decision-makers to identify their biggest challenges and then how they can design school around preparing students to solve those big problems. They talk in particular about the success of the government-funded STEM schools and the role that modelers played in training the educators. They talk about formative assessment, and how it is not only for the benefit of the teacher, but also the New Era-New Urgency: the Case for Repurposing Education. They talk about the purpose for education or for teaching the particular things we teach, and the “shadows” that every teacher or reform person must confront even before walking into a school.
Guests
F. Joseph Merlino
F. Joseph Merlino’s academic background is in chemical engineering and cognitive developmental psychology. He is the president of the 21st Century Partnership for STEM Education (17 years). He has been a PI and project director of numerous large-scale NSF, IES, and USAID projects, including a Targeted Math Science Partnership involving 45 school districts and 13 colleges and universities. For the past 12 years, he has been directing a STEM project for the Egyptian Ministry of Education establishing 21 New STEM high schools and new STEM teacher prep programs in 5 Egyptian universities. He has employed many modelers as consultants on these projects. He is co-author of a new book entitled NEW ERA-NEW URGENCY: The Case for Repurposing Education by Lexington Books (2024)
Highlights
[4:47] F Joseph Merlino “Actually, this idea that physics instruction and science instruction could be different, goes back to the 1880s.”
[17:01] F Joseph Merlino “we had to use the assessments as a foot in the door as a way to open the door to then introduce a different pedagogical approach.”
[24:06] F Joseph Merlino “the idea of the formative assessment that we talk about is that if you’re cooking something, for example, if you’re cooking, a dish, a stew, for example, you sample it along the way, and then you add ingredients as you need in order to suit it to the taste.”
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