The Educator's Notebook

A weekly collection of education-related news from around the web.

“A Visual Guide To 2024’s Rare Dual [Cicada] Appearance”

“Billions of bugs are emerging from the soil across a large swath of the United States in a natural phenomenon last witnessed in 1803. It involves two broods, or groups, of periodical cicadas, insects with relatively long life cycles that show up after a certain interval. The Northern Illinois brood spends 17 years underground before […]

“Reopen Schools With A ‘Golden Age Of Play’”

“For older middle schoolers and high schoolers, recess and free play can take the form of frequent break times, self-determined passion projects and learning to solve real problems in their communities. As the American Academy of Pediatrics has noted, Cognitive processing and academic performance depend on regular breaks from concentrated classroom work. This applies equally to adolescents […]

In Praise Of Praise

“The higher the ratio between the two — the more a teacher praised and the less they scolded — the better kids stayed focused on their lessons.”

A Case For Playing Video Games With Our Kids

Do I see a long future of mother-son video game nights ahead? Not really… I’ll keep playing for the practical benefits and the emotional ones, too. Taking part in another’s pleasure, no matter how anodyne or indecipherable that pleasure may feel to us, is revelatory. We learn what makes them tick, and we learn what […]

More Screen Time Does Appear To Correlate With Adverse Development

“The researchers found that greater screen time at 24 months was associated with poorer performance on developmental screening tests at 36 months, and greater screen time at 36 months was associated with lower scores on developmental screening tests at 60 months.”

Issues

Every week I send out articles I encounter from around the web. Subject matter ranges from hard knowledge about teaching to research about creativity and cognitive science to stories from other industries that, by analogy, inform what we do as educators. This breadth helps us see our work in new ways.

Readers include teachers, school leaders, university overseers, conference organizers, think tank workers, startup founders, nonprofit leaders, and people who are simply interested in what’s happening in education. They say it helps them keep tabs on what matters most in the conversation surrounding schools, teaching, learning, and more.

Peter Nilsson

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