“We are offering up ideas, strategies, new tools, fresh ways to fine-tune and improve and grow and it is all so well-intended, but to an overwhelmed teacher who is trying desperately to just keep their head above water, it’s like trying to drink from a firehose. The message ends up getting reduced down to one thing: DO MORE… So right now I want to pause my usual stream of ideas and suggestions and talk to those administrators, to principals and superintendents and instructional coaches and anyone else in a position to tell teachers how to do their jobs… So this is my ask of you as an administrator: Choose 10 teachers on your staff and make it a goal to give each of them one piece of specific, positive feedback this week.
“In the second half of this post, I go into detail about what exactly I mean by “simulating history.” I am under no illusions that these simulations are accurate: they are littered with confidently-stated falsehoods and hallucinations. Sometimes, though, hallucinations can be a feature, not a bug.”
“All human brains are of course the same, Nordlinger emphasized. But when people are putting thoughts into words, their mental processes may be different, depending on the language they are using.”
“Small shifts in our feedback practices can lead to less work and more learning… These shifts are evolutionary, not revolutionary: they ask for modest and achievable adjustments in our pedagogy, not a wholesale overhaul.”
“Four in 10 parents say they know a “little general information” about artificial intelligence, and about six in 10 say they have heard little to nothing about how AI can be applied in education… Even so, the majority of parents—more than two thirds—believe that the potential benefits of AI to K-12 education either outweigh or are equal to the potential drawbacks. Only 16 percent of parents feel that the downsides outstrip any potential benefits.”
Copyright
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