It turns out that Mr. Bloom’s view is far more nuanced than the provocative declaration above… And he is by no means making the case for heartlessness. His point, rather, is that empathy is untempered by reason, emanating from the murky bayou of the gut. He prefers a kind of rational compassion — a mixture […]
For each student there appeared to be a demarcation line…that professors could cross by making their courses too difficult” (p. 109). Once that line was crossed, opinions of the course and instructor quickly changed to dislike. The too-difficult courses had grading systems students perceived as unfair, tests that were too hard, homework that was graded […]
A study published in the Review of Educational Research today suggests that school climate is something educators and communities should prioritize — especially as a way to bridge the elusive achievement gap. The authors analyzed more than 15 years of research on schools worldwide, and found that positive school climate had a significant impact on […]
An annual survey of admissions officers reiterates an important message for high school students who are worried sick about their SAT or ACT scores: The classes you take and the grades you earn are far more important to us than your test scores… In the fall 2014 admissions cycle, 79.2 percent of responding colleges and […]
Learn more about factors in the admission decision, acceptance rates for college applicants, common recruitment strategies, and the status of college counseling in secondary schools… Explore the latest admission statistics for four-year US colleges and universities including selectivity and yield rate trends.”
Any Gikuyu mother in Kenya knows that you wait to give a child a task until you see that she is ready for it. Any Baiga father in the forests of India knows that if a child tries something and then backs away, you leave him alone, because he will be back to try again […]
Too often, grades are the period at the end of any conversation on learning. Turn these numbers and letters into meaningful measures of mastery by looking for ways to amplify formative feedback, treating failures as beneficial to learning, and giving students opportunities to revise their work. Read on for more ways to create a learning-centered […]
Do presentations, projects and portfolios give a better idea of what a student has learned than a class grade or a score on a standardized exam? And are they particularly valuable for students who have struggled in traditional high school classes? Many advocates believe that adopting such an approach to assessment for all students could […]
The mist was rising and through the fog they saw a red fox leap for its morning prey; then the beavers started slapping their tails in the water, and, as if on cue, a flock of great blue herons flew right over their heads. You might be compelled to exclaim… “Wow, this is better than […]
Throughout the board’s extended discussions, several messages resonated. One trustee pointed out that we should not look at a tuition freeze as a cost, but rather as a forgone revenue opportunity, and that we should realize that raising tuition has a cost as well — a more restricted applicant pool.”
As it turned out, even though all the sounds had short-term neurological effects, not one of them had a lasting impact. Yet to her great surprise, Kirste found that two hours of silence per day prompted cell development in the hippocampus, the brain region related to the formation of memory, involving the senses. This was […]
We often take a militaristic, “tough” approach to resilience and grit… We believe that longer we tough it out, the tougher we are, and therefore the more successful we will be. However, this entire conception is scientifically inaccurate. The very lack of a recovery period is dramatically holding back our collective ability to be resilient […]
For all our talk about noncognitive skills, nobody has yet found a reliable way to teach kids to be grittier or more resilient. And it has become clear, at the same time, that the educators who are best able to engender noncognitive abilities in their students often do so without really “teaching” these capacities the […]
I don’t know about you, but I’m really bad at being self-disciplined about things I don’t care about. For me, and I suspect for many, hard work and resilience can only happen when there is a strong desire. Grit is thus downstream from longing. People need a powerful why if they are going to be […]
Researchers at University of Waterloo conducted three studies examining the association between self-reported smartphone use and performance on questions like the ball-and-bat problem. They separated respondents into low- medium- and high-smartphone usage groups. They found no difference between the low and medium groups, but the high usage group was less accurate on the analytic problems.”
Huddled into icy plains of North Dakota, Napoleon is essentially the same place it was 25 years ago. And by most accounts, 50 and 75 years ago. The demographics and economics are static. Most of my high school classmates have taken over their family farms, tilling and planting the land of their parents’ parents’ parents. […]
School leaders are faced with more initiative fatigue and bureaucratic baggage than ever. Our systems have become too complex, said Schmoker, and that’s an implementation killer. The real cost of complexity is stagnation. We get barely any improvement, even though we have lots of change.”
In this paper, we describe impacts on teacher and principal perceptions of the observation process. We report six sets of findings from the first year of implementation”
These kids almost certainly don’t need to spend any more time talking to classmates about what sets them apart from the world around them. They need to have as many experiences as possible outside the privileged halls of their schools… They need to discover not just what makes them different, but what they share in […]
Our transformation into device people has happened with unprecedented suddenness. The first touchscreen-operated iPhones went on sale in June 2007, followed by the first Android-powered phones the following year. Smartphones went from 10 percent to 40 percent market penetration faster than any other consumer technology in history. In the United States, adoption hit 50 percent […]
McGonigal defines stress as “what arises in your body, in your brain and in your community when something you care about is at stake.” She acknowledges that stress can make some people feel paralyzed and might lead them to underperform. She calls that reaction a “threat response” to stress, but says if educators can help […]
“From a young age, resilient children tended to “meet the world on their own terms.” They were autonomous and independent, would seek out new experiences, and had a “positive social orientation.” “Though not especially gifted, these children used whatever skills they had effectively,” Werner wrote. Perhaps most importantly, the resilient children had what psychologists call […]
What does it take to be an optimal human being? For Aristotle, the highest human good was eudaimonia. For Carl Rogers, it was the fully functioning person. For Abraham Maslow, it was self-actualization. For Erik Erickson, it was wisdom and integrity. For Erich Fromm, it was about having a being orientation (in which you value […]
Over recent years there’s been a steady escalation of concern about the admissions process at the most revered, selective American colleges. And little by little, those colleges have made tweaks. But I get the thrilling sense that something bigger is about to give. The best evidence is a report to be released on Wednesday. I […]
“Nobel Fever Grips Research Community As Prize Swells To $190 Million… College Unveils New Media Center Every Month…”
Effort itself has become praise-worthy without the goal it was meant to unleash: learning. Parents tell her that they have a growth mindset, but then they react with anxiety or false affect to a child’s struggle or setback. “They need a learning reaction – ‘what did you do?’, ‘what can we do next?’” Dweck says.”
Switching your attention — even if only for a minute or two — can significantly impede your cognitive function for a long time to follow. More bluntly: context switches gunk up your brain. This effect has been validated from many angles in academic psychology and related fields.”
A given [school] may be a heterogeneous archipelago. But most of its students spend the bulk of their time on one of many homogeneous islands. That’s consistent with the splintered state of America today, but it’s a betrayal of education’s mission to challenge ingrained assumptions, disrupt entrenched thinking, broaden the frame of reference.”
It seems that schools are expected to position themselves as either traditional — “chalk and talk,” uniforms, a belief in canonical knowledge, a culture of discipline and compliance, or progressive — liberal, with more of a constructivist approach to teaching and learning, and a focus on the development of the individual building off his or her strengths rather than […]
Meyer thinks technology can change the math classroom’s reputation as a dull, mystifying, and even traumatizing place. But he doesn’t think tech can fix everything. ‘There’s limitations on what kinds of work can be done on a computer without a teacher… You’ll never see a free-form argument of the sort that students do in our […]
“The foundational reason for why we find it so difficult to rebuild school curricula around the needs of the modern world is that we lack an organizing framework that can help prioritise educational competencies, and systematically structure the conversation around what individuals should learn at various stages of their development. Four-dimensional education provides a clear […]
The documentary is about relationships, not subject matter. In the school, too, teachers cover about half as much content as in a regular school. Long stretches of history and other subject curriculums are effectively skipped. Students do not develop conventional study habits. The big question is whether such a shift from content to life skills […]
If debate is equal parts rhetorical flourish and strategy, it’s worth asking whether circumstance forced the prisoners to devise an approach — in which limited resources demanded sharper focus and more rigorous planning — that resulted in superior lines of argumentation.”
Studies of conversation both in the laboratory and in natural settings show that when two people are talking, the mere presence of a phone on a table between them or in the periphery of their vision changes both what they talk about and the degree of connection they feel. People keep the conversation on topics […]
“Both Udacity and Knewton require the human, the learner, to become a technology, to become a component within their well-architected software system. Sit and click. Sit and click. So much of learning involves decision making, developing meta-cognitive skills, exploring, finding passion, taking peripheral paths. Automation treats the person as an object to which things are […]
After thirty years of constant reform and little improvement, it’s clear that there’s a fundamental flaw in how the education field goes about effecting change. Quick fixes, sweeping transformations, and mandates aren’t working. Ongoing professional development isn’t working either. What might work much better is a sustained, systemic commitment to improvement—and a willingness to start […]
“the body of scientific research illustrating the positive effects of mindfulness training on mental health and well-being—at the level of the brain as well as at the level of behavior—grows steadily more well-established: It improves attention, reduces stress, and results in better emotional regulation and an improved capacity for compassion and empathy.”
Expert teachers recognize the learner as one system, themselves as another, and their interaction with the learner as a third system. In order to successfully manage the interaction and support their learner’s development an expert teacher utilizes multiple awarenesses (of self, learner, interaction, teaching practice/content, and external context).”
If the benefit of schooling comes from the content learned, then it’s important to get a better understanding of what content will be most valuable to students later on in their lives. The answers may seem intuitive, but they’re also subjective and complex. A student may not use plane geometry, solid geometry, or trigonometry, but […]
Are you counting on your high-achieving student body, challenging curriculum, and learning- conducive environment to continue to attract families to your school? …In every case, there is a cheaper, and often more innovative, educational alternative out there… We have defined and focused this report on four major categories of educational choice options for families: Academically […]
The data emerging about the mental health of our kids only confirms the harm done by asking so little of them when it comes to life skills yet so much of them when it comes to adhering to the academic plans we’ve made for them.”
Put simply, teachers who work in supportive contexts stay in the classroom longer, and improve at faster rates, than their peers in less-supportive environments. And, what appear to matter most about the school context are not the traditional working conditions we often think of, such as modern facilities and well-equipped classrooms. Instead, aspects that are […]
The status of teaching depends on the knowledge base and its acquisition by teachers… There’s an inverse relationship between our ability to produce well-informed, thoughtful, objective teachers and our intention, as a society, to micromanage their work. The more we entrust the people in the schools the more we’re willing to give them the collective […]
Can’t make it. Sorry this is last-minute. Every minute is the last. — Pamela”
The focus in Japanese education is not on how many innovations they rush to implement or how many new gadgets students get to use. Instead, educators focus on collecting evidence of effectiveness and leveraging technology resources (whether it’s a chalkboard or a smartboard) with purpose and intentionality to enhance and facilitate teaching and learning opportunities. […]
“The momentary pause in Beethoven’s fifth, periods of prolonged sleep, the wait time after a question: these are moments when we gather up the past [stimulus] and create a future [response] that belongs more to our imagination and critical thought and less to our instinct. Moments of pause bring creative insight, analytical acuity, vision.”
“How is teacher professional growth hindered…? The absence of downtime… their workload… the lack of autonomy… structural isolation… very little feedback about their effectiveness… What would a national teacher strategy look like?”
The added value is using these spaces for other purposes: workshops, seminars, symposiums, exhibits, showcases, media labs, meeting rooms, study rooms, group work rooms, tutoring rooms, and other activities. So there is a functional layer. We can teach more. We can teach differently. Other people can also teach more and differently as well. We can […]
As a growing body of research is showing, the developing brain relies upon the consistent ‘serve and return’ interactions that happen between a young child and a primary caregiver… When these interactions occur regularly, they provide the scaffolding that helps build ‘key capacities — such as the ability to plan, monitor, and regulate behavior, and […]
As the economy changes, the skills required to thrive in it change, too, and it takes a while before these new skills are defined and acknowledged. For example, in today’s loosely networked world, people with social courage have amazing value. Everyone goes to conferences and meets people, but some people invite six people to lunch […]
Despite every advancement, language remains the defining nexus of our humanity; it is where our knowledge and hope lie. It is the precondition of human tenderness, mightier than the sword but also infinitely more subtle and ultimately more urgent. Remember that writing things down makes them real; that it is nearly impossible to hate anyone […]
The answer is not to abandon testing, but to measure the things we most value, and find good ways to do that… After all, in the past 50 years economists and psychologists have found ways to measure things as subtle and dynamic as the mechanisms that explain when and why we give in to impulse, […]
Inviting students to participate physically can feel like inviting classroom chaos, and it’s critical to recognize and respect that when teachers ask students to participate physically, we’re asking them to complete far more complex, demanding work than just sitting and listening.”
Soon all the collections in all the libraries and all the archives in the world will be available to everyone with a screen. Who would not welcome such a vast enfranchisement? But universal accessibility is not the end of the story, it is the beginning. The humanistic methods that were practiced before digitalization will be […]
“My rules have crumbled, as has my interest – or hell, even belief – in ed-tech startups. Despite the mythology of “disruptive innovation,” the most innovative initiatives in education technology aren’t coming from startups. They aren’t incubated in Silicon Valley. They don’t emerge from the tech industry. In fact, many of the ed-tech startup ideas […]
Teachers and administrators share similar perspectives about the ideal professional learning experience. When asked what effective professional development looks like, teachers describe learning that is relevant, hands-on, and sustained over time. District and school administrators have a similar view of what good professional development looks like. But there is a real disconnect between teachers’ satisfaction […]
If in classical modernity people could imagine their lives in intergenerational terms… in late capitalism, turnover is so accelerated that it becomes hard to imagine one’s life course even within a few years, let alone a few generations. This in turn drives a sense of the acceleration of the ‘pace of life,’ the psychological feeling […]
“Of the thirty-odd studies and articles I’ve consumed on the subject, only one graduate research paper claimed a benefit to RRR [Round Robin Reading, or taking turns reading in class] or its variations… Katherine Hilden and Jennifer Jones’ criticism is unmitigated: ‘We know of no research evidence that supports the claim that RRR actually contributes […]
“In many ways, the performance question has gotten caught up in this fight between active learning and lecturing. “We assume that performance only relates to lecture, only relates to the passive delivery. And thus it should be discarded along with the lecture,” says Robert Lue, the faculty director of Harvard University’s Derek Bok Center for […]
“Nighttime is the only time teens get to have intimate conversations and freely navigate their social world… that means checking up on the latest drama on Twitter—“Anyone still awake?” is a common post-midnight tweet—and filling up their Instagram accounts, or asking a girl for a pic.”
“Freshmen arrive on campus three weeks before the fall semester starts, not to river-raft or play getting-to-know-you games, but to study philosophy, literature, and religious texts for five hours a day. In January, they are required to stay on campus and work in science labs… Bard… saw a thirty-per-cent increase in applications this year.”
“Here we examine student course evaluations from a statistical perspective. We argue that averages of rating scores should not even be calculated, much less compared across instructors, courses, or departments. Instead, frequency tables should be used to summarize scores. It is crucial to report survey response rates, not merely the number of respondents. Finally, we […]
“Cultivate the right emotions, the prosocial ones, in daily life. These emotions— gratitude, compassion, authentic pride, and even guilt—work from the bottom up, without requiring cognitive effort on our part, to shape decisions that favor the long-term.”
Clearly, great teachers begin by loving children. But beyond that, a growing body of research points to some basic tenets of top-notch instruction—including these four actions and mind-sets parents can look and listen for when they visit a classroom, meet an educator or review their children’s schoolwork.
“Character is a person’s disposition to think, feel, and act in ways that help oneself and others… Research tells us that we can develop and practice these skills [curiosity, gratitude, grit, optimism, self-control, social intelligence, zest], just like we can with traditional subjects.”
“We’ve known for a long time that most students won’t learn if you just stick them in a classroom and make them listen to a lecture. They have to put the learning to use and make it relevant to their own lives. And yet most teachers still get their professional development at seminars and conferences, […]
“While these reformers talk a lot about markets and competition, the essence of a good education — bringing together talented teachers, engaged students and a challenging curriculum — goes undiscussed. Business does have something to teach educators, but it’s neither the saving power of competition nor flashy ideas like disruptive innovation. Instead, what works are […]
“The training of the body is directly related to the development of a fundamental aspect of the human psyche: what Plato, that pre-eminent teacher of teaching, called thymos. In English we don’t have a word for this concept, but it encompasses both bravery and the urge for glory. Perhaps the closest we have is “spiritedness,” […]
“The PISA results are not ambiguous. Every single country that outperforms us has significantly smaller teacher workloads. Indeed, on the scale of time devoted by teachers to in-class instruction annually, the United States is off the charts.”
“Good intelligence depends in large measure on clear, concise writing. The information CIA gathers and the analysis it produces mean little if we cannot convey them effectively… This guide is designed to be helpful and convenient, sensible in organization, and logical in content. It contains, among other changes, a revised list of accepted acronyms and […]
“The more time children spend in structured, parent-guided activities, the worse their ability to work productively towards self-directed goals.”
It was little more than a century ago that literacy became universal in Western Europe and the United States. If computational skills are on the same trajectory, how much are we hurting our economy—and our democracy—by not moving faster to make them universal?”
“Critical reflection is fundamental to teaching and scholarship, but fetishizing disbelief as a sign of intelligence has contributed to depleting our cultural resources. Creative work, in whatever field, depends upon commitment, the energy of participation and the ability to become absorbed in works of literature, art and science.”
“Bring the kids to the fields or courts or gym, tell them to make the rules and referee themselves, and then go walk a long way off.”
“Graduates who said they had a mentor who encouraged my hopes and dreams, professors who cared about me and at least one prof who made me excited about learning are three times more likely to be thriving and twice as likely to be engaged at work.”
“No one ever explains the mechanism by which the silence of a long drive home without a trophy is supposed to teach resilience. Nor are we told whether there’s any support for this theory of inoculation by immersion [without assistance from ‘overprotective’ adults].”
“Mistakes aren’t a necessary evil. They aren’t evil at all. They are an inevitable consequence of doing something new (and, as such, should be seen as valuable; without them, we’d have no originality).”
“…the key to maximizing the benefits of stress while minimizing any negative effects is interspersing regular hits of acute stress with periods of low or no stress… he advises harnessing the daily aggravations that life already throws at you. And exercising more, but maybe not for the reason you think.”
“Steiner-Adair interviewed 1,000 children between the ages of 4 and 18, asking them about their parents’ use of mobile devices. The language that came up over and over and over again, she says, was sad, mad, angry and lonely.”
“1. Human-computer teams are the best teams. 2. The person working the smart machine doesn’t have to be an expert in the task at hand. 3. Below some critical level of skill, adding a man to the machine will make the team less effective than the machine working alone. 4. Knowing one’s limits is more […]
“Paradoxically, in spite of the seemingly endless resources, innovation inside of an existing company is much harder than inside a startup. That’s because existing companies face a conundrum: Every policy and procedure that makes them efficient execution machines stifles innovation.”
“Most measurable forms of parental involvement seem to yield few academic dividends for kids, or even to backfire—regardless of a parent’s race, class, or level of education.”
“The current sequence [of math] is merely an entrenched historical accident that strips much of the fun out of what she describes as the ‘playful universe’ of mathematics… Mathematics is fundamentally about patterns and structures, rather than ‘little manipulations of numbers.’”
“Kapur has identified three conditions that promote a beneficial struggle. First, choose problems to work on that ‘challenge but do not frustrate.’ Second, provide learners with opportunities to explain and elaborate on what they’re doing. Third, give learners the chance to compare and contrast good and bad solutions.”
“When you look at people who don’t go to school and make their way in the world, those are exceptional human beings. And we should do everything we can to find those people.”
“The report begins with a series of stage-setting adjectives, meant to capture SEAS faculty members’ aspirations for their new campus: ‘Open. Connected. Active. Transparent. Livable. Sunlit. Social. Flexible.’”
“Lastly, the drill sergeants in Seligman’s program are taught two capacities that might seem at odds with mental toughness: gratitude and generosity.”
“Ms Mark’s research has found that people who stopped using email at work felt less stress and were more focused and productive.”
“Yes, I said to myself, this is what we do; we think about problems and puzzles and try to advance the understanding of them.”
“Now that, generally, one need not wait for things, patience becomes an active and positive cognitive state.”
“I’ve already identified three big shifts I’d make right away…”
“Agarwal said he expects MIT will move away from the traditional four-year-on-campus experience.”
“The high rate of maladjustment among affluent adolescents is strikingly counterintuitive. There is a tacit assumption—even among those most affected—that education and money procure well-being, and that if children falter, they will swiftly get the appropriate services. Education and money may once have served as buffers against distress, but that is no longer the case. […]
“Teachers who have even just two small initiatives in place (working with a mentor and having regular supportive communication with an administrator) are more likely to stay in the classroom.”