“Boredom has a purpose. To understand and harness it, we need to give our minds more opportunities to experience it. In the rest of this post, I will explore the many ways our efforts to conquer boredom through technology have produced unintended consequences, including the near-total capture of our attention, the death of daydreaming, and […]
““My whole theory of writing I can sum up in one sentence,” Fitzgerald wrote, in 1920. “An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters for ever afterward.””
“Not long ago, I posed a thought experiment: What if we designed a school with the explicit goal of producing dependent learners? …In this hypothetical school: Autonomy is minimized. Students follow rigid schedules and adult-created rules. Learning is passive. Direct instruction dominates while curiosity and risk-taking are discouraged. Assessments reward single correct answers, not divergent […]
“The Education Department claims the Supreme Court has held that promoting diversity is not a “compelling interest” that justifies state or school district actions. This is not true… On the contrary, the current state of the law regarding racial balance and diversity in K-12 education is that policies to promote diversity in school populations are […]
“By constructive dialogue, we mean exchanges where participants engage across lines of difference with intellectual rigor and mutual respect. This approach rejects both uncritical agreement and unproductive conflict in favor of learning-focused engagement… This report is designed to guide higher education leaders—including presidents, vice presidents, provosts, and leaders of task forces and civic centers—in undertaking […]
“Americans share many common high school experiences, especially four that each are shared by more than three-quarters. These are having a crush on someone, having a group of friends, taking a class they loved, and taking one they hated.”
“While visual redundancy (image + text) supported learning, verbal redundancy (spoken + written text) actually increased cognitive load and hurt performance. The best outcomes came when visual support was used without overloading the same modality.”
“While overall perceptions of the value of college degrees have dropped roughly 5% over the last year, the majority of the respondents, across all ages, races and political affiliations, said at least one degree — associate or bachelor’s — is valuable.”
“Alabama state law previously required students to take at least four years each of English, math, science and social studies to graduate from high school. The state is now calling that track the “Option A” diploma. The new “Option B” workforce diploma allows students to replace two math and two science classes with a sequence […]
“Two quick disclaimers on the research findings that I will discuss in this blog post. These studies concerned feedback on student-produced mathematical proofs, and much of the data came from clinical interviews that were not connected to a specific course. Although this specific research focused exclusively on student proofs, many of the findings could apply […]
“Through mission-focused leadership schools can navigate complexity and uncertainty with clarity for what’s most important for kids and their learning.”
“Associations with inadequate sleep are both wide-sweeping and profoundly negative… From all measures in this survey, there are no positive associations with greater time spent on social media, only negative…”
“After watching this video, I encourage you to read the source material. Bloom’s Taxonomy is one of the most cited but least read resources in instructional design. A neglect to read the source material is what leads to major misconceptions and misapplication.”
“Peter Elbow, an English professor whose struggles with writer’s block led him to create a new way of teaching freshman composition that emphasized free-writing exercises, personal reflection and peer feedback over rigid academic conventions that often stifled students, died on Feb. 6 in Seattle. He was 89.”
“By defining the key attributes and competencies needed for transformative leadership, the Portrait provides a resource to guide professional growth and as a foundation for targeted training programs. By embedding the Portrait attributes into key areas of organizational strategic planning — such as professional development, recruitment and succession planning — organizations can cultivate a sustainable leadership […]
““Creativity, critical thinking, problem solving, communication, empathy — these are the skill sets people will need to cultivate in the future to be more effective,” Mr. FoFana said. “And, of course, learning how to manage the A.I. tools.””
“Bloom’s Taxonomy gets thrown around a lot in instructional design, but it’s often misunderstood. Especially by those new to the field or fresh out of college. Two things to know about it: It’s not a checklist, and it’s definitely NOT A PYRAMID. In this video I break down what Bloom’s actually does—helping us analyze learning […]
“Teaching, I realized, doesn’t happen within a vacuum like college lesson plans. Instead, it happens nested within courses, within schools, and within communities. As my thought experiment spiraled outwards, I thought about planning from an informational standpoint. I generalized and distilled my ideas to the following: 1. All subjects have fairly predictable, content-specific activities. 2. […]
“Leadership can often be equal parts high confidence and self-esteem and worrying if you’re doing it right while continually searching for answers. Whether you’re a leader in an organizational setting or have high influence in some other capacity, improving your leadership begins with a focus on what you’re already good at.”
“Just because you can 3D print something doesn’t mean you should, DeSimone says. You can print a house, but he’s not sure there’s a compelling reason to do so. Traditional methods work well enough. But 3D printing is finding a sweet spot in medicine, where its three-dimensional creative powers have the rare ability to match […]
“The DEI wars are a mess. Divisive DEI policies are being challenged by a divisive president in a divisive way… The good news is that there is a clear way out of this morass. DEI proponents are right that America’s history of racial discrimination requires a remedy, but that response must be consistent with enduring […]
“What we need to consider about the computer has nothing to do with its efficiency as a teaching tool. We need to know in what ways it is altering our conception of learning. / This is exactly right; the very idea of efficiency is highly problematic and suggests the user does not understand the principles […]
“The authors reference the often-invoked concept of a demographic cliff, pointing out that it might overdramatize the changes to come. “While the cliff metaphor is useful to illustrate the impending demographic shift for policymakers, the reality will be a slower and steadier decline, which has important implications for institutions of higher education, workforce training systems, and […]
“Then one day at school, Jim [Henson] was holding one of his puppets when a teacher said to him, “You [are] wasting your time with those puppets.” Jim began to think that she might be right… Not long after he chucked the dream of being a puppeteer, Jim “wandered over to Europe” without a plan. […]
“This fact is fortunate for math teachers because kids have a lot of math ideas, even kids who don’t think they do, so the more we can make math about the ideas kids have, the more kids will like math. Watch how that hypothesis played out for me in a class I taught last week.”
“As one internal report put it: “Compulsive usage correlates with a slew of negative mental health effects like loss of analytical skills, memory formation, contextual thinking, conversational depth, empathy, and increased anxiety,” in addition to “interfer[ing] with essential personal responsibilities like sufficient sleep, work/school responsibilities, and connecting with loved ones.” Although these harms are known, […]
“The mentor’s mindset shatters the idea that influential adults must be either tough guys or a soft touch. “Neither approach is good,” Yeager told me. What adolescents need are corrections with encouragement. “Keep high standards and give more support,” he said. Honest feedback works when it is accompanied by moral support and clarity on how […]
“Giving kids agency doesn’t mean letting them do whatever they want. It doesn’t mean lowering expectations, turning education into entertainment or allowing children to choose their own adventure. It means requiring them to identify and pursue some of their own goals, helping them build strategies to reach those goals, assessing their progress and guiding them […]
“Perhaps TPS’s longevity stems from its effectiveness in increasing in-class participation, reinforcing key concepts, aiding in recall of information, developing the communication skills of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) students, and giving voice to quieter students who might hesitate to contribute their thoughts in a larger group… But even the most engaging learning strategies […]
“Having students working independently or collaboratively for extended periods of time allows us to see what our students are capable of and allows us to intervene if they’re off track. In the flipped classroom model, productive work periods are at the center—where students work on practicing skills and completing labs, tests, and assignments during scheduled […]
“All jurisdictions agreed with the policy, and all but one (Tasmania) agreed that the minimum age should be set at 16. While the Tasmanian Government would have preferred a minimum age of 14, it agreed to support the age minimum of 16 to maintain national consistency.”
“The curriculum didn’t engage the kids, several acknowledged. But again, they were not blaming the teachers who were teaching the required curriculum. They blamed the system, their system. “It doesn’t offer kids meaningful choices,” one superintended said. “The world has changed, kids have changed, and the curriculum hasn’t. Most of what’s taught in their academic […]
“Education is not simply about gaining more knowledge, but about increasing students’ (and, ultimately, society’s) ability to formulate and solve meaningful problems. This means learning to think together to overcome the limitations of our own experience and logic, to use the diversity of experience, perspective, and intellectual resources to solve the problems that arise in […]
“Politics is the way a society defines which people have value and which people get value. Seen through that lens, teachers are unavoidably practicing politics in their classrooms every day. In classrooms right now, teachers are defining who is valuable, whose ideas are valuable, whose ideas are worth sharing with the rest of the class, […]
“It was an incredible victory for American schools. Fewer struggling math students meant more opportunities to complete advanced coursework, qualify for good jobs, and earn higher wages. Unbeknownst to us at the time, 2013 turned out to be the high water mark. Achievement stopped improving. First, it stagnated. Then, toward the end of 2010s, it […]
“Self-reflection… Pedagogical innovation… Feedback and collaboration”
“One data point educators find heartening: The vast majority of students—94 percent—want at least some media literacy instruction in schools. In fact, more than half of teens surveyed—57 percent—believe that schools should “definitely” be required to teach media literacy.”
“Although historically associated with a more inquiry-based approach, this article focuses on the development of creativity as part of a knowledge-rich curriculum. It describes the role of subject-specific knowledge in the development of creative expertise and highlights effective strategies for nurturing creativity with specific examples from English, Science and Technology, and Creative Arts.”
“These were outstanding and fundamentally human accomplishments, to be sure. But the Nobel recognition underscored a chilling prospect: Henceforth, perhaps scientists will merely craft the tools that make the breakthroughs, rather than do the revolutionary work themselves or even understand how it came about. Artificial intelligence designs and builds hundreds of molecular Notre Dames and […]
“A parent’s first instinct is often to remove obstacles from their child’s path, obstacles that feel overwhelming to them but are easily navigable by us. This urge has led to pop-culture mythology around pushy parenting styles, including the “Helicopter Parent,” who flies in to rescue a child in crisis, and the “Snowplow Parent,” who flattens […]
“In high schools across the country, there is a growing belief that debate-based pedagogies improve civility and academic success by encouraging students to think critically, engage in high-level academic discourse, and construct compelling arguments. We follow students in Boston and Chicago public schools to witness the methodology’s impact.”
““What we found was not a silver-bullet solution, a perfect curriculum, or a rockstar principal,” the report said. “Instead, these schools shared a commitment to doing three core things well: they create a culture of belonging, deliver consistent grade-level instruction, and build a coherent instructional program.”
“In a 2024 study, researchers compared a long lecture block followed by active learning activities—small group work and pop quizzes, for example—with an approach that interspersed the two approaches. They found that students learned the most when short lectures were punctuated by three-minute active learning activities… Here are six research-based activities—typically taking no longer than […]
“Its humble format — two people of opposite politics, chatting in a room with a moderator — belies an ambitious goal. Dave Isay, the founder of StoryCorps, hopes to scale experiences like Mr. Russell’s and Mr. Hailes’s into a kind of wave of national reconciliation that will help heal our political polarization, on the theory […]
“The survey paints an unusually detailed portrait of how the nation’s history is being taught during an era of intense political polarization. It reached 3,000 middle and high school teachers across nine states: Alabama, Colorado, Connecticut, Illinois, Iowa, Pennsylvania, Texas, Virginia and Washington.”
“Younger consumers are also more likely to say they feel “more valued for their talents” online than offline, feel “more appreciated” online, and feel “more creative” online, than older consumers.”
“Dopamine can sometimes sound like the bad guy in this conversation, but all in all, it’s an awesome neurotransmitter. It’s what drives us to create, to learn, to build, to improve. Dopamine pushes us to boldly go where no person has gone before… The problem with our culture today is not too much desire but […]
“This article attempts to reframe education’s purpose away from the recent market-based assumptions of neoliberalism and toward a renewed civic purpose for education in a changing society. We try to make the case for why public schools still matter to democratic preparation, what kinds of shifts are needed to equip young people to be full […]
“First, warring factions must agree that some polarizing conflicts are “wicked problems,” which don’t have any easy solutions. A wicked problem is a tug-of-war between competing priorities and values… Second, school systems hurting from polarization need leaders who can skillfully listen and mediate conflicts… Moving opposing viewpoints into the groan zone is a messy process. […]
“Yes, with research we can identify potentially positive practices. What we can’t do is tell teachers how best to implement these insights in real classrooms. Having everyone mindlessly read a purpose-setting script at the start of a lesson may be a no-brainer. Noticing that some kids are neglecting that purpose, seems more in the realm […]
“Here are answers to some frequently asked questions about religion in school, the separation of church and state, and school prayer.”
“79% of Gen Z feel optimistic about their futures, but only 51% feel prepared for them. 68% plan to go to college, yet only 22% feel very prepared to succeed in college.”
“Are you a high school student with an idea for a current project that will make an impact in your community? Apply to have your innovative project or initiative considered for the Student Impact Challenge at SXSW EDU, March 3-6, 2025. The Student Impact Challenge celebrates student achievement and agency in solving the most pressing […]
“Game designers are exceptionally good at not just keeping you entertained, but also teaching you how to play the game in the first place. So how do they do it? How do game designers analyze different learning curves, scaffold their information, and have you learn a huge amount of information without making you feel like […]
“The most recent survey, which is part of a larger body of research on Gen Z by the Walton Family Foundation and Gallup, was conducted online March 13-20, 2024, with 1,675 10- to 18-year-old youth and one of their parents or guardians via the probability-based Gallup Panel. It finds that, rather than being completely positive […]
“The 2024 Student Voice Report presents a comprehensive analysis of high school students’ emotional and physical health, sense of connection and belonging in school, and engagement with learning, based on data collected from over 375,000 students from 2010 to 2023. On average, high school students report receiving only 6.6 hours of sleep per night, far […]
“In the coming year, we may need to prioritize collaboration over information, constructing knowledge together rather than trying to find it and use it for individual purposes. The time we have spent on searching could be reallocated to time spent on gathering.”
“I go out to schools and I interview teachers asking them… why they want to stay at their school, and teaming is the first thing that I hear.”
“The research on the value of a scripted curriculum is important — but teachers say so is the reality they face in the classroom every day.”
“There was a clear benefit on performance for handwritten notes compared to typed notes. The researchers calculated how the strength of the benefit would translate to grades in a hypothetical scenario and suggested that 9.5% of the students who take their notes by hand would achieve an A whereas only 6% of the students who […]
“Universal Design for Learning (UDL) seeks to eliminate barriers to learning based on research on how people learn. It’s an inclusive approach that recognizes student strengths and provides flexibility in how students access and engage with material and show what they know.”
“The preliminary reports come after a school year in which concerns have grown about antisemitism and Islamophobia at Harvard and other universities. Last week, Stanford released reports from its own task forces, which found pervasive antisemitism and suppression of pro-Palestinian speech on its campus.”
“The Transformational Learning Principles (TLPs) are a set of evidence-based guidelines highlighting the most essential elements of effective learning. Bringing together core ASCD and ISTE concepts and informed by learning science, they are a key part of our organizational mission and vision. They also bring focus and a common language to our collaborative efforts with […]
“Two separate committees – the Muslim, Arab, and Palestinian Communities Committee and the Subcommittee on Antisemitism and Anti-Israeli Bias – have each released reports from their seven-month reviews of what people in their communities have experienced before and after the events of Oct. 7, 2023.”
“Humanity’s relationship to AI is characterised by similar cycles of underestimation and surprise, followed by exploration, understanding and explanation, and a subsequent downgrading of our belief that intelligence is currently at play… This is sometimes called the ‘AI effect’, explained by the computer scientist Larry Tesler as our tendency to believe that ‘Intelligence is whatever […]
“The United States Surgeon General, Dr. Vivek Murthy, announced on Monday that he would push for a warning label on social media platforms advising parents that using the platforms might damage adolescents’ mental health.”
“Evolutionary zoology provides a framework to understand the emergence of human competencies such as creativity, curiosity, resilience and pro-social, even ethical, behaviors. Organic life forms of diverse species exhibit behaviors and traits that share common threads with these human capacities developed throughout the eras, and ongoing research provides insights into the evolutionary foundations of these […]
“Even as educators see an uptick in misbehavior, nearly half of teachers and administrators say their schools are using restorative justice practices more now than five years ago, according to a recent EdWeek Research Center survey. But the purest version of the restorative justice framework is hard to come by, said Allison Payne, a professor […]
““Who’s the target audience?” I’d ask in class, followed with an ominous, “And why does that matter?” Contemplating everything from a Harper’s essay to an early Lana Del Rey video, my Gen Z students propose: “It targets Gen Z,” even when that seems all but impossible… Forty years after Postman decried the nation’s passivity in […]
“Religion and its rites might be weakening, but we still need the psychology of rites of passage. If we want a healthy life and a healthy society, we must reclaim them. But simply to revive the rites of passage of days past won’t suffice. They are outdated; they have outlived their purpose. We need to […]
“The novelist, Richard Powers recently wrote that, “The best arguments in the world,”—and ladies and gentlemen, that’s all we do is argue—The best arguments in the world, he said, “Won’t change a single person’s point of view. The only thing that can do that is a good story.” I’ve been struggling for most of my […]
“Our humanity, as imperfect as it may be, is a gift to our students. In an age of A.I., our students still need a human to listen and empathize; to experiment and adapt; to make mistakes and apologize. They will need a guide who can build a relationship and help them navigate a complex world.”
“To understand the distinct roles of human and AI curiosity, I found it helpful to examine their unique characteristics through a comparative framework. This framework looks at three key aspects of curiosity—processing, perspective, purpose—and examines how humans and AI differ across these dimensions.”
“The framework rests on a simple assumption: that schools are, first and foremost, places of inquiry and exploration, preparing students for the freedom, rights, and responsibilities they will enjoy as adults. Teaching and learning are distinct from advocacy and activism, and nonpartisan teaching is vital to creating an intellectual climate within schools that promotes, sustains, […]
“Everyone knows Oxford and Cambridge and the Ivy League institutions, but do they know that UCL, MIT and Delft University of Technology have the top three architecture programmes in the world? Do they know that Princeton University isn’t one of the top 10 universities in computer science? Do they know that Bocconi University in Milan, […]
“Recognition isn’t just about feeling good. Gallup research shows that consistent recognition for doing good work has a direct influence on the key performance measures that we use to evaluate our schools. Teachers who receive regular recognition and praise: are more productive, are more engaged at work, are more likely to stay with their school, […]
“Combining detailed administrative data with survey data on middle schools’ smartphone policies, together with an event-study design, I show that banning smartphones significantly decreases the health care take-up for psychological symptoms and diseases among girls. Post-ban bullying among both genders decreases. Additionally, girls’ GPA improves, and their likelihood of attending an academic high school track […]
“This video has nearly 30,000 comments, some from Gen Xers nostalgic for their ‘90s youth—but many from Gen Z, aching for a world they never experienced. Older generations might dismiss this as teens wanting to be different and reject modern culture, as they often do. But the comments reveal something deeper: “As someone who graduated […]
“While there’s been ample research on tracking’s negative effects, studies of positive effects resulting from detracking are scant. In perhaps the only attempt to summarize the detracking literature, a 2009 summary of 15 studies from 1972 to 2006 concluded that detracking improved academic outcomes for lower-ability students, but had no effect on average and high-ability […]
“What people tell us when they do this is that they often have never just sat with a student for 40 minutes and deeply listened to them about their experience and about what they want. That’s the first thing they say. The second thing they say is, “I cannot unhear what I just heard. When […]
“In my research, I find three families of character strengths. Strengths of heart encourage relating to other people in positive ways. In my research, I find three families of character strengths. Strengths of heart encourage relating to other people in positive ways… Strengths of mind encourage active and open-minded thinking. In this day and age, these intellectual […]
“These findings are based on a survey of 2,531 U.S. public K-12 teachers conducted Oct. 17-Nov. 14, 2023, using the RAND American Teacher Panel. The survey looks at the following aspects of teachers’ experiences: Teachers’ job satisfaction, How teachers manage their workload, Problems students are facing at public K-12 schools, Challenges in the classroom, Teachers’ […]
“Stories gain even more power when they are brought to life by reading aloud. In fact, this may be the book’s primary chance of salvation. If the book is going to survive its death struggle with the isolating and disconnecting technology of the smartphone, its best bet, I argue, will be if we can encourage […]
“A message cutting across all five actions is “focus to flourish”. Education systems have been tremendously successful at achieving specific educational goals, such as expanding schooling, because that is what they committed to, that is what they measured, that is what they were aligned for, and that is what they supported. In order to achieve […]
“In the three years since Orange’s novel became a mainstay of the Millennium Art curriculum, pass rates for students taking the Advanced Placement literature exam have more than doubled. Last year, 21 out of 26 students earned college credit, surpassing state and global averages. The majority of them, said Ouimet, wrote about “There There.””
“As of spring 2023, 3 percent of teachers said that limitations on race- or gender-related topics positively impact student learning. Teachers were about ten times more likely to say that such limitations negatively impact student learning. Teachers who opposed limitations voiced concerns that these limitations constrain students’ learning opportunities, diminish students’ sense of belonging and […]
“When teaching about specific issues, professors should pivot from yes-or-no debates to “under what circumstances.” For example, instead of assigning an essay on “Do you support mask mandates?” she suggests tweaking the prompt to “Under what circumstances may authorities require people to wear personal protective equipment?” Removing binaries and de-emphasizing existing political labels, she writes, […]
“All good tasks should be, by design or fortunate accident, “low threshold, high ceiling”. Low threshold so that nearly all people can make a start and high ceiling so that there’s always some higher order avenue to work towards.”
“Ginsburg said that the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a non-profit, reports that more professors on the left and right have been “fired in the last few years than in the entire McCarthy period,” often in response to student demands: “This professor took this position, we can’t have this person here.” The complaints typically […]
“”It is permissible in English for a preposition to be what you end a sentence with,” the dictionary publisher said in a post shared on Instagram last week. “The idea that it should be avoided came from writers who were trying to align the language with Latin, but there is no reason to suggest ending […]
“Amid national debates about what schools are teaching, we asked public K-12 teachers, teens and the American public how they see topics related to race, sexual orientation and gender identity playing out in the classroom.”
“For more than two decades, I’ve taught versions of this fiction-writing exercise. I’ve used it in universities, middle schools and private workshops, with 7-year-olds and 70-year-olds. But in recent years openness to this exercise and to the imaginative leap it’s designed to teach has shrunk to a pinprick. As our country’s public conversation has gotten […]
“But the complaint also pinpoints what Pennridge schools teach — and what they prevent students from learning — as a violation of civil rights. The curriculum changes, removal of DEI resources, and other steps to restrict student education on discrimination and its history “created an environment where race- and sex-based harassment can flourish,” the filing […]
“Three Dartmouth economists and a sociologist then dug into the numbers. One of their main findings did not surprise them: Test scores were a better predictor than high school grades — or student essays and teacher recommendations — of how well students would fare at Dartmouth… A second finding was more surprising. During the pandemic, […]
“As part of the curriculum redesign—which district leaders credit with more than doubling the number of schools that receive recognition from the state for high achievement—Maxlow in 2021 helped create a student-internship program. High school students can apply for a job to help conduct annual reviews of the district’s curriculum and classroom activities. The approximately […]
“In the first year of the COVID pandemic, two states waived many of their typical requirements for teachers, allowing anyone with a bachelor’s degree to teach. After reviewing end-of-course exam results, supervisor evaluations, and other data, researchers concluded that the students of this group of emergency-hired teachers did not differ significantly from students taught by […]
“The first thing to notice is that the two groups of scholars are arguing about two different things. The inquiry critics pointed out that inquiry wasn’t great at helping students learn content and skills. The inquiry defenders emphasize that inquiry is better at helping students develop conceptual understandings. Different teaching methods may be better for […]
“The responses varied notably by race and ethnicity. Among Black adults, 52 percent said the legal victory for Students for Fair Admissions against Harvard University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill was “mostly a good thing,” while 48 percent found it mostly bad. In comparison, 72 percent of white respondents, 68 percent of Hispanics and 63 percent […]
“Without test scores, admissions officers sometimes have a hard time distinguishing between applicants who are likely to do well at elite colleges and those who are likely to struggle. Researchers who have studied the issue say that test scores can be particularly helpful in identifying lower-income students and underrepresented minorities who will thrive. These students […]
“Many commenters said, in no uncertain terms, that students need to be held accountable for their academics and behavior… They said policies like the 50 percent rule were unfair… And that leniency didn’t prepare young people for post-high school success… But some saw the benefits of a “grade floor” in certain situations… While others suggested […]
“I see teenagers unintentionally becoming more unforgiving and judgmental rather than open-minded and compassionate. When we can’t or don’t talk freely, we lose the chance to find real common ground, acknowledge complexity or grasp that even our own opinions can be malleable. If we listen only to those who already agree with us, we won’t […]
“To make sense of the state of the profession, Education Week compiled some of the most significant findings related to teachers that were published this year. Much of this research comes from the EdWeek Research Center’s own surveys, which went out regularly to nationally representative samples of teachers, principals, and district leaders to gauge their […]
“The main line of our work so far can be summarized like this: We have shown that there is an adolescent mental health crisis and it was caused primarily by the rapid rewiring of childhood in the early 2010s, from play-based to phone-based. It hit many countries at the same time and it is hitting […]
“Four eighth-grade English language arts teachers, initially most concerned about their students’ disinterest in reading, stopped assigning any particular book and instead gave students wide access to books written for young adults, let them choose what to read (or not), and gave them time to read and openly discuss the books. We studied these classrooms […]
“Most published rankings are one-size-fits-all, based on formulas that don’t factor in your priorities, goals and needs. So we’ve created a tool to help find the best American colleges — for you. Do you care most about making money after graduating? Low college costs? Diversity? Academics or athletics? Staying close to home? Use our tool’s […]
“Together and separately, we’ve taught tens of thousands of individuals from all walks of life to have more meaningful and effective conversations across their differences. We focus our efforts on coaching people in positions of power because they have the greatest opportunity to transform the dynamics of these interactions — to foster empathy instead of […]
“In honor of Thanksgiving in the U.S., we wanted to share a curated selection of our Management Tips on how to show gratitude and appreciation at work. We hope you find the advice useful at any time of year.”
““We didn’t want to find rogue teachers who were going off and doing something on their own,” he said. “We were looking for wide-scale or potentially scalable programs.” Weiner identified several kinds of unconventional roles: Lead teacher, who serves as a mentor, curriculum developer, and co-teacher for a small team of teachers in the same […]
“These staple instructional practices, while criticized–often severely by generations of pedagogical reformers–are, in 2023, alive and well in charter schools, regular elementary and secondary public schools, and higher education. And they even persist amid a revolution in teachers and students using high-tech devices in and out of the classroom. Are these ways of teaching simply instances of […]
“The course will launch for credit next fall, and is currently being taught as a pilot program in 700 schools across 40 states… African American studies is an interdisciplinary field, melding history with the study of contemporary politics, culture and law.”
“While AI can help students analyze text, identify detail in an image, and structure a work of writing, only the student can apply this understanding to her world. Only the student can integrate new understanding into his school community and personal relationships. Only the student can practice new habits based on new ideas and understanding […]
“Since 2022, nearly 15,000 students and hundreds of teachers in more than 40 states have helped pilot AP African American Studies. (The course will be available nationally in the 2024-25 school year.) College Board visited some of them, in Baltimore, Houston, and Baton Rouge, to see the course in action—and to hear directly from those […]
“It is a common misunderstanding that demandingness is the same as strictness. However, demandingness is deeply connected to personal concern for, and belief in, students’ success. Warm demanders believe every student can grow to be the best version of themselves.”
“When people engage in conversations about identity, diversity, and justice with someone who has opposing views, we encourage them to practice the four strategies we’ve described: Locate the conversation on the controversy scale… Find uncommon commonalities.. Show your work on the remaining disagreements to demonstrate that you’ve thought carefully about the subject… Manage your expectations.”
“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 […]
“Launched in 2021, One Small Step brings together strangers with opposing views for a 50-minute, nonpolitical conversation to get to know each other. Over 4,100 people across 40 states have participated in the program… Richeson analyzed questionnaires completed by 400 One Small Step participants before and after their conversations. Her analysis showed that both liberals […]
“As colleges are increasingly called upon to announce positions on social and political issues, the Kalven Report reminds us that colleges are not critics — they are “the home and sponsor of critics.””
“To help educators explain the conflict and guide students in how to talk about emotionally charged, violent events like this in measured, respectful ways, Education Week has collected several resources. Those resources are intended to help students understand historical context, process current events, and use media literacy skills to analyze news coverage and social media […]
“In this meta-analysis, we examined if teaching writing improved the writing and reading of students in Grades 6 to 12, and what specific writing treatments enhanced students’ writing. Our review included writing treatments tested using an experimental or quasi-experimental design (with pretests) and published and unpublished studies, and computed effect sizes for all writing and […]
“I’ve gathered some of the most common efforts among teachers everywhere that aren’t met with the same amount of effort and success from their students, and for each one, I offer a small tweak that can make big improvements. Sometimes the tweak is a shift in semantics, other times it might be a slight change […]
“We spoke to girls from ages 12 to 17 who have participated in programs led by Girls Leadership, a nonprofit that teaches confidence-building and how to use social media responsibly. Here are some of their best pieces of advice for other teens — and what they want adults to know, too.”
“Venet explains that unconditional positive regard is a stance that communicates this message to students: “I care about you. You have value. You don’t have to do anything to prove it to me, and nothing’s going to change my mind.” In her book, she asserts that taking this stance and putting it into practice builds […]
““They’re voting with their enrollment, to start with—it’s an impressive sign of interest with the first semester alone,” UT system chancellor James B. Milliken said. “Everything I hear from students, from employers and others is they welcome this as an additional resource to prepare them for the marketplace.””
“Another surprising result is that students, on average, benefited from solving the same problems, without assigning easier ones to weaker students and harder ones to stronger students… when 30 students are each working on 20 different, customized problems, it’s a lot harder to figure out which of those 600 problems should be reviewed in class. There […]
“TextFX is an AI experiment designed to help rappers, writers, and wordsmiths expand their process. It was created in collaboration with Lupe Fiasco, drawing inspiration from the lyrical and linguistic techniques he has developed throughout his career. TextFX consists of 10 tools, each is designed to explore creative possibilities with text and language.”
“The goal of the final product of the work, Data-Informed Decision Making: A Guide to Institutional Research in Independent Schools, is to show the possibilities and value institutional research offers and to provide tools for the intrepid institutional researchers who are looking to grow their own skills and to foster their community’s Data Culture.”
“In a groundbreaking step, the campus announced Thursday that it will drop admission requirements for calculus, physics and chemistry courses for students who don’t have access to them and offer alternative paths to prove mastery of the material… One of Caltech’s alternative paths is taking Khan Academy‘s free, online classes and scoring 90% or higher […]
“Chiang reports that the reader has been well received by her students so far, with an end-of-semester survey indicating that they found the reader spoke more to their personal interests in art and history, made her courses more relevant to their lives, and provided a more nuanced and complex presentation of history.”
“The Human Exploration Rover Challenge asks high school, college or university students from around the world to create “lightweight, human-powered rovers”. These will have to traverse an obstacle course simulating lunar and Martian terrain, while also completing mission-related science tasks.”
“Reading these studies, it seems like there are a few clear conclusions: AI can generate creative ideas in real-life, practical situations. It can also help people generate better ideas. The ideas AI generates are better than what most people can come up with, but very creative people will beat the AI (at least for now), […]
“I absolutely think you should experiment with AI as you write your recommendation letters this fall. The same advice applies to these letters as I provided for seniors writing essays. This is not a simple cut and paste, but instead a great tool for getting started, rephrasing, or discovering different ways to frame the content […]
“The Stanford Deliberative Democracy Lab, in collaboration with Helena and various partners has conducted a national Deliberative Poll® to determine what Americans would really think about possible reforms to our democracy and our electoral processes if they had a chance to weigh the options under good conditions… What would Americans really think if they could […]
“School administrators and leaders, boards of education, boards of trustees, teachers, parent teacher associations, state departments of education, and online learning platforms can all play a role. Develop a strategic plan for school connectedness and social skills with benchmark tracking… Build social connection into health curricula… Implement socially based educational techniques… Create a supportive school […]
“The most common way of discussing current and controversial topics is the classroom debate. While I enjoy good debates, they might not be accomplishing what we want them to, and unless we take the time to build foundational skills and dispositions they might actually be getting in our way… There are other effective dialogic models […]
“Our conversation crisis has manifested in eye-watering political polarity. This bitter partisanship is not new, but fresh research has documented how it interferes with learning on college campuses and ultimately, decreases young adults’ faith in the power of communicating across differences. Their jadedness — and lack of ability and willingness to use conversation as a mechanism for compromise — […]
“Ultimately, sustainability in teaching came down to discussions about energy budgets. Teachers’ energy reserves are finite, and concerns about teacher agency, endless cycles of curriculum adoption, and limited time and resources wear on these energy reserves. Conversely, solutions like bolstering learner agency, creating collectivist school cultures where teachers collaborate regularly, and incorporating minimalist planning practices […]
“ChatGPT has made cheating so simple — and for now, so hard to catch — that I expect many students will use it when writing essays. Currently about 60% of college students admit to cheating in some form, and last year 30% used ChatGPT for schoolwork. That was only in the first year of the […]
“In my three years of teaching this powerful text, this was the most rewarding. I had a mixture of creative sequels, vocabulary journals, research on thematic topics like censorship and control, and character analysis… Then, I asked it: Write a 500 word dystopian story taking place in Newark, New Jersey for 800 Lexile Level. I’ve […]
“I can’t claim that this is going to be a complete user guide, but it will serve as a bit of orientation to the current state of AI. I have been putting together a Getting Started Guide to AI for my students (and interested readers) every few months, and each time, it requires major modifications. […]
“The contemporary cultural machinery is geared to chase folks out of the middle ground or push experts in one area out of their lane, leading them to confidently pronounce on matters they have no business banging on about. Call it cognitive narcissism. Curious, collaborative inquiry has been abandoned for the brute force of unilateral persuasion. […]
“So what’s different now? What follows in this essay is an attempt to contrast some of the most notable features of the new transformer paradigm (the T in ChatGPT) with what came before. It is an attempt to articulate why the new AIs that have garnered so much attention over the past year seem to […]
“Students will cheat with AI. But they also will begin to integrate AI into everything they do, raising new questions for educators. Students will want to understand why they are doing assignments that seem obsolete thanks to AI. They will want to use AI as a learning companion, a co-author, or a teammate. They will […]
“The Supreme Court’s ruling on Thursday that ended race-conscious admissions is widely expected to lead to a dramatic drop in the number of Black and Hispanic students at selective colleges. But the court’s decision could have other, surprising consequences, as colleges try to follow the law but also admit a diverse class of students.”
“Reviewed 13 evaluations of comprehensive reform efforts, identified the features of the models evaluated, and categorized them to create a high school reform framework that can be generally applied. The authors hope that school and district leaders can compare their current efforts with the framework to identify how they might refine or augment those efforts.”
“This is really your intern. What it is worth using it for will be different for everyone, and the value will vary by task. Different people with different preferences may find very different uses. If you are a strong writer with a particular voice, you may never want to use AI for writing. If you […]
“An experimental psychologist by training, Logue designed an experiment. She compared remedial math classes to the alternative of letting ill-prepared students proceed straight to a college course accompanied by extra help. The early results of her randomized control trial were so extraordinary that her study influenced not only CUNY in 2016 but also California lawmakers […]
“To get this result, I had to draw on considerable prior knowledge. More importantly, I had to draw on significant language and critical thinking skills. Anyone who ever said that a philosophy degree like mine isn’t practical can eat my dust. Socrates was a prompt engineer. Most Western philosophers engage in some form of chain-of-thought prompting as a way […]
“When we place too high a priority on the speed of our email replies, we destroy our ability to focus. Interruptions derail our train of thought and wreak havoc on our progress. When you know you don’t have to reply to emails right away, you can actually find flow and dedicate your full attention where […]
“The researchers found that high school athletic trainers reported 15,531 injuries over 6,778,209 athletic exposures (AEs; practice or competition), yielding an estimated 5.2 million injuries nationally. Football (3.96 per AE), girls’ soccer (2.65), and boys’ wrestling (2.36) had the highest injury rates, with injury rates overall higher in boys’ sports (2.52) versus girls’ sports (1.56). […]
““Imagine if you had a voice assistant that could write code for you, and you said, ‘Hey, Alexa, build me a Web site to sell shoes,’ ” Sanjay Sarma, a professor of mechanical engineering at M.I.T., told me on the phone. “That’s already happening. It’s called ‘low-code.’ ” There has been much hand-wringing about ChatGPT and its […]
“Educators are innovators… They recognize the urgency of this moment and want to use every tool at their disposal to meet each students’ unique needs.”
“Poskett argues that this story is an empirical failure: it misses how science is actually done, and it does a disservice to practicing scientists. Above all, it misses where science is done. Against the standard narrative of a European scientific revolution, Poskett implores us to see science as a global enterprise, the result of the intermingling of […]
“Our goal was to help students learn the underlying principles of kinetic and potential energy. We used ChatGPT to generate a range of different examples of kinetic and potential energy. Kids could sort these examples into categories and then explain their choices. In the screenshots below, the text next to the yellow icon is our […]
“The issue with the will to equip, then, is not the desire to prepare students for the future, but the impoverishment of our educational imagination that so often accompanies it. In the grips of the equipage mentality, we forget, first, that the educational experiences of young people can carry their value in themselves and not […]
“Contrary to what you might think, it’s not career achievement, money, exercise, or a healthy diet. The most consistent finding we’ve learned through 85 years of study is: Positive relationships keep us happier, healthier, and help us live longer. Period.”
“Both low-tech and high-tech machines can surely help students learn but it is the teacher’s lesson objectives, knowledge of the subject, rapport with students, and a willingness to push and support them that count greatly in what students learn rather than anything intrinsic within the devices used.”
“The Daily-AI workshop, designed by MIT educators and experienced facilitators, features hands-on and computer-based activities on AI concepts, ethical issues in AI, creative expression using AI, and how AI relates to your future. You will experience training and using machine learning to make predictions, investigate bias in machine learning applications, use generative adversarial networks to […]
“In fact, OpenAI expects a collaborative disclaimer, one in which the published content is “attributed” to a human author (or company) at the same time that the “role of AI in formulating the content is clearly disclosed in a way that no reader could possibly miss.” …The company insists that we should not view the […]
“Instead of trying to “win” every argument you find yourself in, you could have more success if you look at arguments as opportunities to learn and grow… The setup was simple: Participants had to debate hot-button topics in an online chatroom. One group was instructed to adopt a competitive mentality in order to “win” the […]
“30 percent of the roughly 1,000 teenagers surveyed by the EdWeek Research Center last fall said they wanted to learn more about job opportunities related to sustainability and climate change.”
“It’s at this point that the usual essay on ChatGPT points towards something consoling. Something like ‘Ah, but do not despair, humans will always yada yada’. I’m afraid I am not here to offer any such solace. I’ve done writing of all kinds for several decades, from travel journalism to art journalism to political journalism, […]
“In this short booklet, we will explore the various ways that ChatGPT can be used to enhance your teaching practice. I will provide tips and prompts for effectively implementing ChatGPT into your teaching practice and I will also discuss the potential problems that ChatGPT may create in the education sector.”
“For decades there’s been a dichotomy in thinking about AI between “statistical approaches” of the kind ChatGPT uses, and “symbolic approaches” that are in effect the starting point for Wolfram|Alpha. But now—thanks to the success of ChatGPT—as well as all the work we’ve done in making Wolfram|Alpha understand natural language—there’s finally the opportunity to combine […]
“Most of us have never seen anything like it outside of science fiction. To better understand what ChatGPT can do, we decided to see if people could tell the difference between the bot’s writing and a child’s. We used real essay prompts from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (the standardized test from the Department […]
“ChatGPT is, quite simply, the best artificial intelligence chatbot ever released to the general public… For most of the past decade, A.I. chatbots have been terrible — impressive only if you cherry-pick the bot’s best responses and throw out the rest. In recent years, a few A.I. tools have gotten good at doing narrow and […]
““It’s a sign of respect for a place,” said Eiji Hattori, 32, a fan from Tokyo, who had a bag of bottles, ticket stubs and other stadium detritus. “This place is not ours, so we should clean up if we use it. And even if it is not our garbage, it’s still dirty, so we […]
“Practice a lot with writing, and eventually, you can write without worrying about punctuation. Practice a lot with arithmetic operations, and you can do them without conscious thought, allowing the brain to focus its deliberate, conscious thinking on more complex ideas.”
“Majorities of teens credit social media with strengthening their friendships and providing support while also noting the emotionally charged side of these platforms”
“Decades of research support the power of review and retrieval practice to reinforce learning. Inherently, video learning provides “a cost-effective, location-free method of flexible study, one that is available at all hours” and allows students to “view material repeatedly if necessary,” researchers explain in a comprehensive 2018 analysis that encompassed 270 studies on instructional videos.”
“Constructive dialogue is a form of conversation in which people who have different values, beliefs and perspectives seek to build new ways to understand and interact with each other, even as they sustain commitments to their own stances. It builds opportunities for students to connect rather than argue, to understand rather than vilify, and to […]
“I was expecting children in the question training to ask a lot more questions in the follow-up task and was hoping they might show some improvement of knowledge and some improvement of generalized curiosity/interest in science content as measured by the “willingness-to-pay” task. We did not see strong evidence that the question asking training taught […]
“The analytics revolution, which began with the movement known as Moneyball, led to a series of offensive and defensive adjustments that were, let’s say, catastrophically successful… the quantitative revolution in culture is a living creature that consumes data and spits out homogeneity… It sacrifices diversity for the sake of familiarity. It solves finite games at the […]
““The essays that students turn in are about to get a lot better,” Ethan Mollick, associate professor of management at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, tweeted recently. “I just tried Moonbeam and it produced an outline & credible undergraduate essay with just the prompt ‘Legitimation and startups.’ And that is without human intervention, which would help.” In fact, […]
“For more than two years, Covid disrupted social rituals and rites of passage. Now a recent study suggests we have become less extroverted, creative, agreeable and conscientious. The declines in some traits were sharper among young people.”
“Courses that are meant to distinguish between serious and unserious students, it has become clear, often do a better job distinguishing between students who have ample resources and those who don’t… Instead, universities should focus on the broader goal of teaching for equity and with empathy, which means ensuring that students get the support they need to learn and succeed, […]
“If the system has to be fixed, and we can’t fix the system by adding to it, then the logical place to start is with subtraction. We need to look closely at our schools and figure out everything that we don’t need to be doing anymore. We need to find as many things as possible that we […]
“Gallup defines equity as fair treatment, access and advancement for each person in an organization. This definition considers the historical and sociopolitical factors that affect opportunities and experiences so that policies, procedures and systems can help meet people’s unique needs without one person or group having an unfair advantage over another.”
“Here are a few of the discoveries that are truly compelling: People who love their jobs do not hate Mondays. Education-related debt can cause an emotional scar that remains even after you pay off the debt. Volunteering is not just good for the people you are helping; it is also good for you. Exercising is […]
“Mrs. Bailey did more than tell us we could do it. She was not mere sunshine and encouragement. She forced us to have opinions and defend them. And she was not alone. She was part of a cadre of teachers known for genuinely trying to get us to engage with the material and ourselves. Mr. […]
“Some say competitive debate is a flawed model for healthy discourse, whether for domestic disputes or political disagreements. In an essay in The Dublin Review, the novelist Sally Rooney, a former champion debater, characterized formal debate as overly aggressive and possibly immoral. “For the purposes of this game, the emotional or relational aspects of argument […]
“The notion that kindness can boost well-being is hardly new. Studies have shown that prosocial behavior — basically, voluntarily helping others — can help lower people’s daily stress levels, and that simple acts of connection, like texting a friend, mean more than many of us realize. But researchers who study kindness and friendship say they hope the new […]
“Last month, a new study in Nature revealed a key predictor of economic mobility: connectedness. Specifically, researchers at Opportunity Insights found that relationships with higher-income students dramatically improved low-income students’ chances of upward mobility in adulthood, even more than traditional success metrics like school quality.”
“In order to create what Chik calls a “space of reasonability,” sometimes professors must let students practice “free-flowing speech,” even if it goes wrong, and create a classroom culture where the ensuing mistakes are treated as just that and not an act of malice.”
“It should come as no surprise that parents vary widely in the way they manage their children’s social media use. According to the authors, there are four general approaches parents take when monitoring their teenagers’ social media use.”
“A difference between traditional and interdependent mentoring is that traditional mentoring can be one-sided. New teachers may feel compelled to show deference to experienced veterans, and mentors may be asked to respond to problems they’re not comfortable solving without additional help. In contrast, interdependent mentoring partnerships prioritize both teachers’ contributions. Mentors are appreciated for their […]
“All of the teachers we spoke with agreed that their political beliefs should not shape classroom discussions. But their personal experiences and teaching philosophies have informed their approaches to tough subjects like identity, representation and inequality.”
“However, they also believe that disconnecting is not an option. “For many teens, technologies are a non-negotiable for friendship preservation,” write the authors. “There’s no way to opt out without major social repercussions. They wish adults would acknowledge this reality.””
“YouTube tops the 2022 teen online landscape among the platforms covered in the Center’s new survey, as it is used by 95% of teens. TikTok is next on the list of platforms that were asked about in this survey (67%), followed by Instagram and Snapchat, which are both used by about six-in-ten teens… This study […]
“Faculty members often assume it’s a matter of serendipity. The reality is that effective class discussions — much like effective lectures — are the result of careful planning. Students must do their part by coming to class ready to participate. But there are ways to increase the likelihood that they will be prepared, and to […]
“McLuhan’s view is that mediums matter more than content; it’s the common rules that govern all creation and consumption across a medium that change people and society. Oral culture teaches us to think one way, written culture another. Television turned everything into entertainment, and social media taught us to think with the crowd.”
“Creating more connections across class lines – either through greater economic integration of our institutions and neighborhoods or more opportunities for cross-class social engagement – looks to be the most promising route to improving rates of upward economic mobility.”
“She’s a little embarrassed to say she’s become reliant on it. Not that she couldn’t write without it, but she thinks her writing wouldn’t be as rich, and she would certainly be more burnt out. “There’s something different about working with the AI and editing those words, and then coming up with my own and […]
“Each day of the school year we publish a Student Opinion question: an invitation for students to share their own opinions and experiences in response to New York Times stories on the news of the day. Each of these prompts is introduced with an article, interactive feature or video produced by The Times… The prompts are […]
“The academics found that there was often a tradeoff between “good teaching” where kids learn stuff and “good teaching” that kids enjoy. Teachers who were good at raising test scores tended to receive low student evaluations. Teachers with great student evaluations tended not to raise test scores all that much… It was rare, but the […]
“Revenge bedtime procrastination is the act of deliberately putting off sleep in favor of leisure activities — binging Netflix or scrolling TikTok, for example — that provide short-term enjoyment but few long-term life benefits. Revenge bedtime procrastination is especially likely when busy schedules and daily responsibilities prevent the enjoyment of “me time” earlier in the day.”
“Lastly, there’s one more beneficial side-effect that comes from peer observation: having your students see you together. Something powerful happens when students see their teachers together. You become larger than the sum of your parts, stronger not only in number, but because this simple show of cooperation tells them you are united, which is an important […]
“Oh, and he also wanted us to observe each other using the strategies in our teaching. People FREAKED OUT. Not about having to read another book or try new strategies. It was the peer observation. Lost their ever-loving minds. “I don’t want someone else in my room looking for mistakes!” They said, all in a […]
“Dan pressed a button, and in less than a second the computer produced a poem in the style of Philip Larkin that was so much like a Philip Larkin poem, we thought it was a poem by Philip Larkin. We Googled the first line, expecting it to be an existing Philip Larkin poem, but we […]
“Also called “Juneteenth Independence Day,” “Freedom Day,” or “Emancipation Day” (among other names), Juneteenth is the annual commemoration of the end of slavery in the United States after the Civil War. On June 19, 1865, Union general Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston, Texas, with General Orders, No. 3, declaring: “… in accordance with a proclamation from […]
“Authenticity is being true to yourself, and transparency is sharing that truth through words, behaviors and actions. Highly trusted companies tend to be radically transparent.”
“We discussed rather than debated. We opened up and shared, which would require some measure of vulnerability, a trait that is anathema to winning a debate. The desire for safe spaces, for warnings.. are really just a desire for a little understand, a little space to figure stuff out. Seeing the academic institution as a […]
“After collecting the data from 253 accounts, we focused our analysis on data by location. Our initial analysis focuses on New York City, home to the Klingenstein Center and to a robust and diverse micro-ecosystem of independent schools. This analysis examines more than 900 posts involving 11 New York City-area independent schools. Using the text […]
“No matter what a school’s ultimate culture goal, given what we have all been through over the past two years, I would suggest that nurturing a caring culture is job one. This will ensure that as you build toward the future, you are building on a foundation of trust. Some of the middle five groups outlined above […]
“We all love things that other people think are garbage. You have to have the courage to keep loving your garbage. What makes us unique is the diversity and breadth of our influences, the unique ways in which we mix up the parts of the culture others have deemed “high” and “low.” When you find […]
“While many teachers are routinely observed, evaluated, and coached by other adults, they hardly ever receive formal feedback from their students. And this — useful evidence, solicited in real time from the attentive, perceptive, and astute students with whom they interact daily — can provide the most nourishing feedback of all.”
“Creating a place where all people can find love in their work means incorporating three principles in everything your business does: The people are the point. Employees, rather than customers or shareholders, are the most important stakeholders in your organization. One size fits one. Each of those employees is a unique person with distinct loves, interests, and skills. In trust […]
“Consistent exposure to music, like learning to play a musical instrument, or taking voice lessons, strengthens a particular set of academic and social-emotional skills that are essential to learning. In ways that are unmatched by other pursuits, like athletics for instance, learning music powerfully reinforces language skills, builds and improves reading ability, and strengthens memory […]
“The difficulty in understanding equity and social justice in education and in developing effective policies comes from conceptual confusion. A large range of concepts populate this space of research and policy, often with conflicting meanings and consequences. An attempt is made to distinguish and define the most common conceptualizations of equity:”
“Nearly all cities in the United States imposed restrictions during the pandemic’s virulent second wave, which peaked in the fall of 1918. That winter, some cities reimposed controls when a third, though less deadly, wave struck. But virtually no city responded in 1920. People were weary of influenza, and so were public officials. Newspapers were […]
“We review research-backed guidelines for creating effective and intuitive visualizations oriented toward communicating data to students, coworkers, and the general public. We describe how the visual system can quickly extract broad statistics from a display, whereas poorly designed displays can lead to misperceptions and illusions.”
“Bosses in previous generations, he says, tended to be excellent individual contributors who were promoted to management positions so they could teach teams… The changing job description of a boss and increased expectations from workers means a different type of employee will be considered management material. Those with highly developed social abilities, including “the capacity […]
“What we can learn from reading about the schedules of people we admire is not what time to set our alarms or how many cups of coffee to drink, but that different types of work require different types of schedules.”
“Why note failures? Because successes in life, however defined, are built on failures that often go unnoted. The common pattern in talking or writing about a career is to deny or cover up failures. Carefully prepared resumes are silent on mishaps. The point is that everyone’s career is marked by failures but in our competitive, […]
“The argument for 1619 as our origin point goes beyond the centrality of slavery; 1619 was also the year that a heroic and generative process commenced, one by which enslaved Africans and their free descendants would profoundly alter the direction and character of the country, having an impact on everything from politics to popular culture. […]
“Feedback structure is often thought of as the cliched “feedback sandwich.” Not only is this not a particularly useful model, but consistently delivering positive and negative feedback at the same time may cause the key message to be missed. And it does not necessarily improve the likelihood of driving behavior change, which is the goal […]
“I study the justice dilemmas presented by climate change and climate policies, and have been involved in international climate negotiations as an observer since 2009. Here are six charts that help explain the challenges.”
“From the 1860s through 1900, America was embroiled in a generation-long, culturewide war over democracy, fought through the loudest, roughest, closest elections in our history. An age of acrimony when engaged, enraged participation came to seem less like a “perversion of traditional American institutions,” as one memoirist observed, and more like “their normal operation.” The […]
““The Kalven Report” remains one of the most important statements describing the purpose and mission of universities, and by implication, all institutions committed to learning… It advances an argument for what the drafting committee called “neutrality” in political and social action. In order to protect mission—the “discovery, improvement, and dissemination of knowledge” —educational institutions, the […]
“Much as effective teaching benefits from an understanding of certain principles drawn from cognitive science – for example, those involving active engagement, retrieval and transfer, mental modeling, cognitive load, and metacognition – so writing, too, profits from an understanding of cognitive theory. Here are a few lessons that I draw out of my own engagement […]
“To better understand what these institutions are doing well, we surveyed academic research as well as the reported practices of more than 30 institutions, including both regulated degree-granting universities and nonregulated lifelong education providers… We found that, to engage most effectively with students, the leading online higher education institutions focus on eight dimensions of the […]
“Other research on test design suggests that all too often, we’re not just assessing what students know, but also getting a peek into the psychological and cognitive eddies that disrupt a student’s thinking—a high-stakes test that causes anxiety can become a barometer of a student’s poise, rather than their knowledge. A well-designed test is rigorous […]
“Traditionally, teachers use discussion as a means to an end – a learning activity that achieves content objectives, like untangling the events leading up to a world war or tracking character growth through a novel. But in today’s world, discussion skills need to be a learning objective. Conversation Labs would approach Discussion as a Discipline: a set of […]
“The findings are striking for such a simple intervention. How simple? The writing exercises were given just three times in each school year. Pencils, paper, and one hour of time spread out over seven or eight months—even doable virtually. It’s hard to get much simpler than that. Why wouldn’t schools want to jump on this even while the mechanisms […]
“The trick I like best is also the one most commonly recommended by undergraduates in the classes I’m teaching this year—what scientists call situation modification. It involves intentionally changing your physical surroundings to make it easier to resist temptation. Consider, for example, this data collected from thousands of high school students on Character Lab Research Network. The […]
“Science is objective. Scientists are not. Can an “iron rule” explain how they’ve changed the world anyway?”
“Flipped learning was shown to be more effective than lecture-based learning across most disciplines. However, we found that flipped pedagogies produced the greatest academic and intra-/interpersonal benefits in language, technology, and health-science courses. Flipped learning may be a particularly good fit for these skills-based courses, because class time can be spent practicing and mastering these […]
“Giving feedback is one of the most important things we do as educators. Yet teachers rarely receive explicit, evidence-based guidance in how to do so. This document was created to help fill that gap. We hope that this resource will support teachers – as well as those who mentor them – by synthesizing academic research […]
“Good feedback provides us with the information, the motivation, and the structure to learn deeply. As Grant Wiggins argues in “Seven Keys to Effective Feedback,” if we spent less time teaching and more time giving feedback and supporting students in applying it, students would learn more. While we know that feedback matters, we also struggle with how […]
“Cultivating a genius isn’t just about introducing someone to a set of facts or skills and believing in them. Muhammad distilled what matters into the five tenets of the Historically Responsive Literacy framework: identity, skills, intellectualism, criticality and joy.”
“The team found that for all three career types, work tended to be more diverse just before a true hot streak than expected from the randomly selected points. However, once success had begun, individuals switched, sticking to a narrower than expected approach. That, the team says, suggests “that individuals become substantially more focused on what […]
“Over the past forty years, factors associated with raising a school’s academic profile include: teachers’ consistent focus on academic standards and frequent assessment of student learning, a serious school-wide climate toward learning, district support, and parental participation. Recent research also points to the importance of mobilizing teachers and the community to move in the same direction, building trust among […]
“When you take something old and use it in something new, that’s remixing. It might seem like just copying, but it’s actually much more. Remixing can empower you to be more creative. Remixing allows us to make music without playing instruments, to create software without coding, to create bigger, more complex ideas out of smaller […]
“Among the timely solutions the researchers have identified: having a structured daily routine and limiting passive screen time during the pandemic protects kids against depression and anxiety. Research is clear on the link between mental health and academics. Kids struggling with fears or having trouble regulating their emotions are more likely to experience challenges in […]
“There is broad support among parents for teaching SEL-related skills in schools, although the term “social and emotional learning” is relatively unpopular… Based on those results, Tyner distills four policy implications, including recommending that SEL proponents focus on specifics rather than nebulous concepts. Faced with specifics such as schools teaching sensitivity to different cultures, parents […]
“It’s time to give up the idea that ‘truth’ is the almighty stop-gap for justification and the hope that reasons will win out if we just find the right ones. Politically transformative work should aim to cause feelings and experiences in one’s adversaries that invite further investigation and reflection. Science, the environment, racial justice – […]
“Keep scrolling for the long version, but here’s the TL;DR: I’m not convinced that students’ recall of math facts or procedures was any better than they would have been with traditional tests; however, I found tremendous evidence indicating that most students understood the concepts and their connections because the assessments gave students agency while requiring them to justify their thinking in connected, […]
“In 2021, schools have the opportunity to stop initiatives that either no longer fit strategically or that are distractions from core work. Schools will decide if/how to keep pandemic changes as part of larger strategic goals, such as rethinking schedules, allowing for remote work, shifting grading and assessment practices, later start times, etc. Schools will make time […]
“Spatial ability, defined by a capacity for mentally generating, rotating, and transforming visual images, is one of the three specific cognitive abilities most important for developing expertise in learning and work settings.”
“Writing improves learning by consolidating information in long-term memory, researchers explain. Plus, five engaging writing activities to use in all subjects.”
“To future-proof citizens’ ability to work, they will require new skills—but which ones? A survey of 18,000 people in 15 countries suggests those that governments may wish to prioritize.”
“Is Math appropriate to teach leadership, or is critical thinking more likely? Beyond Communication and Creativity respectively, what should Language and Arts focus on? After three years of research, CCR publishes its ground-breaking recommendations in a new report, which describes which disciplines are most conducive to teach given competencies. Among the findings: The importance of the […]
“When we’re ready to start thinking about teaching again, summer is the perfect time to do some big-picture thinking. We can reflect on and plan for bigger goals, plans, and strategies.”
“Every discipline has a key role to play for development of Competency expertise and transfer. If all disciplines focus on teaching their top Competencies, benefits will exist at the curricular, course, and learner level. Curricula will be integrated with relevant Competencies which will in turn increase content relevance and depth of understanding of what it […]
“The dominant contemporary notion of academic rigor is the latter—it rests on the premise that difficulty is defined by a student’s workload rather than the depth and richness and intensity of the intellectual journey.”
“Organizing schools in discipline-based classes that go for 45 minutes where quizzes and test assess understanding every so often works well when you’re focused on knowledge. But skills and competencies are fundamentally different. They require different contexts, different structures. Cultivating creativity, collaborative problem-solving, self-directed learning, empathy, can largely only happen effectively in rich, complex contexts […]
“We have focused our recent research on one interesting aspect of the transition for new teachers: the influential role of the induction mentor teacher in an educator’s first year. Through a case study approach, we looked at the in-depth experiences of seven recent graduates from our teacher preparation program, collecting interview and focus group data […]
“Whether reading a book, playing a video game, or losing oneself in a daydream, these mental activities are not cognitive idling. Even a couch potato does more than just sit on the couch like a potato. As we experience and manipulate alternative realities—evaluating the universe of counterfactuals that we mentally construct—we ponder options and perhaps […]
“We know what you did during lockdown.”
“The structure of these groups is key. Members say the hour goes by quickly, is energizing, and leaves them feeling inspired to enact concrete ideas. This is all because of the components that go into the Mastermind. While the structure we use is simple and predictable, the effects are powerful. The power comes from a […]
“While various theories of motivation and engagement have gained – and lost – traction over the years, one of the most widely accepted is the theory proposed by Fredricks, Blumenfeld, and Paris in 2004. It presents engagement as a mash-up of behavioral, emotional, and cognitive factors.”
“Based on an examination of research, the report finds four common prevailing features in high-quality professional development, regardless of whether it’s focused on in-person, hybrid or virtual models: a focus on content, support for collaboration, the provision of feedback and reflection, and personalized coaching and support.”
“Currently nearing the end of its second school year, this high school is the end product of a group of brave, forward-thinking educators who saw what education could be, and instead of trying to work within the system, asked themselves, “Why don’t we just build it?””
“A different interpretation of adolescence emerged in the 2000s, stemming from two important new findings. Neuroscientists showed that puberty ushers in a period of exuberant neuronal growth followed by a pruning of neural connections that is second only to the similar process that occurs in the first three years of life. They also showed that […]
“Training has its uses. It can even save lives. (See CPR above.) But training is woefully inadequate when it comes to confronting social problems such as poverty, discrimination and racism. These are long-standing, knotty and complex issues that defy ready-made solutions. Any serious effort to address them must start with education, a process for which […]
“[These leaders] learned how to work together with others who have different backgrounds and different ways of thinking, and they emphasized collaborating together to lead their business despite all their differences.”
“The science of climate change is more solid and widely agreed upon than you might think. But the scope of the topic, as well as rampant disinformation, can make it hard to separate fact from fiction. Here, we’ve done our best to present you with not only the most accurate scientific information, but also an explanation of […]
“To help school communities think through what’s the purpose of schooling, a little history can help, as the dominant policy rationale for public schools’ purpose in society has changed over time. “
“It’s being secure enough in your strengths to acknowledge your weaknesses. Having enough faith in your knowledge to recognize your ignorance. Being so determined to get it right that you’re willing to admit when you’re wrong.”
“Because of their complexity, just getting such routines off the ground can seem like a victory in itself, but we cannot emphasize strongly enough how important it is that improvement routines be employed thoughtfully, and that everyone involved has a shared understanding of their purpose. It is important that routines run smoothly, but this is […]
“If students know that teachers value and believe in them, no matter what they have gone through over the past year, educators can create a classroom environment where high expectations are the norm. When students feel empowered, they care more and work harder. Next time you hear the phrase learning loss, think about whether we really […]
“For example, stretch mistakes are positive and may occur when a person is trying something difficult and doesn’t get it right the first time. Similarly, with aha-moment mistakes there are sparks of realization that happen when someone understands they’re missing important information. On the more negative side, sloppy mistakes are the ones made in a […]
“In two gold-standard, randomized, controlled trials of thousands of students in diverse school systems across the U.S., project-based learning significantly outperformed traditional curricula, raising academic performance across grade levels, socioeconomic subgroups, and reading ability.”
“When someone seems closed-minded, my instinct is to argue the polar opposite of their position. But when I go on the attack, my opponents either shut down or fight back harder. On more than one occasion, I’ve been called a “logic bully.” When we try to change a person’s mind, our first impulse is to […]
“Originally created by Google to work with an interactive whiteboard (trust me, your school probably can’t afford the actual hardware), Jamboard software also works on laptops, Chromebooks, and mobile devices. Making it perfect as both a face to face and a remote instructional and learning tool… How might you use it? Here are five ways that Jamboard […]
“Generalists are not experts—but they are skilled at accessing the work of experts. They know how to look at an issue from multiple angles, sift good information from less good information, corroborate and compare what they find.”
“Many schools will keep online learning offerings, and a few will invest in these programs in a big way. Some will move to online parent-teacher conferences held on a more frequent basis. Others will have a group of teachers and staff who are full-time remote and possibly part-time. Some will run virtual classes for some students, […]
“Pottinger’s White House experience has made him acutely aware of what he calls “the fading art of leadership.” It’s not a failure of one party or another; it’s more of a generational decline of good judgment. “The élites think it’s all about expertise,” he said. It’s important to have experts, but they aren’t always right: […]
“In one sense, the public shaming… underscores the power of social media to hold people of all ages accountable, with consequences at times including harassment and both online and real-world “cancellation.” But the story behind the backlash also reveals a more complex portrait of behavior that for generations had gone unchecked in schools in one […]
“Of all the learners that ever registered on a MOOC platform, one third did so in 2020… Data collected by Class Central show that pre-pandemic, technology-related subjects were the most popular: the ten most-followed courses were all career-focused. Post-pandemic, interest in soft skills and general topics increased. The most popular course during the pandemic turned out to be Yale […]
“Maintaining the traditional scope of AP Exams was a challenging decision… Please know we honor and respect choices you may make to focus on fewer topics in a difficult year. The skills students develop in your course are often more valuable than how much content they get through, and students who cover fewer topics in […]
“Come January, when her husband’s job title changes, hers will stay the same: Unlike every other first lady in American history, she has said she will keep her full-time job. “I’m going to continue to teach,” she said in an interview on “CBS Sunday Morning” in August. “It’s important — I want people to value […]
“By the time students reach high school, friendships become more stable. “In middle school, it’s unusual for an individual to maintain the same group of close friends over the space of 18 months,” says B. Bradford Brown, an educational psychology professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison: “In high school, that is no longer the case.” Likely because individual identities are […]
“We reviewed hundreds of educational studies in 2020 and then highlighted 10 of the most significant—covering topics from virtual learning to the reading wars and the decline of standardized tests.”
“Among adults, healthy friendships are voluntary, personal, positive, and persistent,” Lydia Denworth writes in her 2020 book Friendship, “and they usually assume some measure of equality.”… Eighty percent of adolescents experience loneliness at school, and about 12 percent of 6,000 sixth-graders in one of Juvonen’s studies were not named as a friend by anyone. Students with no friends […]
“Deeper conversations help people become explicable to each other and themselves. You can’t really know yourself until you know how you express yourself and find yourself in another’s eyes. Deeper conversation builds trust, the oxygen of society, exactly what we’re missing right now.”
“Before, a teacher only had to worry about meeting students where they were academically, socially, and emotionally. Now you literally have to figure out a way to meet them where they are… What I’d like to do in this post is curate some of the ways teachers have solved the problem of teaching students who are […]
“There has been a longstanding belief in education that, after the early years of their career, a teacher’s experience has little to no influence on their ability to help pupils learn (Rice, 2003; Hanushek and Luque, 2003; Rockoff, 2004). It has been thought that teachers undergo a steep learning curve upon entering the profession, lasting three to five […]
“The theory: To deal effectively with change, it helps to be engaged in changing yourself.”
“In other words, instead of changing the assessment context or altering the severity of consequences, teachers simply take away students’ reasons for cheating. Why cheat on an assessment if that hurts your chances of getting the individualized assistance you need to do well? Some teachers go so far as to make every assessment formative until […]
“Hill identified six developmental areas, in addition to academics, that schools have traditionally helped nurture. Here, we summarize her suggestions for how schools can work with families to continue to do so in a pandemic.”
“These books decry the generational chauvinism that assumes that today’s educational system is superior to all that came before, that the kind of courses and pedagogies we offer are the best imaginable, and that our current curriculum — which combines excessive requirements without a clearly defined sense of what a graduate should know or do […]
“To ensure that kids keep progressing on both the academic and social-emotional fronts, it’s critical that educators provide live teacher-led video conference sessions. These need to optimize both academic coverage and social interaction. A baseline would be two or three 30-to-45 minute sessions in each of the core academic subjects each week… These sessions need […]
“Racism in America has been the subject of serious scholarship for decades. At Harvard University Press, we’ve had the honor of publishing some of the most influential books on the subject. The excerpts in this volume—culled from works of history, law, sociology, medicine, economics, critical theory, philosophy, art, and literature—are an invitation to understand anti-Black […]
“Before the pandemic, I was a parenting expert… I told worried parents about the nine signs of tech overuse, like ditching sleep for screens. I advised them to write a “family media contract” and trust, but verify, their tweens’ doings online… Now, like Socrates, I know better. I know that I know nothing… I have […]
“Reality pedagogy involves connecting academic content to events happening in the world that affect students. The curriculum can weave in specific references to the neighborhoods where young people are from, inequities that they and their families are hurt by, and protests in the community. But that doesn’t mean these lessons are always serious. Students can […]
“I asked Melanie to share some ways online teaching should be different from face-to-face teaching. She came up with nine: three that are specific to community building and communication, and six that focus on instructional design. Along with these differences, she also shared a few things that should stay exactly the same.”
“The contents of this “playbook” are the result of an eight week effort during May-June of 2020 to inform a subset of CIP’s return-to-school planning… This document provides… A compendium of case studies, research, and expert perspectives meant to inform and support CIP’s thinking regarding select elements of its return-to-school planning; A snapshot in time […]
“That’s why both educators and researchers who study child development say the school shutdowns resulting from the coronavirus pandemic may be particularly disruptive for middle schoolers. These kids are being sequestered at home at exactly the stage in life they need their peers and teachers most.”
“This is a mini film, Numb by me. I did this for a school project but I’m really happy with how it came out, so I’m posting it here.”
“Work began in January with the deciphering of the SARS-CoV-2 genome. The first vaccine safety trials in humans started in March, but the road ahead remains uncertain. Some trials will fail, and others may end without a clear result. But a few may succeed in stimulating the immune system to produce effective antibodies against the virus. […]
“It’s not clear how much more efficient teaching can be, and how much faster people can achieve mastery of skills and knowledge. But as Herbert Simon challenged more than 50 years ago, more educators could at least be open to learning from the data and evidence that is theirs for the taking just about every […]
“Students are deferring college in numbers larger than ever before. This is an extraordinary opportunity to discover a language, history, and culture that is entirely new. Find ancient civilizations and IKEA, rigorous academics and relaxing excursions, desert landscapes and a lush campus covered in green quadrangles. All this and professionally-recognized university counseling for college repositioning. […]
“If there is one thing every token black friend knows, it is that we are not to provoke serious discussions of racial issues among our white crowd. We should only offer an opinion on such matters when invited to do so by our white peers. Further, we should ensure that the opinion is in line […]
Three week, online courses, professional development for teachers. Dive into language, history, and culture of the Middle East for your summer professional development. The King’s Academy Summer Institute is designed to share the rich culture and language of Jordan and the larger Middle East with teachers and adult learners around the world. The program offers online learners […]
“Basically, as the work closures are loosened, and we start to venture out more, possibly even resuming in-office activities, you need to look at your environment and make judgments. How many people are here, how much airflow is there around me, and how long will I be in this environment. If you are in an […]
“When we started, we only had our intuition and the spirit of our founding schools to make relationships central to our pedagogy. Now, many years of student survey data have helped us refine that approach and design intentionally for relationships. We survey our students twice per semester. Our surveys have evolved as our program has, but […]
“Our latest report shows not only that the business case remains robust but also that the relationship between diversity on executive teams and the likelihood of financial outperformance has strengthened over time. These findings emerge from our largest data set so far, encompassing 15 countries and more than 1,000 large companies. By incorporating a “social […]
“Distance learning gives me more control of my studies. I can focus more time on subjects that require greater effort and study. I don’t have to sit through a teacher fielding questions that have already been answered. I can still collaborate with other students, but much more effectively… I’ve also found that I prefer some […]
“The way individuals make meaning is cognitive and emotional at once—like a good story. And deep, meaningful thinking actually taps into basic survival processes, in essence making the thinker feel more alive, like their work is personal, and like what they think and do matters. No wonder adolescents can become so inspired and motivated when their […]
“This guide is meant to give you hope and fear. To beat COVID-19 in a way that also protects our mental & financial health, we need optimism to create plans, and pessimism to create backup plans. As Gladys Bronwyn Stern once said, “The optimist invents the airplane and the pessimist the parachute.””
“Sixty-five percent of teachers in a new nationwide poll favor starting next year with ‘regularly scheduled instruction” over other options, such as revisiting concepts from the end of this semester, extending next school year or offering students the chance to repeat a grade… The results show administrators — who made up about 12% of the 5,555 respondents […]
“Institutions should develop public health plans now that build on three basic elements of controlling the spread of infection: test, trace and separate.”
“They are flexible and adaptable teaching techniques. With all of the concern for student-centered inquiry and using tougher questions based upon Bloom’s taxonomy, one enduring function of schooling is to transfer academic knowledge and skills (both technical and social) to the next generation.”
“The secret to good writing is good editing. It’s what separates hastily written, randomly punctuated, incoherent rants from learned polemics and op-eds, and cringe-worthy fan fiction from a critically acclaimed novel. By the time this article is done, I’ll have edited and rewritten each line at least a few times. Here’s how to start editing […]
“Before this, I would stand outside my first grader’s school, waiting, and when he would walk outside when the bell rang, for a minute, I got to see him in his own world, for a brief few steps, until he saw me and entered our shared world again.”
“This guide was compiled by teachers at King’s Academy for the purpose of supporting our transition from onsite to online learning. King’s Academy has a wealth of teachers with experience in online teaching and learning — in online college consortia, with Global Online Academy, for education technology companies, and more. These teachers convened for a […]
“For many companies, the only option is to accelerate their digital transformation. That means moving from active experimentation to active scale-up supported by ongoing testing and continuous improvement. These moves should happen across two dimensions: at the core of the company and through the development of new businesses.”
“Crack open a book and you can not only learn from someone who’s several thousand miles away, you can learn from someone who’s several thousand years away.”
“Because the store of general knowledge we need for full language proficiency is fluid, not fixed, reading and watching the news should be a staple of the well-educated person’s knowledge and language diet. But at a time when it’s never been more important to be well-informed and literate, children have never been less likely to […]
“And so I’m back, students are gone, as all my colleagues try to figure how they’re gonna get along. I should have kept up with the tech, not skipped that class on course design. If I’d have known for just one second I’d be teaching all-online.”
“Should you let that comment slide, or address it head on? Is it more harm than it’s worth? We can help.”
“We are all embedded within systems, but each life—each child—is an unrepeatable anecdote. According to the adults I knew when I was a kid, the worst thing in the world was to be a “statistic,” subsumed into a mass of low expectations and bad outcomes determined by color and class and sustained by a bureaucracy […]
“The researchers compared siblings who attended different high schools, and the ones who attended schools that were better at boosting soft skills had better outcomes.”
“When students haven’t been required to wrestle with difficult writing decisions—and when much of that decision making has been done by the teacher—they lose their sense of agency and their confidence as writers. Bryant and Jillian have ended up frustrated because they’ve had years of the same kind of writing practice. Their good grades in […]
“The assumption that teaching is highly individualistic has often been used to resist efforts at specifying — or, some fear, prescribing or oversimplifying — what accomplished teachers actually do in the classroom. Yet, if we cannot describe the work that teachers do in some detail, then we risk resorting to vague generalities about it, leaving […]
“So what does it look like to put these non-negotiables into practice and plan a project? I will walk you through the process I have come to embrace and share with teachers who cross my path, either through our time together in the trenches during project coaching, or when they pick up my book, Keep it […]
“I found myself darting around the room having to explain what the word “inevitable” meant. The question of inevitability in history is a fascinating one that middle schoolers of all levels can discuss. But it sure helps to understand what the word “inevitable” means in order to have it. As I heard from another teacher, […]
“The analysis yielded six major findings. Among them: Students of all racial/ethnic groups learn more from teachers with high grading standards, and these standards tend to be higher in schools serving more advantaged students. Moreover, the impact of rigorous grading practices can improve student performance in subsequent math classes up to two years later.”
“If we want people to perform well, concision is king: the fewer the criteria, the easier it is to reinforce, practice, monitor—and thus ensure—that those criteria are fully met. When organizations establish only a tiny set of crystal-clear criteria, both performance—and job satisfaction—skyrocket. The same goes for schools. There are both historic and contemporary precedents […]
“When adults continue to learn at their jobs they are better at creating that experience for other people. She says if schools are going to be places where students consistently push against the edge of what they don’t know, testing new theories, and trying things out while learning from mistakes, those same qualities must be […]
“Put simply, life is beginning to look ever more complex and ever more collaborative. All this has fractured Western biology’s consensus on Darwin. In response to all these new insights, some biologists instinctively defend Darwin, an ingrained impulse from years of championing his work against creationists. Others, like Margulis herself, feel Darwin had something to offer, […]
“Cognitive science does not provide a recipe for what teachers should do, but rather should inform their repertoire of approaches. And of course, it forms only one part of teachers’ extensive knowledge and expertise.”
“If reported to Yale’s Executive Committee, those found guilty of academic dishonesty could face suspension, probation or other reprimands. But thanks to the regret clause, CS50 instructors on both campuses pledge not to bring such cases to the Executive Committee for students who admit to potential academic dishonesty within 72 hours of the submission deadline. […]
“For managers and teams, the takeaway is clear: a structure that allows for periods of collaboration and periods of uninterrupted individual work can boost creativity and productivity.”
“Parents and educational staff need different tactics to address — and end — bullying. Many of the suggestions that are provided here are what clinicians encourage clients toward during the course of therapy. While therapeutic intervention often only involves a single person, or a handful of individuals, the school environment provides the opportunity to affect […]
“Sleep length, quality and consistency together accounted for 24.4 percent of the difference among the students’ test grades. And these factors appeared especially important for boys. Grossman’s team is not sure why. But boys who didn’t get enough sleep or regular sleep were likely to do worse on an exam than were girls who had […]
“For the past ten years, I have written a lengthy year-end series, documenting some of the dominant narratives and trends in education technology. I think it is worthwhile, as the decade draws to a close, to review those stories and to see how much (or how little) things have changed.”
“Computers are great at storing, delivering and rewinding explanations, but that isn’t what math education needs. Math education needs visualizations that provoke students wonder mathematically. It needs a creative palette that enables students to express their mathematical ideas more fully. It needs to connect ideas and people together so that students and teachers can learn […]
“At first, Thunberg’s father reassured her that everything would be O.K., but as he read more about the climate crisis, he found his own words rang hollow. “I realized that she was right and I was wrong, and I had been wrong all my life,” Svante told TIME in a quiet moment after arriving in […]
“Sometimes it takes a long time and lot of painful grading in order to figure out the mistakes. You have to be open to your own errors in the assignment. When you see kids all making the same kind of mistake, you need to notice that maybe it’s how you phrased the question, or the […]
“Surprise discussions sprung on students can go off the rails quickly. “If the Monday morning after the Charlottesville riots a teacher just walks into her classroom and asks the students, ‘Well, what did you guys think of that?’ That’s going to be a disaster,” McAvoy said. An open discussion right after a tragic event, with […]
“When he got home, Rowan would turn on his laptop and sit in front of the glowing screen for hours, or flop onto his bed, his phone hovering above his face. His Instagram feed flashed before him like a slot machine. His most popular account, @Zuccccccccccc, taking its name from Facebook’s chief executive, had 1.2 […]
“At the same time, a coaching culture is wasted unless leaders design and implement positive conditions for coaching. We focus on ways school leaders can establish the four conditions that help coaches transform leading, teaching, and schooling: A strong model of high-quality instruction. A strong model of coaching. A strong model to build capacity for coaching. A […]
“When people discover that they don’t know as much as they thought they did, something interesting happens: their political attitudes become less extreme.”
“There are all kinds of ways that people talk about identity and diversity these days. I’ve been trying to organize them into approaches. Here’s my first crack. My goal here is to be descriptive, not judgmental. I don’t think these approaches are necessarily mutually exclusive, but I do think some people within each of these […]
“Academia has confused a convention with a moral rule, and this confusion is not unmotivated. We academics cannot make much money off the papers and books in which we express our ideas, and ideas cannot be copyrighted, so we have invented a moral law that offers us the “property rights” the legal system denies us.”
“Thankfully, there’s a science to understanding emotion. It’s not just a matter of intuition, opinion, or gut instinct. We are not born with an innate talent for recognizing what we or anyone else is feeling and why. We all have to learn it. I had to learn it. As with any science, there’s a process […]
“She recommends starting a reading routine with infants, even though it may seem like they aren’t getting much out of books at that age… And there’s no reason this protected time has to stop as children grow older.”
“We have been able to document the improvement of our student body moving roughly 30 percent not ready for college math to almost 100 percent are ready.”
“The study found that low-stakes peer evaluations resulted in improvements in teacher job performance, as measured by test scores. The study found improvements for both the observed teacher and the teacher doing the observation.”
“The actual physical capacity to connect people and ideas may, in fact, be one reason why cities, and some neighborhoods are more conducive for innovation than others.”
“Scientific evidence is not the only source of knowledge nor is it the source of knowledge that always holds high ground in decision-making. Two other important kinds of knowledge are what might best be labeled craft knowledge and moral knowledge. Craft knowledge stems from the understanding gathered over time by practitioners, including through stories, ad […]
“Page concluded that grades can have a beneficial effect on student learning only when accompanied by standard or individualized comments from the teacher. Studies conducted in later years confirmed these results.”
“The six N.A.T.A. recommendations are endorsed by five societies of athletic trainers, including professional football, hockey, soccer, basketball and baseball trainers, as well as the group’s Intercollegiate Council for Sports Medicine.”
“She and her team found that arts integration instruction led to long-term retention of science concepts at least as successfully as conventional science teaching. Arts integration was particularly helpful for students with the lowest reading scores. Studies like this one have led to a resurgence of interest in arts integration, a pedagogy that uses art as […]
“School debate doesn’t have to be this way, though. In fact, many schools around the country are gravitating to alternative forms of debate that set the goals of truth and understanding over the goal of persuasion… In the Ethics Bowl, created at the intercollegiate level in 1993 and the high school level around 2012, a […]
“Every 10 days, on average, another university makes these tests optional for admission. Forty-one schools have jettisoned this requirement in the last year, the largest number ever.”
“Survey data and experts suggest that students generally appreciate libraries most for their simple, traditional offerings: a quiet place to study or collaborate on a group project, the ability to print research papers, and access to books. Notably, many students say they like relying on librarians to help them track down hard-to-find texts or navigate scholarly journal databases.”
“Most high-school math classes are still preparing students for the Sputnik era. Steve Levitt wants to get rid of the “geometry sandwich” and instead have kids learn what they really need in the modern era: data fluency.”
“To answer the question, “What are the mindsets and practices of excellent CEOs?,” we started with the six main elements of the CEO’s job—elements touched on in virtually all literature about the role: setting the strategy, aligning the organization, leading the top team, working with the board, being the face of the company to external […]
“The opposite of racist isn’t ‘not racist.’ It is ‘anti-racist.’ … One either allows racial inequities to persevere, as a racist, or confronts racial inequities, as an anti-racist. There is no in-between safe space of ‘not racist… Teaching for an antiracist future starts with us, the educators. An antiracist educator actively works to dismantle the […]
“Recognition of the powerful pattern matching ability of humans is growing. As a result, humans are increasingly being deployed to make decisions that affect the well-being of other humans. We are starting to see the use of human decision makers in courts, in university admissions offices, in loan application departments, and in recruitment. Soon humans […]
“In the workshops students worked on math problems together, considering together what it would take to achieve at the highest levels on different problems. The academic improvement that resulted from the workshops was significant. Within two years, the failure rate of African American students had dropped to zero, and the African American and Latino students […]
“Men majoring in computer science or engineering roughly doubled their starting salaries by age 40, to an average of $124,458. Yet earnings growth is even faster in other majors, and some catch up completely. By age 40, the average salary of all male college graduates was $111,870, and social science and history majors earned $131,154 […]
“In this model of professional development, peer networks became the main mechanism for transferring collective wisdom and acquiring tacit knowledge that can’t be learned by reading a book or listening to a lecture—skills such as designing a strong lesson plan with precise pacing, rhythm, and clear focus, for instance, or building positive relationships among students. […]
“In 2018, 141 US colleges and universities offered varsity esports programs, 75 more than in 2017.”
“We compared students’ self-reported perception of learning with their actual learning under controlled conditions in large-enrollment introductory college physics courses taught using 1) active instruction (following best practices in the discipline) and 2) passive instruction (lectures by experienced and highly rated instructors)… Students in active classrooms learned more (as would be expected based on prior […]
“In his new book, Proof!: How the World Became Geometrical, historian Amir Alexander advances an audacious claim: that Euclidean geometry profoundly influenced not just the history of mathematics, but also broader sociopolitical reality.”
“Different opinions reflect different values, different attitudes towards assessment, and different understandings of how learning happens. I’ll take a stab at unpacking this, and (as is my wont) I will not be shy about sharing my opinions along the way. I will present this as a discussion with imaginary colleagues, whose contributions are in bold type. “
“Quality education is about relationships. Caring teachers who understand child development and who know and are attuned to the children in their care are far more important than many of the measures of quality we use today, such as class size, physical environments, or a specific curriculum. Rich, open-ended conversation is critical, and children need […]
“Linguistic decline is the cultural equivalent of the boy who cried wolf, except the wolf never turns up. Perhaps this is why, even though the idea that language is going to the dogs is widespread, nothing much has been done to mitigate it: it’s a powerful intuition, but the evidence of its effects has simply […]
The 1619 Project is a major initiative from The New York Times observing the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. It aims to reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we […]
“Whether higher ed can overcome the barriers to institutional and departmental collaboration is, to my mind, the next great challenge facing our colleges and universities.”
“As in a prior study of Wisconsin 6th graders, the 7th graders who participated in the writing exercise had fewer failing grades and better overall GPAs at the end of the school year than their peers who had not participated. The researchers found no changes in attendance or discipline, but did find that students who had […]
“Can changing how you think about stress make you healthier? And here, the science says yes. When you change your mind about stress, you can change your body’s response to stress. Your heart might be pounding. You might be breathing faster, maybe breaking out into a sweat. And normally, we interpret these physical changes as […]
“What if the medicine we have been prescribing is only making matters worse, particularly for poor children? What if the best way to boost reading comprehension is not to drill kids on discrete skills but to teach them, as early as possible, the very things we’ve marginalized—including history, science, and other content that could build […]
“I tend to brace against the idea of lecturing. It conjures up images of a crowded hall and a professor droning on and on while we sit in the audience feverishly taking notes. But lectures aren’t inherently bad. After all, I love a good podcast or TED Talk. I regularly deliver keynotes for conferences, school […]
“The more tightly the social parts of our brain are connected, the more possible it is that performance will be more moving, more expressive… Brains are social, people are social, and when they’re connected, that has the best effect for creativity.”
“By using informal writing to convey the regular dramas of human life, they also started reshaping informal writing into something that could deeply convey the full range of human emotions… This leads to miscommunication, of course, between generations of Internet People… How we talk online is determined by our linguistic community, which in turn is […]
“In place of a straightforward transcript listing letter grades and a grade point average, admissions officers received the growth transcript, which provides rich information on student progress in four broad areas: Mindset, knowledge, creativity and skills. Under each of those four categories, eight subcategories provide a granular look at students’ progress over their three years […]
“The challenge we all face is how to maintain the benefits of breadth, diverse experience, interdisciplinary thinking and delayed concentration in a world that increasingly incentivises or even demands hyperspecialisation. While it is true that there are areas that require individuals with Tiger’s precocity and clarity of purpose, as complexity increases – as technology spins […]
“Unlike textbooks or video, virtual reality fully immerses users in a dynamic virtual world – and the headset device can be as simple as a mobile phone inserted into an inexpensive Google Cardboard viewer. Now, teachers around the world are using virtual reality to overcome barriers of physical distance and give their students a first-person view […]
“The meetings of these groups aren’t talkathons or just opportunities for teachers to spend time together in a group hoping to learn. Each team has a serious, important assignment with deadlines. And each assignment is expected to result in improvements to student performance. Opportunities for teachers to move ahead in their careers depend in significant […]
“Minimal manning—and with it, the replacement of specialized workers with problem-solving generalists—isn’t a particularly nautical concept. Indeed, it will sound familiar to anyone in an organization who’s been asked to “do more with less”—which, these days, seems to be just about everyone… In 20 years, we’ll know a lot more about the costs and benefits […]
“Using examples in our teaching does not help students generalize or make lessons more interesting. In fact, the research shows that when we offer examples students tend to focus on the more trivial aspects of the example – the authors call these the “seductive details” – rather than the important content we had in mind. […]
“The challenge we all face is how to maintain the benefits of breadth, diverse experience, interdisciplinary thinking, and delayed concentration in a world that increasingly incentivizes, and even demands, hyper-specialization. While it is undoubtedly true that there are areas that require individuals with Tiger’s precocity and clarity of purpose, as complexity increases — as technology spins the world […]
“The country’s colleges and universities have experienced a pronounced increase in the number of freshmen applications received over the past 15 or so years, a trend reflected in the U.S. undergraduate population’s dramatic growth, from 16.7 million in 1996 to 20 million in 2016, according to a recent Pew Research Center report… Yet selective colleges and universities—those that […]
“As a country we have moved past the idea that the basics of a decent life should be hoarded by an aristocracy, a hereditary class with a monopoly on wealth, power and property. Allocating resources on the basis of merit is arguably a better system, or at least, less unjust. Still, it is far from […]
“Deeper learning is defined as a set of competencies that include content mastery, critical thinking, collaboration, and effective communication. Mehta and Fine define it as the place where “mastery, identity, and creativity” meet. Students who have engaged in deeper learning have strong expertise in a field, learn to identify themselves as practitioners of the discipline, and […]
“We need to see the reading comprehension problem for what it primarily is — a knowledge problem. There is no way around the need for children to gain broad general knowledge in order to gain broad general proficiency in reading.”
“What You Need to Know About Me is a new anthology (published by The Hawkins Project, co-founded by Dave Eggers) that highlights the experiences of young people (ages 11-24) who have immigrated from one country to another… Of our contributors, we want to know: How has the experience of migration impacted your life? What have been […]
“Walking is a way to be more present, ease anxiety, spark creativity, increase productivity, and detox from digital overload (that is, if you don’t walk with your face in your phone).”
“This pattern extends beyond music and sports. Students who have to specialize earlier in their education — picking a pre-med or law track while still in high school — have higher earnings than their generalist peers at first, according to one economist’s research in several countries. But the later-specializing peers soon caught up… The early […]
“Nonverbals are anything that communicates but is not a word. The public knows them as body language… In fact we are never in a state where we’re not transmitting information.”
“The decision to give students who take the SAT test a numerical rating that reflects the challenges they have overcome in life is the most telling sign yet that universities across the country are searching for ways to diversify their classes without considering race or ethnicity… In the initial data the College Board has collected on some […]
There are five core computational thinking skills… These are collecting data, analyzing data, decomposing, finding patterns and using abstract thinking.”
“I recently interviewed over 40 teens in grades 6 through 12 and asked them, What do you need from schools to feel supported both academically and socially? I share their responses, both honest and illuminating, here.”
The more weak ties a person has (neighbors, a barista at the neighborhood coffee shop or fellow members in a spin class), the happier they feel. Maintaining this network of acquaintances also contributes to one’s sense of belonging to a community, researchers found.”
“The manner in which the machinery of instruction bears upon the child… really controls the system.”
“The Arts + Social Impact Explorer is designed as a gateway to research, projects, and support organizations. The goal is to enable people to extract key information at a quick glance, helping users visualize how the arts permeate community life while providing leaders what they need to make visible impact.”
“We must revisit the largely held perception of school as a primarily academic institution that offers learning opportunities at a fixed time in a fixed setting… Expanding access to out-of-school activities propels our young learners to higher graduation rates, improved academic achievement and higher wages. Out-of-school spaces also offer fertile ground for developing critical thinking, […]
“Colleges and universities are increasingly turning to CRMs to track the life cycle of their engagement with students—from initial marketing outreach to financial aid, applications, enrollment, course registration, retention, alumni and donor relationships.”
“The study, published in the Journal of Learning Sciences on April 15, found that students applied the strategies they had learned to entirely new problems, without prompting, and that they also performed better on projects. Notably, the biggest benefits went to low-achieving students.”
Free mass public education empowered nearly everyone with the historically scarce skills of reading and numeracy. But in an economy defined by artificial intelligence and robotics, people will need much more than literacy and numeracy.”
“People like history—just look at the New York Times bestseller list—but not enough historians actually take the time to try to talk to the interested public… An obvious remedy would be to place more stress on good writing; courses on how to write for the informed laity should be central to all humanities instruction. But the humanities […]
“As one learns about so-called liberal arts institutions today, one swiftly encounters a wide range of aspirations, many of which have little to do with academic or even cognitive aspirations. Colleges are expected to produce good citizens; kind and empathic human beings; happy persons who are self-realized; individuals who want to lead the world, change […]
“The concept of “learning styles” has overwhelmingly been labeled a mythby researchers, so attempting to determine which of your students are kinesthetic learners will not be a good use of your time. What is worth your time is using movement when working with all learners, because plenty of research backs that up.”
“Research tends to focus on homework’s quantity rather than its quality, because the former is much easier to measure than the latter. While experts generally agree that the substance of an assignment matters greatly (and that a lot of homework is uninspiring busywork), there isn’t a catchall rule for what’s best—the answer is often specific […]
“Isolated examples of professional learning based on individual educator needs are a poor substitute for engaging teachers in ongoing collaborative learning that draws on their expertise to examine student data and design learning agendas that benefit everyone in the school… when teachers or schools have too much control over PD decisions, there tends to not […]
“Practically speaking, high dependence on tuition — as high as 80 to 90 percent — is a good sign that an institution will not likely survive for long… Colleges and universities that are under threat of closure “have a full range of bad choices to make,” she noted: they can lower standards, defer maintenance, create new […]
The benefits of drawing were not dependent on the students’ level of artistic talent, suggesting that this strategy may work for all students, not just ones who are able to draw well. Across a total of eight experiments, the researchers confirmed drawing to be a “reliable, replicable means of boosting performance”—it provided a significant boost […]
“Recent evidence would suggest that growth mindset interventions are not the elixir of student learning that many of its proponents claim it to be… It is hard to dispute that having a self-belief in their own capacity for change is a positive attribute for students. Paradoxically, however, that aspiration is not well served by direct […]
Take a deep breath and try again,” said the young man, encouraging me in true Yoda fashion. “UP, UP, UP,” I thought, fixing my mind on the drove. And, amazingly, up it went. Hovering here and there and lurching around a bit, but most certainly skyward. After 30 seconds of amazing drone control, I’d had […]
“In light of a new study revealing stereotyped characters across Dr. Seuss’s children’s books, published just before Read Across America Day, how can educators engage students in a critical discussion of this canonical author?”
Only one leadership personality, the architect, delivers sustained improvement—by balancing all four roles. In the words of the researchers, they’re insightful, humble, visionary leaders who believe schools fail because they’re poorly designed, so they work with teachers to develop a collaborative school vision and engage directly in professional learning, coaching, mentoring, and peer collaboration.”
“The premise is simple: A teacher wears an earpiece during a lesson, which is being livestreamed for an instructional coach who is somewhere else. Throughout the lesson, the coach delivers in-the-moment feedback to the teacher, who can add something or switch gears based on what she’s hearing in her ear. Typically, the coach and the […]
“In her new book Merchants of Truth, Abramson, the former executive editor of the New York Times, had apparently plagiarized from several sources… The irony was thick. Here was a veteran of the industry, a Harvard journalism lecturer no less, getting facts wrong in a book about “the fight for facts” in contemporary news.”
We find that a substantial increase in arts educational experiences has remarkable impacts on students’ academic, social, and emotional outcomes. Relative to students assigned to the control group, treatment school students experienced a 3.6 percentage point reduction in disciplinary infractions, an improvement of 13 percent of a standard deviation in standardized writing scores, and an […]
The most effective parents, according to the authors, are “authoritative.” They use reasoning to persuade kids to do things that are good for them. Instead of strict obedience, they emphasize adaptability, problem-solving and independence — skills that will help their offspring in future workplaces that we can’t even imagine yet.”
The seven tenets of globally competent school leaders fall under four domains: (1) vision setting, (2) pedagogy and practice, (3) situated action, and (4) systems and structures. These domains reflect general best practices of educational leadership, while recognizing the ways in which one’s local professional context is interconnected to a broader global environment.”
“A small group of well-educated professionals enjoys rising wages, while most workers toil in low-wage jobs with few chances to advance.”
“Instead of saying: “Your next step would be to revise some of the dialogue to make it sound more realistic.” Try this: “I wonder if, as a writer, you’re ready for more advanced dialogue techniques.”
“The study also illuminates the importance of six collegiate experiences, including how supportive relationships and relevant, engaging learning experiences are linked to long-term outcomes such as higher workplace engagement and wellbeing for college alumni nationwide. The proportion of currently enrolled students who strongly agree that they are confident they will graduate with the skills and knowledge they […]
“All of this research suggests that doctors who don’t connect with their patients may risk undermining a treatment’s success. Doctor-patient rapport is not just a fluffy, feel-good bonus that boosts Yelp reviews, but a component of medical care that has important effects on a patient’s physical health. Particularly as artificial intelligence promises a world where […]
“Students have got to have a good relationship with teachers. Suzanne Dikker of New York University has shown that when classes are going well, the student brain activity synchronizes with the teacher’s brain activity. In good times and bad, good teachers and good students co-regulate each other. The bottom line is this, a defining question […]
While more students are taking precalculus now, the enrollment in Advanced Placement calculus courses has declined by nearly 13 percent over the past two years. Enrollment in AP Statistics, which requires only Algebra II as a prerequisite, has surged nearly 50 percent.”
“It is worth critically examining whether the practice of telling students what they will learn before they learn it equates to the kind of deeper learning that will allow students to thrive in a rapidly changing 21st century job market.”
“I’ll start, as we academics so love to do, with a little bit of theory — specifically, four core principles that can help shape your planning for the first day of your course. Next, I’ll cover the logistics of a successful first day, including managing the space and technology as well as getting to know […]
In 2015, before the new training began, more than half of the kindergartners in the district tested below the benchmark score, meaning most of them were heading into first grade at risk of reading failure. At the end of the 2018 school year, after the science-based training, 84 percent of kindergartners met or exceeded the […]
“Digital Promise and the Institute for Applied Neuroscience have teamed up to synthesize findings from the growing field of learning sciences research into 10 key insights about how people learn, along with suggestions for how to apply this information to classroom practice.”
“First, to high-strung affluent parents, well-compensated counselors, and other members of the elite-admissions industrial complex: Just relax, okay? You are inflicting on American teenagers a ludicrous amount of pointless anxiety. Even if you subscribe to the dubious idea that young people ought to maximize for vocational prestige and income, the research suggests that elite colleges are not […]
“The evidence is clear: Academic excellence is not a strong predictor of career excellence. Across industries, research shows that the correlation between grades and job performance is modest in the first year after college and trivial within a handful of years. For example, at Google, once employees are two or three years out of college, their grades have no bearing on their […]
“So you’re studying the Civil War — or Shakespeare, or evolution, or “The Bluest Eye.” Why? What does it have to do with your life and the lives of those around you? Why should you remember it once you’ve turned in that paper or taken that test?”
“All kids want to play. Kids with disabilities are no different. “Ian” is a short, animated film inspired by the real-life Ian, a boy with a disability determined to get to the playground despite his playmates bullying him. This film sets out to show that children with disabilities can and should be included… “Ian” premiered […]
“A belief in the power of technology is becoming akin to an article of faith among education decision makers and commentators — along with preferences found in progressive pedagogy, like student-driven learning over teacher-driven curriculum, cross-cutting skills over traditional subjects, Google over memorization. But what if introducing more technology, and turning away from traditional ways of teaching, is actually making education… […]
“On the first day of school, my students and I met in the library. Instead of going over a syllabus or introducing course expectations, the librarians and I gave brief book talks, sharing novels we had read or that we knew were well-received by young adults. When I invited my juniors to choose a book […]
“This Working Paper from the National Scientific Council on the Developing Child explains the science behind motivation–the “wanting” system and the “liking” system–as well as how those systems develop, and how that development can be disrupted. It also dives into the implications of the science for parents, caregivers, and teachers, as well as policy and […]
“From 1991 to 2017, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Youth Risk Behavior Survey finds, the percentage of high-school students who’d had intercourse dropped from 54 to 40 percent. In other words, in the space of a generation, sex has gone from something most high-school students have experienced to something most haven’t… Now some observers […]
“How can we encourage and support conversations around controversial topics? How can we tie current events to broader topics and past events without . . . you know, setting stuff on fire and throwing desks?”
“Every year since 2010, the National Association of Scholars surveys the schools that pick books. This year, throughout 481 colleges and universities, they found schools were more likely to pick new books over classics. 67 percent of common reading books assigned were published after 2011, according to NAS.”
“Puns point to the essence of all true wit—the ability to hold in the mind two different ideas about the same thing at the same time. And the pun’s primacy is demonstrated by its strategic use in the oldest sacred stories, texts, and myths.”
“We’re inviting students around the country to create a podcast, then — with the help of a teacher — compete for a chance to win our grand prize and have your work appear on NPR.”
“There’s an incredibly rich scholarship on the history of evidence, which traces its rise in the Middle Ages in the world of law, its migration into historical writing, and then finally into the realm that we’re most familiar with, journalism. That’s a centuries-long migration of an idea that begins in a very particular time and […]
“The story of modern medicine is the story of our human struggle with complexity. Technology will, without question, continually increase our ability to make diagnoses, to peer more deeply inside the body and the brain, to offer more treatments. It will help us document it all—but not necessarily to make sense of it all. Technology […]
“And here’s something that could have been especially relevant to these Times stories: there’s existing research on parental attitudes and successful parenting strategies regarding digital media. You can help your kids learn via digital media, experts say, and use it constructively. You can help manage and moderate their use.”
“Moving Toward Mastery describes a teaching profession that is equity-oriented, learning-centered and lifelong; it recommends 15 strategies that can help school districts successfully make this paradigm shift.”
“The fields of neuroscience, psychology, and cognitive science have unearthed important insights and established agreed-upon models that help explain how learning happens and inform the design of impactful learning environments. Our Designing for Learning resources aim to share these insights and models in a way that supports whole-school design.”
“The midterms are here. Here’s everything you need to know to hit the polls and cast an informed vote this election season.”
“Teachers in the BMTN [Better Math Teaching Network] choose to focus on deepening their students’ abilities in one of three areas: connect, justify and solve. They are grouped with other algebra teachers at schools across New England working on the same skill. They each test small changes in their classrooms, iterate on those changes, and bring […]
“Our purpose in sharing this report is to spur much-needed dialogue about the shift to competency-based education and how that shift can be done in ways that advance equity, ensure teachers have the tools they need, and open up new opportunities for truly effective high school learning. There are no prescriptions here. Instead, we hope […]
K-12 education should prioritize teaching critical thinking, problem solving, and teamwork across subject areas. Teaching students to become analytical thinkers, problem solvers, and good team members will allow them to remain competitive in the job market even as the nature of work changes.”
Taking mathematical ideas seriously might lead to discovering that technical ideas are as important as political or religious ones. Taking mathematics seriously might also, counter to stereotypes, lead thinking away from current preoccupations with culture and power, and back to questions of aesthetics and beauty. Aesthetics and beauty are ever-present concerns in art and in […]
Instead of trying to transform a task to match your style, transform your thinking to match the task. The best strategy for a task is the best strategy, irrespective of what you believe your learning style is.”
“If we are to survive as a nation, then our students must learn that the goal is not to win an argument. The goal is not to define reality according to the terms of one’s beliefs. The goal is to see what is around us and respond wisely.”
“Beginning in the 1960s activists filed federal suits again school systems that tracked minority students… Reformers, leaning on studies done by researchers, worried about school groupings reinforcing inequalities in society by excluding low income students from advanced courses and thereby entry into college. These policymakers (and parents) pressed states and districts to open up Advanced […]
“After almost two decades of its use, we’ve raised an entire generation of students around the notion of test-based accountability, and yet the fruits of that seem…. well, elusive. Where are the waves of students now arriving on college campuses super-prepared?”
“An English teacher has the writing component to teach and also literature, and the ratio is kind of up to the teacher. This teacher, to a phenomenal extent, put emphasis on writing. Of course we read things, but I was in her class for three years, and we were assigned most weeks three pieces of […]
“We have misfiled the significance of drawing because we see it as a professional skill instead of a personal capacity… This essential confusion has stunted our understanding of drawing and kept it from being seen as a tool for learning above all else… Drawing shouldn’t be about performance, but about process. It’s not just for […]
“We need to stop preaching to get rid of public speaking and we need to start preaching for better mental health support and more accessibility alternatives for students who are unable to complete presentations/classwork/etc due to health reasons.”
“Food and Drug Administration on Wednesday gave Juul Labs and four other makers of popular vaping devices 60 days to prove they can keep them away from minors. If they fail, the agency said, it may take the flavored products off the market… According to the agency, more than two million middle and high school […]
“The expectations that the experimenters had in their head actually translated into a whole set of tiny behavior changes… You may be standing farther away from someone you have lower expectations for. You may not be making as much eye contact, and it’s not something you can put your finger on.”
So I’ve combed through about three decades’ worth of research, and I’m going to tell you what it says about best practices in note-taking. Although this is not an exhaustive summary, it hits on some of the most frequently debated questions on the subject.”
“Cycles of interest – there are some ideas that keep recurring in ed tech: the intelligent tutor, personalised learning, the end of universities. Audrey Watters refers to zombie ideas, which just won’t die. Partly this is a result of the aforementioned historical amnesia, and partly it is a result of techno-optimism (“This time it really will work”).”
“Current initiatives to personalize learning in schools, while seen as a contemporary reform, actually continue a 200+ year struggle to provide scalable, mass, public education that also addresses the variable needs of individual learners. Indeed, some of the rhetoric and approaches reformers are touting today sound very familiar in this historical context. What, if anything, […]
With a strong cadre of teacher leaders in place and a professional culture where staff share effective practices across classrooms, teachers constantly explore new ways to meet the needs of their students. Beyond their impact on classroom instruction, these factors have also led to high levels of teacher retention.”
“The most urgent questions students ask as they begin a new school year are, Am I safe? and, Do I belong? Once students feel sure these needs are met, they’ll dive into learning. We can’t take successful communication of these assurances for granted, though. We have to prove them to students every day. What can […]
“Historians are not seers; their analogies may be misplaced and their assessments can be wrong. Yet the idea of history constituting a valuable guide for present and future action was an established part of western culture. This makes sense. After all, the past is our sole repository of information about what works and what does […]
“By making small changes to the design of their organizations and the ways they manage their employees, leaders can encourage curiosity—and improve their companies. This is true in every industry and for creative and routine work alike.”
“Many readers now use an F or Z pattern when reading in which they sample the first line and then word-spot through the rest of the text. When the reading brain skims like this, it reduces time allocated to deep reading processes. In other words, we don’t have time to grasp complexity, to understand another’s […]
“Years ago I spoke with a 16-year-old girl who was considering the idea of having a computer companion in the future, and she described the upside to me. It’s not that the robot she’d imagined, a vastly more sophisticated Siri, was so inspiring. It’s that she’d already found people to be so disappointing. And now, […]
“So often… class discussions become a reflection of existing power relations in society, rather than a tool for dismantling and reorganizing them.”
We make countless choices to change how we interact with our job. Each of these choices influences how we feel about teaching. Psychologists call these choices job crafting. Job crafting, say psychologists Amy Wrzesniewski and Jane E. Dutton, is the actions employees take to redesign their work in order to foster engagement, satisfaction, resilience, and thriving. […]
“The report recommends ways education practitioners and policymakers can support adolescent learning for all students, including historically underserved populations.”
“Our brains aren’t less active when we sleep, as was long thought, just differently active… In sleep labs, when people have been introduced to certain new tasks, mental or physical, their spindle frequency increases that night. The more spindles they have, it seems, the better they perform the task the next day.”
“Approaches that encourage students to use what they know, revisit it over time, mix it up and learn about their own learning are core elements in many current edtech tools… A century of scientific research demonstrates that these features don’t simply increase engagement—they also improve learning, higher order thinking and transfer of knowledge.”
“This kind of diversity, diversity of thought, is the hidden advantage of diversity, because it better enables us to solve complex problems.”
“The senders of the thank-you letters consistently underestimated how positive the recipients felt about receiving the letters and how surprised they were by the content. The senders also overestimated how awkward the recipients felt; and they underestimated how warm, and especially how competent, the recipients perceived them to be.”
“Three studies released this year offer real evidence that good teaching can be passed down, in a sense, from mentor teacher to student teacher. In several cases, they find that the performance of the student teachers once they have their own full-time classrooms corresponds to the quality of the teacher they trained under.”
“I was going through a tough time, and watching his streams gave me an outlet outside of reality where I could just smile and not think about my problems.”
“An announcement from Jeff Sessions, a Harvard lawsuit, changes in the Supreme Court and proposals for selective high schools in New York City. Here’s a rundown of the facts in place, and the latest developments.”
“In a joint statement, they said that they were responding to the diminished utility of AP courses and the desirability of developing our own advanced courses that more effectively address our students’ needs and interests. Collectively, we believe a curriculum oriented toward collaborative, experiential, and interdisciplinary learning will not only better prepare our students for […]
“In this essay, ethicists… argue that the US public schools’ sponsorship of tackle football is ethically indefensible and inconsistent with their educational aims. Their argument relies on three ethical principles and a growing body of evidence that many students who play football suffer traumatic brain injury and cognitive impairment that undermine their academic success and […]
“Vermont’s experiment in experiential learning goes back a number of years, but it took off in 2013, when the legislature passed a law that lets students meet state graduation standards through work-based experiences.”
“Even though these characteristics relate in predictable ways to education, these relationships hold true even when accounting for level of education. Further, there is relatively modest overlap among the groups, meaning that each of these groups is distinct. For example, just 32% of those with high political awareness also have a lot of trust in […]
Because Blockcert credentials can be linked to any blockchain… they can be read and verified anywhere in the world without the need to check with the original issuer.”
“Research has confirmed the basic summary I offered in 2005; using learning-styles theories in the classroom does not bring an advantage to students. But there is one new twist. Researchers have long known that people claim to have learning preferences… THere’s increasing evidence that people act on those beliefs; if given a chance, the visualizer […]
“Cognition happens because of emotion. There’s really no such thing as a thought that doesn’t have an emotion attached to it or that doesn’t have an emotion that follows it. When we take in the world around us, we have an emotional reaction to that appraisal. That emotional reaction changes the way we think in the next […]
“A meta-analysis of more than 40 studies on diversity and inclusion training found that training is effective when it meets these three conditions: 1. the training is complemented by other diversity initiatives. 2. the training targets both awareness and skills development. 3. the training is conducted over a significant period of time.”
“Whether you are designing a completely new learning model or updating your approach as part of ongoing efforts to learn and improve, identifying the outcomes that learners will achieve as a result of their time with you [is a] critical step.”
“When it comes to developing strategy in a rapidly changing world, it’s no longer enough to just make a plan and stick to it; organizations instead need to learn to set a direction and make adaptations to it.”
“At one time, America’s most celebrated citizens trained entirely outside of college, such as Abraham Lincoln, who studied to be a lawyer with the help of local attorney offices. But, as college became the default path to top professions in the 20th century, apprenticeships fell out of favor with America’s upwardly mobile culture. In order […]
Our landscape is overrun with archaic ways of thinking about women, about people of color, about the “other,” about the rich and the poor, about the powerful and the powerless. And these ways of thinking are destroying us. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We will not Little Red Riding hood our way […]
In surveys, specialized teachers said they were less able to tailor instruction for each child (advocates of personalized learning, take note!) and they were much less likely to report an increase in job satisfaction or performance than elementary school teachers who spent all day with their students. It seems that the ostensible benefits of specialization […]
“Our next step is to work together to create a written record for what happened, why, its impact, how the issue was mitigated or resolved, and what we’ll do to prevent the incident from recurring.”
“In the time of #MeToo, the debate about how to handle sexual consent has become louder than ever. Many sexual encounters seem to take place in a so-called gray zone of miscommunication, denial, rationalization and, sometimes, regret. We wanted to explore that complexity when we asked college students for their stories of navigating this gray zone: […]
“In general, higher education institutions have sound and rigorous processes for known, incremental, and precedent-setting change. What they lack is a valued parallel process for true bottom-up experimentation when the outcomes are unknown.”
“Research on failure as a motivator is limited, though the evidence that does exist suggests that students can grow both from learning about the failures of other successful people and from experiencing failure themselves. Crucially, for failure to “work,” research indicates that educators and parents need to encourage students to figure out what went wrong and […]
The source of the trouble is that when people are judged by performance metrics they are incentivised to do what the metrics measure, and what the metrics measure will be some established goal. But that impedes innovation, which means doing something not yet established, indeed that hasn’t even been tried out. Innovation involves experimentation. And […]
“What I mean by my above claim is that knowledge work management cannot stop at the boundary of the black box: providing workers only shared objectives and the tools/information needed to act on these objectives. It must also consider what occurs inside the box — setting up cultures, workflows, and environments optimized to help the […]
“The bottom line is that policymakers and advocates who have pushed for more testing in part as a way to narrow the gap between rich and poor have undermined their own efforts. They have created a system that incentivizes teachers to withhold the very thing that could accomplish both objectives: knowledge. All students suffer under […]
Instead of teaching to learning styles, create lessons by asking, “How can I best help students grasp the meaning of the material?” That means if you want kids to understand what a French accent sounds like, you’d have them listen to a recording. If you’re trying to have them understand maps, you’d give them an […]
“These findings are clear: if you start on the decoding before you have an underlying understanding of story, experience, sensation and emotion, then you become a worse reader. And you like it less. Treat kids like robots during early learning and you put them off for life.”
“Policies aimed at standardizing classroom practice seldom produce homogeneous lessons.”
“K–12 teachers, I will argue, have little use for psychological theory, but could benefit from knowing the observations—developmental patterns and consistencies in children’s cognition, motivation, and emotion. Such knowledge roughly equates to “understanding children.””
Why don’t we tell our kids the truth about success? We could start with the fact that only a third of adults hold degrees from four-year colleges. Or that you’ll do equally well in terms of income, job satisfaction and life satisfactionwhether you go to an elite private college or a less-selective state university.”
“Across the country, citizen-led efforts are underway that attempt to bridge the divides created or unearthed by the… presidential election. These efforts are admirable. Done wrong, however, these efforts have the potential to compound our political problems rather than ameliorate them. Profound philosophical divides with deep historical roots exist across the country about the role […]
“If we understand that most in tech mean well, but lack the historic or cultural context to ensure that their impact is as good as their intentions, we can ensure that they get the knowledge they need to prevent harm before it happens.”
“I haven’t put grades on student work since I started teaching as instructor of record in 2001… none of the institutions where I’ve worked (including R1s, community colleges, liberal arts colleges) has entirely dictated how I had to approach assessment—at every single one there was sufficient wiggle room for experimentation.”
Out went the plastic playhouses and in came the dicey stuff: stacks of two-by-fours, crates and loose bricks. The schoolyard got a mud pit, a tire swing, log stumps and workbenches with hammers and saws… Now, Ms. Morris says proudly, “we have fires, we use knives, saws, different tools,” all used under adult supervision.”
“The benefits of reading aloud to students have been known for decades. A landmark report called ‘Becoming a Nation of Readers’ identified listening as ‘the single most important activity for building the knowledge required for eventual success in reading.’”
“No matter what worldview or way of knowing someone holds dear, they always believe that they are engaging in critical thinking when they’re developing a sense of right and wrong… Much of what they conclude may be rooted in the way of knowing more than any specific source of information. That’s true for all of […]
These kids aren’t prodigiously gifted. They’ve just had the gift of the kind of education we no longer value.”
A sense of safety and security in childhood is integrally tied to mental and physical health later in life—as well as emotional wellbeing, and the formation of the coping mechanisms that allow a person to deal with later adversity in ways that do not involve killing. It is this sense that can be undermined sometimes […]
Consider that holy grail of learning outcomes, critical thinking… Teaching it is not a cheap or efficient process. It does not come from… emphasizing short, quantifiable, standardized assignments at the expense of meandering, creative and difficult investigation. Producing thoughtful, talented graduates is not a matter of focusing on market-ready skills. It’s about giving students an […]
Some years ago, Dan Meyer pioneered and promoted a structure of math lessons based on three “acts” that fit together in a way that gave lessons a momentum and rhythm in the way that three act structure in film gives films (or TV shows or whatever) a structure and a rhythm… [In media literacy] we […]
Today’s cult of convenience fails to acknowledge that difficulty is a constitutive feature of human experience. Convenience is all destination and no journey. But climbing a mountain is different from taking the tram to the top, even if you end up at the same place… We need to consciously embrace the inconvenient — not always, […]
Subjects who invented an analogous problem were more likely to successfully solve the radiation problem compared to subjects not asked to invent a problem… it’s a technique that prompts people to focus attention on the deep structure, just as comparison does.”
Filling out surveys isn’t something you can always do, so it came to my mind that maybe there could be an easier way to give feedback, and to send the data directly to people who are interested in the results… We saw that, if you make it easy, people will give feedback every day, even […]
How many students chose slavery as the reason the South seceded? Eight percent… Textbooks and teachers tend to accentuate the positive, focusing on heroes like Harriet Tubman or Frederick Douglass without also giving students the full, painful context of slavery.”
To participate, students had to complete three tasks: 1. Do a personal 24- to 48-hour news audit in which you record all the news you get now, where it comes from and how well it meets your needs and interests. 2. Change your “news diet” to make it better meet your needs. Tinker with sources, […]
A conceptual failure lies at the heart of ed reform’s underperformance: the mistaken assumption that education policy, not classroom practice, is the most important lever to pull to drive enduring improvement. But educational failure is not a tale of unaccountable and union-protected layabouts refusing to do right by children. More often than not, it’s well-intended […]
“Randomly think of a thing. Let it bump around your head a bit. If the bumping gets too loud, start writing the words with the nearest writing device. See how far you get. The more words usually mean a higher degree of personal interest. Stop when it suits you. Wait for time to pass and […]
Rather than trying to minimize screen time, I think parents and teachers should try to maximize creative time. The focus shouldn’t be on which technologies children are using, but rather what children are doing with them. Some uses of new technologies foster creative thinking; others restrict it. The same is true for older technologies. Rather […]
Our research has repeatedly shown a concrete link between having a best friend at work and the amount of effort employees expend in their job. For example, women who strongly agree they have a best friend at work are more than twice as likely to be engaged (63%) compared with the women who say otherwise […]
Such experience, it is argued, will help students by giving them a leg up in their careers and making them more useful people. And although that may often prove true in the short term, I am convinced it is not reliably the case when we consider a longer time frame — particularly for students in […]
From 2005 to 2015, the share of US schools offering major Western languages like Spanish and German fell. Chinese has overtaken Latin. And the “other” category—comprising Arabic, Japanese, and plenty of others—nearly caught up to French.”
Reflexive feedback conversations involve both parties in talking, listening, reflecting, and taking action. The idea of reflexivity, which comes from the social sciences, suggests a two-way street—a feedback relationship that runs in both directions. Leaders who use reflexive feedback are more effective at changing teacher practice because they’re willing and able change things other than the teacher, in […]
Safety is not a single static state; it is a capacity. A safe school is not an absolute, it is an approach and a practice. We must practice the ability to assess risk and make a sensible choice. Practice the perception of danger and the possible alternatives. Practice acting swiftly in some circumstances and behaving […]
When we say we are thinking, what we are actually doing is rearranging causal relations with past events, objects that we have encountered before, to see what happens when we combine them.”
He spent hours with me that day demystifying the test-taking and application process and sharing study tools that I still find useful. He taught me the tricks to multiple-choice, and how to strategically answer math questions that I didn’t recognize. He walked me through my difficulties with subject-verb agreements and showed me how to “hack” […]
In general, when people spend a lot of time passively consuming information — reading but not interacting with people — they report feeling worse afterward… On the other hand, actively interacting with people — especially sharing messages, posts and comments with close friends and reminiscing about past interactions — is linked to improvements in well-being… […]
A 2008 study found that sustained intense interests, particularly in a conceptual domain like dinosaurs, can help children develop increased knowledge and persistence, a better attention span, and deeper information-processing skills.”
But as Kate Lacey notes, active/passive does not work as a simple binary, but as a fractal distinction, where what counts as ‘active’ shifts with context: listening is active in contrast to hearing, but listening counts as passive in relation to speaking, and both listening and speaking count as passive in relation to movement.”
In ancient Athens, isegoria described the equal right of citizens to participate in public debate in the democratic assembly; parrhesia, the license to say what one pleased, how and when one pleased, and to whom.”
Current education practices show that reading comprehension is misunderstood. It’s treated like a general skill that can be applied with equal success to all texts. Rather, comprehension is intimately intertwined with knowledge. That suggests three significant changes in schooling… Third, the systematic building of knowledge must be a priority in curriculum design.”
Kongphan sat down in front of an array of four computer monitors and clicked a button to alert his followers that he was about to start streaming. Fans surged in, filling the chat window with emotes—small, emoji-like images that are Twitch’s preferred mode of expression… Kongphan put on a gaming headset and leaned in to […]
“Independent bookstores have been steadily expanding for several years. Vinyl records have witnessed a decade-long boom in popularity (more than 200,000 newly pressed records are sold each week in the United States), while sales of instant-film cameras, paper notebooks, board games and Broadway tickets are all growing again… We do not face a simple choice […]
I had read many accounts of individual faculty members… but in mid-August, I discovered Starr Sackstein’s book Hacking Assessment: 10 Ways to Go Gradeless in a Traditional Grades School, which gave me some cover in case students or administrators challenged this.”
A 2015 Journal of Experimental Psychology study found that when people’s phones beep or buzz while they’re in the middle of a challenging task, their focus wavers, and their work gets sloppier — whether they check the phone or not. Another 2015 study, appearing in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, showed that when people hear […]
If no one ever argues, you’re not likely to give up on old ways of doing things, let alone try new ones. Disagreement is the antidote to groupthink. We’re at our most imaginative when we’re out of sync. There’s no better time than childhood to learn how to dish it out — and to take […]
I’d never read an “Odyssey” that sounded like this. It had such directness, the lines feeling not as if they were being fed into iambic pentameter because of some strategic decision but because the meter was a natural mode for its speaker.”
There’s no magic formula for getting into a selective college, but over a decade covering admissions for The Chronicle of Higher Education, I’ve picked up a thing or two. These takeaways, based on hundreds of interviews with admissions deans over the years, may help you navigate the process.”
A high GPA reflects skills like being prompt, working really hard, following directions, and being well rounded, all important skills for high-level careers.”
The confusion over the purpose of the humanities has nothing to do with their relevance. The humanities are no more or less relevant now than they ever were. It is not the humanities that we have lost faith in, but the economic, political, and social order that they have been made to serve.”
“I built these pieces as a way of introducing or reinforcing students’ ideas on motion and acceleration, inertia and kinetic energy, so let’s take a look at some of them… This piece I refer to as a Galileo Track… This piece was important because it was actually a piece that Galileo designed to help explain […]
“[The] goal is to provide a review of the scientific evidence base for Montessori education, with the dual aspirations of stimulating future research and helping teachers to better understand whether and why Montessori education might be effective.… two important aspects of Montessori’s educational method are the learning materials, and the self-directed nature of children’s engagement […]
What seems innate and shared between humans and other animals is not this sense that the differences between 2 and 3 and between 152 and 153 are equivalent (a notion central to the concept of number) but, rather, a distinction based on relative difference, which relates to the ratio of the two quantities. It seems […]
The fact checkers read laterally, meaning they would quickly scan a website in question but then open a series of additional browser tabs, seeking context and perspective from other sites. In contrast, the authors write, historians and students read vertically, meaning they would stay within the original website in question to evaluate its reliability.”
We are certainly obsessed with innovation — there’s this rather nebulously defined yet insistent demand that we all somehow do more of it and sooner… We should question this myth of the speed of technological change and adoption (and by myth I don’t mean lie; I mean story that is unassailably true) if it’s going […]
After 2012, questions of methodology started dominating every social-psychology conference, as did the topic of replications. Across disciplines, a basic scientific principle is that multiple teams should independently verify a result before it is accepted as true. But for the majority of social-psychology results, even the most influential ones, this hadn’t happened… in the years […]
The more she looked for explanations, the more she kept returning to two seemingly unrelated trend lines — depression in teenagers and smartphone adoption. (There is significantly more data about depression than anxiety.) Since 2011, the trend lines increased at essentially the same rate. In her recent book “iGen,” and in an article in The […]
This type of project reflects the best intentions of the Next Generation Science Standards, which encourage teachers to enable students to learn science by doing… Each lesson should combine “practices,” or the behaviors of real scientists and engineers; “cross-cutting concepts,” which clarify connections across science disciplines and help students create a coherent view of the […]
The modern history of diversity began on June 28, 1978. That was the day the Supreme Court decided a case brought by Allan Bakke, a white military veteran who had applied to medical school at the University of California, Davis… The Court’s decision was not particularly decisive—there were six separate opinions.”
Designers, programmers and tech entrepreneurs from across the world gathered at a conference centre on the shore of the San Francisco Bay. They had each paid up to $1,700 to learn how to manipulate people into habitual use of their products, on a course curated by conference organiser Nir Eyal… [Attendees] might have been surprised […]
In other words, to disagree well you must first understand well. You have to read deeply, listen carefully, watch closely. You need to grant your adversary moral respect; give him the intellectual benefit of doubt; have sympathy for his motives and participate empathically with his line of reasoning. And you need to allow for the […]
To take just one example, adults aged 45 years or older who sleep less than six hours a night are 200% more likely to have a heart attack or stroke in their lifetime, as compared with those sleeping seven or eight hours a night.”
Teams that follow an inclusive process make decisions 2X faster with 1/2 the meetings. Decisions made and executed by diverse teams delivered 60% better results.”
Where officials stood during this exercise seemed to depend largely on what type of institution they were from.”
Teachers know the importance of human observations, face-to-face conversations and critical reflections in making sense of what goes on in classrooms. Standardized tests or opinion surveys may help to identify some general trends, but they are not able to reveal deeper secrets of pedagogy. Therefore, small data can be a good tool to find out […]
Part of the problem, Loladze was finding, lay in the research world itself. Answering the question required an understanding of plant physiology, agriculture and nutrition―as well as a healthy dollop of math.”
And so, one of the benefits of having a teacher who has a more global view of the subject is that they can push you and direct you in ways that keep your brain in the red zone. That’s one aspect I think where teachers are super valuable. I’m not sure it’s even possible for […]
Today, we write back. We thank them for looking at our projects and ask for more details about what they mean when they say “safety net.” We try to answer their questions about our thoughts on the “Muslim ban.””
The curriculum changes, hammered out in just three months by the college’s faculty, will abolish traditional academic departments and instead align professors in three groups, one focusing on engineering, science, and technology, another on the environment and sustainability, and the third on creativity and the arts.”
The Monitoring the Future survey, funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse and designed to be nationally representative, has asked 12th-graders more than 1,000 questions every year since 1975 and queried eighth- and 10th-graders since 1991. The survey asks teens how happy they are and also how much of their leisure time they spend […]
The brilliance of what happened in Louisiana is they didn’t make a single choice for any school district in the state. They simply provided good information, training, and incentives.”
This past fall, Miami University became the first Division 1 school to have a varsity e-sports team, and Platt said a game last semester had more streaming viewers the school’s football, basketball and hockey matches throughout the entire year. The Guardian even reports the possibility that e-sports will be included in the 2024 Paris Olympics… […]
“To find your people, you have to know how to signal your passions and interests and seek out theirs. But you can also search Google, or scan LinkedIn profiles and send “Connect with Me” notices. You can tweet links about what you’re interested in, or leave comments on an Instagram feed. Here is a brief taxonomy that identifies five […]
Thinking for yourself means questioning dominant ideas even when others insist on their being treated as unquestionable. It means deciding what one believes not by conforming to fashionable opinions, but by taking the trouble to learn and honestly consider the strongest arguments to be advanced on both or all sides of questions—including arguments for positions […]
The truth is that memorizing and reciting poetry can be a highly expressive act. And we need not return to the Victorians’ narrow idea of the canon to reclaim poetry as one of the cheapest, most durable tools of moral and emotional education — whether you go in for Virgil, Li Po, Rumi or Gwendolyn […]
“What are your values as a person? What are American values? Do you think the country is living up to those values today? Why or why not?”… I wrote to dozens of teenagers — young people I’d met at protests, young Republicans I’d talked to around Election Day, teenagers who were already vlogging about their […]
Ever since I can remember, I’ve been told to strive for balance. Yet I’ve noticed something interesting: The times in my life during which I’ve felt happiest and most alive are also the times that I’ve been the most unbalanced… I think far better than striving for balance is striving for what psychologists call internal […]
Further analysis revealed that having a caring adult at school is linked to a greater likelihood of self-reported excellent grades at school, and this relationship is strongest for high school students.”
What I never imagined was that these kids would end up teaching me more than I could ever teach them. And it’s good that I never imagined that, because it hasn’t happened at all… I am an unstoppable teaching machine, whereas my students are like a different kind of machine that just happens to do […]
Approach it the right way, and it won’t rule your life — it can even be good for you. Here are ways to deal with stress, reduce its harm and even use your daily stress to make you stronger.”
Educators: Be thinking now about how to engage students in critical discussions about white supremacy. Check out #CharlottesvilleCurriculum”
Mental health experts and parents discussed their experiences Saturday, and shared advice for talking to children about the violence in Charlottesville. Here are their tips:”
Psychological safety is built on mutual respect and acceptance, but unfortunately our culture of shaming and misrepresentation is disrespectful and unaccepting of anyone outside its echo chamber. Despite what the public response seems to have been, I’ve gotten many personal messages from fellow Googlers expressing their gratitude for bringing up these very important issues which […]
At every level, students benefit from clear feedback on their writing, and from seeing and trying to imitate what successful writing looks like, the so-called text models. Some of the touchy-feel stuff matters, too. Students with higher confidence in their writing ability perform better. All of this points toward a synthesis of the two approaches. […]
The quest for knowledge is best driven by intense curiosity rather than utility. It requires not only structure but also passion. And as Flexner pointed out, what seems useless today frequently turns out to be exactly what one needs tomorrow. Education is the same. Of course education provides career skills, but like research, it is […]
Follow the shadow of the moon as it completely blocks out the sun on Aug. 21, moving along a 3,000-mile path from Oregon’s Pacific coast to the eastern shore of South Carolina.”
“It was Christmas 1914 on the Western Front. Despite strict orders not to chillax with the enemy, British and German soldiers left their trenches, crossed No Man’s Land, and gathered to bury their dead, exchange gifts, and play games. Meanwhile: it’s 2017, the West has been at peace for decades, and wow, we suck at […]
“We just published the biography of Dr. Claude Shannon… We’ve distilled what we’ve learned from him over these last few years into this piece. It isn’t a comprehensive list by any means, but it does begin, we hope, to reveal what this unknown genius can teach the rest of us about thinking — and living.”
The feeling we call “empathy” has shifted dramatically over the last century from a description of an aesthetic response, to a moral and political aspiration, to a clinical skill, and today, to the firing of neurons. Returning to empathy’s roots—to once again think about the potential for “in-feeling” with a work of art, a mountain, […]
After Matt Doyle, Vista’s acting superintendent, helped interview more than 2,000 middle- and high-school students about their school experiences and dumped all of his interview notes into a software program that identifies the most frequently mentioned words, one word rose to the surface: “irrelevant.””
For EdTech decision-makers: 1) Beware of living in an echo-chamber: talk to people outside of higher education. 2) Make sure decisions are being led by clearly identifiable pedagogical needs rather than simply by what technology is out there. 3) Involve stakeholders, including faculty, staff, and students early in the decision-making process to build buy-in and […]
The debate started when Peter Bone, a Conservative MP, enquired as to why a tie-less MP had been allowed to ask a question the previous day. In days gone by, this would have been viewed as an impertinent… Watch the video above to see John Bercow, the Speaker of Britain’s House of Commons, wrangle with […]
I would now suggest that hard skills are really temporary skills. They come and go according to the economy and the state of technology. Today, we need very few people who know how to shoe a horse. Soft skills are permanent ones.”
I felt that the best way to build an innovative but successful design was to start with an ambitious set of new ideas, and then to gradually build and test these ideas through successive refinement — first by creating a simple prototype, and then by building up the real product one aspect at a time. At each […]
Before the Internet, you’d have yawning summer afternoons when you’d flop down on one couch, then flop down on another, then decide to craft a fake F.B.I. card. You’d get some paper from your dad’s office, copy the F.B.I. logo and your signature, laminate it with Scotch tape, put it in your wallet, take it […]
Writing well used to be a fundamental principle of the humanities, as essential as the knowledge of mathematics and statistics in the sciences. But writing well isn’t merely a utilitarian skill. It is about developing a rational grace and energy in your conversation with the world around you. No one has found a way to […]
“Being well-read is a transcendent achievement similar to training to run 26.2 miles, then showing up for a marathon in New York City and finding 50,000 people there. It is at once superhuman and pedestrian… There are only so many hours in a day, but the most common workaround for devoted readers is surprisingly uninventive. […]
Equipped with these devices, we’re both here and somewhere else at the same time, joined to everything at once yet never fully anywhere at all. The individual networked in this way is no longer the autonomous subject enshrined in liberal theory, not precisely. Our very selfhood is smeared out across a global mesh of nodes […]
We want to learn a new language. We could decide we want to be fluent in 6 months (goal), or we could commit to 30-minutes of practice each day (habit). We want to read more books. We could set the goal to read 50 books by the end of the year, or we could decide […]
Much like colleges and universities, costs at independent schools have grown as they provide more services and amenities. Micro-schools seek to trim expenses in ways easier to do as a smaller, nimbler operation. They may rent a storefront, for example, rather than maintain a campus. They can hire fewer faculty who would wear more hats, […]
The description for the official Facebook group for the Class of 2021, set up and maintained by the Admissions Office, disclaims all administrative responsibility for “unofficial groups” and warns members their admissions offers can be rescinded under specific circumstances. “As a reminder, Harvard College reserves the right to withdraw an offer of admission under various […]
Participants say the ceremonies are a way of celebrating their shared experience as a group, and not a rejection of official college graduations, which they also attend. Depending on one’s point of view, the ceremonies may also be reinforcing an image of the 21st-century campus as an incubator for identity politics.”
Our mental space stands in direct proportion to our perception of physical space.”
In fact, of the approximately 86 daily changes in an employee’s work activity, the workers themselves generated 65 of them internally, with the vast majority involving “checking in” with no obvious external alert or notification. Even without the “You’ve Got Mail” notification, these workers checked their email anyway and continued to check other sources of […]
“3. Many students have a best friend at school, but few get to do what they do best every day. 4. Getting to do what they do best drives high school students’ perception of success at school.”
His theory may explain the ineffable mind-states that poetry creates in us: poetic experience as the interaction of barely perceptible mental processes whose delicate, scintillating play is usually washed out by the spotlight of conscious attention.”
The idea here is that we should use data as information, not as insight. Put another way, it’s not about the ingredients, it’s about the cook.”
Kids who look up the quadratic equation may end up like the child who looked up “meticulous”; they have a definition, but they don’t have the background knowledge to use it correctly. Students should learn not only the formula but also why it works and how it connects to other math content. That’s how contextual […]
The truth, I recently learned, was that not all service is created equal… But I was taught all work is noble, especially the work we do for others. Slowly, my mother’s gingham apron began to look more like metal armor. I learned how to worship my parents’ gift for attentive listening, easily hearing the things […]
Similar to arguments in law, but unlike those in mathematics, scientific arguments may not need to be perfect for them to be successful. What’s more important is clearly communicating the relationship between an argument and the evidence.”
I’m working on a quarter that is going to happen in 2020, not next quarter. Next quarter, for all practical purposes, is done already and it’s probably been done for a couple of years, and so if you start to think that way it changes how you spend your time, how you plan, where you […]
The happiness of adulthood is not as intoxicating as the rapture of youth, but is perhaps more valuable because it is not narcissistic and thus can be truly shared. After doing the dishes, my fiancee and I sit on the couch with nothing but the Christmas lights on, listening to the sound of cars of […]
By celebrating the inclusion of insiders — people of different genders and races who have been pre-assimilated into Silicon Valley via Harvard or Georgetown or Stanford — the industry misdirects attention from the inclusion of actual outsiders. We don’t change much by publicizing that we have hired people that we would have hired anyway… You’re a woman who went […]
A thick institution is not one that people use instrumentally, to get a degree or to earn a salary. A thick institution becomes part of a person’s identity and engages the whole person: head, hands, heart and soul.”
Behavioral science has identified four discrete accountability mechanisms: evaluation, identifiability, reason-giving, and the mere presence of another. Good professional accountability practices will employ all four behavioral mechanisms, though in various ways. Consider the practice of medicine: Doctors must pass a series of exams to be certified for practice (evaluation); board certifications for specializations are publicly […]
The first finding [is] regarding feedback. Butler examined 3 types of feedback: scores alone, comments alone, and scores with comments. Her study showed that scores alone made students either complacent or unmotivated depending on how well they did. Scores with comments were just as ineffective in that students focused entirely on the score and ignored […]
The author is sacred, singular, reified. There is something monotheistic about this idea of the single author-creator; there is something of the primacy of the individual one may see in Caspar David Friedrich’s paintings. We write our own work, of course, but writing, and art more broadly, is often collaborative at some level: our all-too-often-unacknowledged […]
Just as children are drilled on the scientific method — turn observations into a hypothesis, design a control group, do an experiment to test your theory — the basics of working with computers is being cast as a teachable blueprint.”
We must be more critical about the stories we tell and we’re told about the future of education. Indeed, we need to look at histories of the future and ask why certain people have wanted the future to take a certain shape, why certain technologies (and their stories) have been so compelling.”
What skills do you need to be a successful adult? It turns out there are roughly 25, if you review the relevant literature. Which of these skills do schools regularly teach? Just three, as we found in a recent study… And that was in nine of the highest-rated secondary schools in Massachusetts.”
It is largely an umbrella term that overlaps with other education concepts—such as adaptive learning, differentiated instruction, competency-based education, and learning analytics. The Data & Society Research Institute offers a schematic for unpacking this range of genres and terms.”
When you have a mechanism in place to screen out all of the students with the biggest disadvantages, you end up with an impressive-looking set of alumni. The admissions procedures at these schools don’t determine which students get the benefit of a better education; the perception of a better education is itself an artifact of […]
“Love is never easy to express… But you can do it. The first step is: Imitate. Google “great love poems” and find one you like a lot and copy and paste it onto a blank page — Burns’s “My love is like a red, red rose” or Stevenson’s “I will make you brooches and toys […]
My sons are avid soccer players, so I spend a lot of time watching the “beautiful game.” The thing that makes it beautiful is not leadership, though an excellent coach is essential. Nor is it the swoosh of the ball in the goal, though winning is noisily celebrated. It is instead the intricate ballet of […]
Stanford bioengineers have shown how an off-the shelf kit can be modified to create robotic systems capable of transferring precise amounts of fluids between flasks, test tubes and experimental dishes. By combining the Lego Mindstorms robotics kit with a cheap and easy-to-find plastic syringe, the researchers created a set of liquid-handling robots that approach the […]
The trend has been building for a decade, with no clear understanding as to why. Some experts theorize that falling cigarette-smoking rates are cutting into a key gateway to drugs, or that antidrug education campaigns, long a largely failed enterprise, have finally taken hold. But researchers are starting to ponder an intriguing question: Are teenagers […]
When I walked out of class after discovering Kate’s surreptitious phone scanning, the questions I asked myself were about her, or about my ability to control her behavior: Why can’t she focus in class? How can I keep students away from their distracting devices in class? But when I reconsidered the experience through the lens […]
“When a student is brilliant on the street corner but falling asleep in class, something is wrong with the schooling system.”
There is an adage in educational research that says all models are flawed but some are useful. This is true of Bloom’s Taxonomy… Still, there is value in the taxonomy. If it serves to remind teachers to always strive to build units of instruction to include the skills of analyzing, evaluating, and creating then the […]
Deliberate practice involves the pursuit of personal improvement via well-defined, specific goals and targeted areas of expertise. It requires a teacher or coach who has demonstrated an ability to help others improve the desired area of expertise—say chess, ballet, or music—and who can give continuous feedback. It also requires constantly practicing outside of one’s comfort […]
Professors retain a central role, but Wieman sees them more like athletic coaches, putting students through strenuous, targeted practice while giving immediate feedback and direction based on performance. By confronting the problems first, the audience is more invested — and prepared — to hear what the professor has to say. ‘If you experience the condition of the problem, you’ll […]
if we’re realistic, we’ll know that even when a particular instructional method has been studied under controlled conditions, found to be effective, and labeled best practice, none of that matters if students won’t do the work. Teachers in the real world recognize that although personalization has the potential to improve learning, our first job in […]
With MicroMasters programs, we are helping to bridge the knowledge gap between higher education and the workplace by offering content and credentials in the most in-demand fields and skills needed for success in today’s rapidly-evolving and tech-driven world. These credit-eligible, career-relevant programs are free to try, and can help advance careers and offer a pathway […]
Student’s Daily Home Assignment: 1. Read just-right books every night — (and have your parents read to you too). 2. Get outside and play — that does not mean more screen time. 3. Eat dinner with your family — and help out with setting and cleaning up. 4. Get a good night’s sleep.”
Apart from the four-letter words, “The Martian” is a science teacher’s dream text. It’s a gripping survival story that hinges on the hero’s ability to solve a series of complex problems, using his knowledge of physics, chemistry, astronomy and math, in order to stay alive on a hostile planet. (The Washington Post called the novel […]
The following lists for each of the major content areas, although not comprehensive, can act as starting points through which communities of teachers can begin to think in terms of disciplinary literacy.”
Sleep deprivation is so strongly linked to disease and premature death. One recent study even showed that sleep deprivation in mice can cause death faster than starvation can.”
Apollo is a semester-long, four-hour block of classes—English, social studies, and art—all blended together and co-taught by three teachers, one from each subject area. Throughout the semester, students are responsible for designing and completing four major projects, each of which is aligned with standards in all three subject areas. Students set their own goals for […]
Creativity and innovation are driven by imagination, and imagination withers when it is standardized, which is exactly what digital technology requires—codifying everything into 1s and 0s, within the accepted limits of software… Like all respectable commentators, Sax takes pains to assure us that he’s not a Luddite; the correct and responsible deity is Balance, blandest […]
To illuminate current attitudes about the potential impacts of algorithms in the next decade, Pew Research Center and Elon University’s Imagining the Internet Center conducted a large-scale canvassing of technology experts, scholars, corporate practitioners and government leaders. Some 1,302 responded to this question about what will happen in the next decade: Will the net overall […]
Creativity is in many ways situational, not some inborn faculty or personality trait. When people face scarcity, they give themselves freedom to use resources in less conventional ways—because they have to. The situation demands a mental license that would otherwise remain untapped. Seen in this light, resource abundance can actually be counterproductive. Our problems, challenges, […]
Emotional self-regulation is a complex function, and as we’ve long known in psychotherapy, trying to willfully manage your emotional states through brute force alone is bound to fail. Instead, regulating emotions also includes skills such as shifting attention (distracting yourself ), modulating your physiological response (taking deep breaths), being able to tolerate and wait out […]
Recent research shows that reading comprehension, deep thinking, and even creativity all rely heavily on prior knowledge. Although you can find a thousand articles claiming that knowledge is essentially irrelevant nowadays—that mere facts are not worth teaching in the age of Google, when anyone can look up anything at any time—in fact, cognitive scientists now […]
He and his colleagues asked sedentary men and women to complete three 20-second intervals on a stationary bicycle, pedaling as hard as they could manage, with two minutes of gentle, slow pedaling between each interval. This was the one-minute workout. After six weeks of performing three of these sessions per week, for a total of […]
To holistically prepare this new generation for life in an open society, what’s needed is a new model for high-school civics; one that integrates American history and government, critical thinking, media literacy, and digital literacy. The goal of such education should not be merely to instill understanding of our online civic landscape, but how to […]
In recent years, a new way of quantifying and visualising populations has emerged that potentially pushes statistics to the margins, ushering in a different era altogether. Statistics, collected and compiled by technical experts, are giving way to data that accumulates by default, as a consequence of sweeping digitisation… In the long term, the implications of […]
Today, Iceland tops the European table for the cleanest-living teens. The percentage of 15- and 16-year-olds who had been drunk in the previous month plummeted from 42 percent in 1998 to 5 percent in 2016. The percentage who have ever used cannabis is down from 17 percent to 7 percent. Those smoking cigarettes every day […]
There is a qualitative and quantitative difference between a day that begins with a little exercise, a book, meditation, a good meal, a thoughtful walk, and the start of a day that begins with a smartphone in bed.”
Historical context gives mathematics (and mathematicians, dare I say) a rich personality that is all too often lost in formal study. It reveals the human side of mathematics; the pain and ecstasy of pursuing new mathematical frontiers. It normalises struggle and perseverance as traits of the common mathematician. It snips away the binary view that […]
In the United States, we’re moving towards tribalism, and we’re undoing the social fabric of our country through polarization, distrust, and self-segregation… We cannot fall back on standard educational approaches because the societal context has shifted. We also cannot simply assume that information intermediaries can fix the problem for us, whether they be traditional news […]
Historically, creativity has been portrayed as a mysterious, elusive force—a gift from the gods or the muses. Creativity can’t be summoned, the thinking goes, let alone taught to the mentally inflexible, unimaginative, muse-less masses. Design thinking upends that perception and assumes that anyone can be a creative problem-solver.”
This utilitarian narrowness plagues the American pedagogical conversation, and our persistent promotion of so-called 21st-century skills has made the problem worse… Instead of interrogating the assumption that the demands of the marketplace should drive educational practice, we have rushed to impose new economic models — global, 21st-century ones — on our classrooms. Many educational progressives […]
Extracurriculars, our work suggests, tend to differ from core classes in a number of important ways. They are voluntary rather than mandatory; they often involve work that is undertaken collectively rather than individually; they feature opportunities for peer leadership and peer-to-peer learning; they involve dimensions of playfulness; and they are aligned to activities that are […]
As we started our yearlong study, the evidence began piling up. Our research team found amazing changes were happening. Students were now awake the first hour of class, the principal reported fewer disciplinary incidents in the halls and lunchroom, and students reported less depression and feelings of greater efficacy. Over 92% of the parents said […]
How many more studies will it take? We know that readers vote more and volunteer more, and that reading literature deepens empathy. And — as finally, categorically demonstrated in a landmark Yale study last year — that readers live longer. Control for any variable, for income, for ZIP code, for anything you please, and proficient […]
Many of the discussions about “personalized learning” insist that technology is necessary for “personalization,” often invoking stereotypes of whole class instruction and denying the myriad of ways that teachers have long tailored what they do in the classroom to the individual students in it. Teachers look for interpersonal cues; they walk around the classroom and […]
To whip up revolutionary fervor, Ben Franklin himself concocted propaganda stories about murderous “scalping” Indians working in league with the British King George III. Other revolutionary leaders published fake propaganda stories that King George was sending thousands of foreign soldiers to slaughter the American patriots and turn the tide of the War of Independence to […]
The research asked teachers to complete a survey at the end of eight weeks – capturing their feelings before, during and after the Christmas break in 2013. It found that teachers who continued to worry about work during their holidays were less likely to recover from the demands of the term, while those who satisfied […]
“It’s an uncommon story in many ways, not least of all because it defies many of the Silicon Valley stereotypes we’ve grown accustomed to. It does not feature people who think that everything will be unrecognizably different tomorrow or the next day because of some restless tinkerer in his garage. It is neither a story […]
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 […]
It is one thing to be presented with a set of skills and strategies to make us more discerning and critical. It is another, more important thing, to care about the truth at all, to care more about the truth than about being right. In short, the business of teaching media literacy or critical thinking […]
Most of our communication technologies began as substitutes for an impossible activity. We couldn’t always see one another face to face, so the telephone made it possible to keep in touch at a distance… Online communication originated as a substitute for telephonic communication, which was considered, for whatever reasons, too burdensome or inconvenient. And then […]
The technical mastery I’d achieved during my studies had stripped away much of my expressivity, and I was no longer convinced that I had anything worthwhile to say. Without the belief that I was of use to the world or that my voice mattered uniquely, I lost my ambition. I became disillusioned and resentful of […]
In Ericsson’s formulation, deliberate practice has several components: evaluating what needs improvement, selecting one small aspect of the skill to work on, developing a strategy, and then evaluating the results of the revised performance… The mere distinction between experience and deliberate practice can help guide educators in imparting certain skills. For example, many schools want […]
Perhaps it’s time to ask why – why this is the ritual and the story that education continues to turn to? …Why are we in this fog of educational make-believe? Why are we so wrapped up in the magical thinking and wishful thinking of education technology? What do we hope the practices of ed-tech will […]
Importantly, they are designing a digital environment that mimics something a teacher can do in a classroom yet many tech products fail to do – provide personalized coaching. For students who seem to display low confidence, they encourage them by showing them their past successes. For students who seem to have low self-regulation (e.g. they […]
The results of a survey taken by more than 10,000 educators following Donald Trump’s election and a divisive campaign that targeted racial, ethnic and religious minorities… described an increase in the use of slurs and derogatory language, along with disturbing incidents involving swastikas, Nazi salutes and Confederate flags. The report also cited more than 2,500 […]
The students who exerted more self-control were not more successful in accomplishing their goals. It was the students who experienced fewer temptations overall who were more successful when the researchers checked back in at the end of the semester. What’s more, the people who exercised more effortful self-control also reported feeling more depleted. So not […]
Dweck concluded that signs of ego depletion were observed only in test subjects who believed willpower was a limited resource. Those participants who did not see willpower as finite did not show signs of ego depletion… Michael Inzlicht… principal investigator at the Toronto Laboratory for Social Neuroscience, believes willpower is not a finite resource but […]
For Rudenstine, humanistic study is recursive, marked by a passionate recidivism: it sends us back, time and again, to the “humanistic object,” the song or play or poem that begs to be reinterpreted, to be experienced once more. “We look to the humanities to provide us with illuminating works to which we can return passionately […]
The Internet, of course, is a marvellous place to find specific facts but it can’t do what a library does. It can’t stimulate the imagination by showing us what an unconquerable ocean of knowledge is available to all of us. Walking through a library, seeing and touching an astonishing number of books on obscure subjects […]
Right now, the educational technology market is blithely barreling down the road of developing sexy, sophisticated algorithms… But “sophisticated” also means “complex.” If we, as a culture, lack the basic literacy to have clear intuitions about what “a 70% chance” means, then how likely is it that we won’t have shocks that cause us to […]
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 […]
Keeping productivity equal, the scientists were as likely to score a hit at age 50 as at age 25. The distribution was random; choosing the right project to pursue at the right time was a matter of luck.”
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 […]
He tried to convince [his father] for a few hours at the restaurant. He told him about white privilege and repeated the scientific studies about institutionalized racism. He mentioned the great Islamic societies that had developed algebra and predicted a lunar eclipse. He said that now, as he recognized strains of white nationalism spreading into […]
Students can leave their notebooks, textbooks, and other school paraphernalia behind when they leave home or school, but they take their bodies with them wherever they go. When educators engage students in learning through the body, they essentially inscribe knowledge into the very sinews of their physical being.”
My students don’t want to come to office hours anymore. They would prefer to send me an email and have me send them an email back because they have a fantasy that they can send me a perfect email… and that I will send them their exact perfect answer back. This does a few things. […]
We need to remember something that Socrates drew our attention to long ago, but which in our eagerness to turn schools into engines of economic productivity we have forgotten, namely that education is a philosophical process. It begins with questioning, proceeds by enquiry, and moves in the direction of deeper understanding. The journey of enquiry […]
“Postmodern thought, with its deconstruction of everything and its emphasis on individual interpretation, leads us down a road of narcissism, cynicism, and detachment. To fix it… to feel less lonely, it’s perhaps this non-ideological pursuit of getting along, of striving to have strong communal integrity, of valuing others for their human dignity, unabashedly enjoying the […]
“Teens… mastered the butterfly game a bit faster than adults—that is, their predictions improved faster than young adults’—apparently because they were less quick to solidify their beliefs about the butterfly’s habits. Participants also had better memories for a series of images they saw after correct choices as opposed to incorrect choices, and that effect was […]
Of course, not all conformity is bad. But to be successful and evolve, organizations need to strike a balance between adherence to the formal and informal rules that provide necessary structure and the freedom that helps employees do their best work… Let’s look at the three main, and interrelated, reasons why we so often conform […]
After decades of strengths research, Gallup understands how leaders of top strengths-based organizations help their companies achieve the best outcomes. Here are their key strategies…”
Since the invention of the printing press, every new revolution in information technology has prompted apocalyptic fears. From the panic that easy access to the vernacular English Bible would destroy Christian orthodoxy all the way to the revulsion, in the 1950s, at the barbaric young medium of television, cultural critics have moaned and wailed at […]
As the school year takes off and the election draws nearer, rejecting political conversations in the classroom will likely be impossible — and unwise, according to educators we interviewed… Still, the 2016 election, fraught with divisive language and widespread dislike of both candidates, is tricky. For civics educators, talking about the election may require a […]
What is on the five-year horizon for K-12 schools worldwide? Which trends and technologies will drive educational change? What are the challenges that we consider solvable or difficult to overcome, and how can we strategize effective solutions? These questions and similar inquiries regarding technology adoption and transforming teaching and learning steered the collaborative research and […]
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.”
In this article, we set forth a model for understanding the relationship between innovation and impact, and we provide a way to diagnose the pathologies that interfere with that relationship. We also offer insight into how organizations can counter these pathologies by developing innovation practices that optimize their effectiveness.”
Every cognitive bias is there for a reason — usually to save our brains time or energy. If you look at them by the problem they’re trying to solve, it becomes a lot easier to understand why they exist, how they’re useful, and the trade-offs (and resulting biases) that they introduce.”
In short, the best way for you to prepare for the unforeseen future is to learn how to think intensively and imaginatively… You should think of yourself as apprenticing to the craft of thought… As with rhetoric, imitation, and inventory, you might not think very highly of apprenticeship these days. But it was crucial for […]
The new AAP clinical report Sports Specialization and Intensive Training in Young Athletes reviews the background of specialization, discusses concerns with intensive training and answers common questions regarding sports specialization in young athletes. Included in the report is an infographic that can be used as an educational tool for patients, parents and coaches.”
What I want from technology is not a new world. What I want from technology are tools for exploring and enjoying the world that is – the world that comes to us thick with ‘things counter, original, spare, strange’, as Gerard Manley Hopkins once described it. We might all live in Silicon Valley now, but […]
What we are saying is that there are different ways of telling a story, and they have different impacts on the way we perceive social reality. Literary fiction, we say, tends to challenge social categories – the characters are category-resistant … Popular fiction, on the other hand, uses types of characters which help us immediately […]
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 […]
“Our technology is our ideology,” Siemens says. He’s worried that, rather than advancing our human potential, many edtech companies and universities are perpetuating the status quo. While machine learning and automation are obviating the need for learners to memorize content and develop routine skills, current edtech solutions still focus on helping learners develop these capabilities, […]
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 […]
The rationales for these buildings are varied: Employers are dissatisfied with graduates’ preparation, students are unhappy with outdated teaching methods, and colleges want to attract students whose eyes are on postgrad venture capital and whose scalable ideas might come in handy on campus. And so universities of all sizes, both public (Wichita State, University of […]
It’s not just that young children don’t need to be taught in order to learn. In fact, studies show that explicit instruction, the sort of teaching that goes with school and “parenting,” can be limiting. When children think they are being taught, they are much more likely to simply reproduce what the adult does, instead […]
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 […]
“[Exercise] makes people more resilient not only to physical stress, but also to emotional and cognitive stress. It is for these reasons that scientists have written that “exercise is associated with emotional resilience to acute stress in healthy adults” and that exercise has been called a keystone habit, or an activity that leads to positive […]
Some test questions are likely harder to answer on tablets than on laptop and desktop computers, presenting states and districts with a new challenge as they move to widespread online assessments. Analyses by test providers and other organizations have pointed to evidence of small but significant device effects for tests administered in some grades and […]
“In tennis, experience is valued, but performance more so, making ongoing improvement a primary focus of professionals. But this focus would not be in place without systems that recognize and reward effective professional learning; sufficient time and energy allocated to the goal of professional growth; and strong coaches and leaders available to support improvement.”
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.”
“We analyzed data describing the behavior of 3,492 participants… With those results in hand we identified the differences between great and average listeners and analyzed the data to determine what characteristics their colleagues identified as the behaviors that made them outstanding listeners.”
Talking about race in America can be scary. People don’t want to be seen as a racist or someone trying to start a conflict. But the less prepared we are to think about race and talk about race, the scarier those conversations are when they occur. And children need tools for how to feel and […]
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 […]
The idea behind sentiment analysis is that words have a positive or negative emotional impact. So words can be a measure of the emotional valence of the text and how it changes from moment to moment. So measuring the shape of the story arc is simply a question of assessing the emotional polarity of a […]
As the summer internship season gets into full swing, consider, for instance, how a plum internship may alter a young person’s career trajectory. While some students take a summer job in food service to pay the bills, others can afford to accept unpaid jobs at high-profile organizations, setting them on a more lucrative path… The […]
It’s neither intelligence nor technique that holds people back from being successful self-taught learners, says Bach. It’s insecurity. Feelings of inadequacy stop curiosity, he says. In Bach’s own field of competitive thinkers, he’s learned that most people who have ambition have a terrible fear that although they’re good, they’re not good enough or smart enough. […]
“”The myth of regeneration through violence,” …he traces it from the earliest Indian captivity narratives through the golden age of the western, and it’s the same story we often tell ourselves today. It’s a story about how violence makes us American. It’s a story about how violence makes us good. Looking out over Baghdad on […]
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 […]
It was a way of being—a weird way of being. You are supposed to have skepticism and imagination, but not too much. You are supposed to suspend judgment, yet exercise it. Ultimately, you hope to observe the world with an open mind, gathering facts and testing your predictions and expectations against them. Then you make […]
Look at this year’s National Football League draft. Twenty-six of the 31 first-round picks, including Jared Goff, the player drafted ahead of all the others, had been multi-sport athletes in high school, according to Tracking Football.”
Let’s start with the first verse of the musical’s opening number. Our algorithm breaks words into their component sounds and then groups similar-sounding syllables into rhyme families, which are color-coded… Now it’s your turn. Paste in English lyrics, poetry or text and our algorithm will try to highlight similar-sounding syllables to reveal rhymes and repetitions.”
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 […]
The conference will start by considering and reviewing the ideas of cognitive development, the neuroscience of education, backwards planning, and recursive learning. The focus will then shift to learner-centered teaching and measuring the effectiveness of learner-centered teaching practices. Two major emphases of the conference are creating material that teachers can use when they leave, and […]
The results add to the evidence that well designed psychological interventions could help close persistent achievement gaps occurring in higher education institutions nationwide. Students who are from lower income backgrounds, under-represented minority groups or families with no previous college graduates typically do worse than other students at the same schools… The findings from the study… […]
“This is the generation of kids that grew up being told that the nation was basically over race,” Renee Romano, a professor of history at Oberlin, says. When they were eleven or twelve, Barack Obama was elected President, and people hailed this as a national-historic moment that changed everything. “That’s the bill of goods they’ve […]
Two weeks earlier, I was almost finished with my sophomore year at the Columbia University School of Engineering and Applied Science when I decided to start my new life. I skipped my final exams, changed bank accounts, got a second phone number and deleted my Facebook page. I needed to break from my old life […]
So these are the five essential questions. “Wait, what” is at the root of all understanding. “I wonder” is at the heart of all curiosity. “Couldn’t we at least” is the beginning of all progress. “How can I help” is at the base of all good relationships. And “what really matters” gets you to the […]
“There’s a strain of thought that says an employee represents a company, and thus dress is not about personal expression, but company expression,” Professor Scafidi said. “But there’s a counterargument that believes because we identify so much with our careers, we should be able to be ourselves at work.” And that has led to all […]
“8. Bandwidth. This must come from the tech folks and refers to the speed and ability to process information. “I don’t have the bandwidth to tackle any new projects.” Replace with “Sticky dots.” E.g., “You want all the staff to get CPR training? That would be great, but we don’t have the sticky dots for […]
Organizers said the project could have a big scientific payoff and would be a follow-up to the original Human Genome Project, which was aimed at reading the sequence of the three billion chemical letters in the DNA blueprint of human life. The new project, by contrast, would involve not reading, but rather writing the human […]
But the biggest advantage of a tutor is not that they personalize the task, it’s that they personalize the explanation. They look into the eyes of the other person and try to understand what material the student has locked in their head that could be leveraged into new understandings. When they see a spark of […]
Patience recognises suffering in the difficulties of one’s life and that of another. Nowadays, it might conjure up ideas of complacence but, with a long view of time – in which time is understood as abundant – patience becomes a way of bearing sorrows. Unlike resilience, which implies returning to an original shape, patience suggests […]
As silly as they might seem, Nosek said the badges served a well-established purpose, by giving researchers a visible means to communicate information about their identities, beliefs, values and behaviors. People use such signaling all the time… Badges give scientists a way to signal that they care about research transparency, Nosek said. And it appears […]
“Adaptive learning” is a popular edtech buzzword, used by curriculum and learning management systems alike. Enthusiasts promise this technology has the ability to make educational experiences more personal, efficient and scalable. Yet, there’s a big problem. There’s very little clarity around what this technology does, doesn’t do and how it actually works.”
The map was built using data from nearly 100,000 articles published between 2005-2014, found in 183 academic journals from the Web of Science database. We analyzed the bibliographic record (title, keywords, author, cited references, and abstract) for each article and created a bibliographic coupling network, to link articles sharing at least two common references.”
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 […]
Last year, a team of Georgia Tech researchers began creating Ms. Watson by poring through nearly 40,000 postings on a discussion forum known as “Piazza” and training her to answer related questions based on prior responses. By late March, she began posting responses live.”
Managers need to know that working to get one woman or minority considered for a position might be futile, because the odds are likely slim if they are the lone woman or nonwhite candidate. But if managers can change the status quo of the finalist pool by including two women, then the women have a […]
Teacher agency emerged as a factor that needs to be elevated in the discourse about professional learning. This report emphasizes the importance of teacher agency and pinpoints strategies that education leaders and policymakers can use to leverage agency in designing more effective professional learning.”
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.”
“The competition — billed as the world’s first drone race involving a brain-controlled interface — involved 16 pilots using willpower to drive drones through a 10-yard dash over an indoor basketball court at the University of Florida this past weekend.”
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. […]
Minecraft is thus an almost perfect game for our current educational moment, in which policy makers are eager to increase kids’ interest in the “STEM” disciplines — science, technology, engineering and math. Schools and governments have spent millions on “let’s get kids coding” initiatives, yet it may well be that Minecraft’s impact will be greater. […]
These questions are what I chase in my days with [my students], and it often takes bouts of frustration and resultant late-night preps to remind me why I’m here—not to teach English or poetry, but to teach [students]. Thank God I have these conduits of literature that constrain me in my yearning to open up […]
In essence, this means that if one has no time, one has also lost oneself. Distracted by the obligations of everyday activities, we are no longer aware of ourselves. If we rush from one thing to another and don’t miss a single event scheduled for our free time, we will accumulate many experiences. Yet if […]
In connected courses, we solve the coordination problem with a different approach: we give everyone their own spaces online to produce learning materials–blogs, Twitter feeds, websites, web domains, etc.–and then we use technology to make a copy of everything that students do and aggregate those copies. Students own their own means of production, and the […]
“Yet while such a unit may be rigorous intellectually, it is arguably incomplete unless students tangle with the book’s emotional core… Standards rarely address it; administrators rarely explicitly encourage it; few people pay consultants to give presentations on it at staff meetings. To do the work mandated by the Common Core well (which, for a […]
Despite the emergence of the metrosexual and an increase in stay-at-home dads, tough-guy stereotypes die hard. As men continue to fall behind women in college, while outpacing them four to one in the suicide rate, some colleges are waking up to the fact that men may need to be taught to think beyond their own […]
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.”
How ironic it was then to discover that at one of the greatest institutions of learning in the world, coaches built a tacit but impenetrable wall between athletics and the life of the mind… coaches made no attempt to get to know me as a person beyond basketball, except when I decided to leave the […]
With no one admitted to the class of 2020, Stanford is assured that no other school can match its desirability in the near future. “We had exceptional applicants, yes, but not a single student we couldn’t live without,” said a Stanford administrator who requested anonymity. “In the stack of applications that I reviewed, I didn’t […]
We’re now in the midst of the most far-reaching shift in media ever, as we rush to replace all manner of physical media with digital alternatives. The benefits are compelling. We’ve gained instant access to a seemingly infinite store of information. But there are losses, too. “Digital memory is ubiquitous yet unimaginably fragile,” Rumsey reports, […]
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”
Van Haren often uses shadowing as a way to dig into data she may have come across in a different format. For example, she noticed that on the most recent student survey, Asian and Pacific Islander students reported very low levels of belonging to the school community. That concerned her, so for her shadow day […]
Researchers have a raft of explanations for why kids are so stressed out, from a breakdown in family and community relationships, to the rise of technology and increased academic stakes and competition. Inequality is rising and poverty is debilitating. Twenge has observed a notable shift away from internal, or intrinsic goals, which one can control, […]
We can’t answer the question “Is tech useful in schools?” until we’ve grappled with a deeper question: “What kinds of learning should be taking place in those schools?” If we favor an approach by which students actively construct meaning, an interactive process that involves a deep understanding of ideas and emerges from the interests and […]
I learned that you spend on average 6.5 hours a day looking at screens. As a doctor, I decided I needed to learn the impact of all this screen time on kids. And as a mom, I needed to know what to do.”
We designed our class to do something different. We wanted the teams to tell the story of their journey, sharing with us their “Lessons Learned from our Customers”. They needed to show what they learned and how they learned it after speaking to 100+customers, using the language of class… The focus of their presentations is […]
Now, several high schools across Massachusetts are exploring whether to follow suit. The push for later start times is emerging in such districts as Belmont, Boston, Masconomet, Mashpee, Newton, and Wayland. The state Legislature is considering a bill to study the issue statewide.”
In honor of Women’s History Month, we asked our spring Student Council — 25 teenagers from all over the United States, as well as from China, South Korea, England and Canada — to search the Times and find the most interesting pieces they could on the broad topic of gender… They unearthed everything from a […]
Many of these programs—especially the camps, competitions, and math circles—create a unique culture and a strong sense of belonging for students who have a zest for the subject but all the awkwardness and uneven development of the typical adolescent.”
Let’s begin by saying that we are living through a very dangerous time. Everyone in this room is in one way or another aware of that. We are in a revolutionary situation, no matter how unpopular that word has become in this country. The society in which we live is desperately menaced, not by Khrushchev, […]
Leaders, moreover, used to command; now they suggest. Conceptually, at least, leadership and power have been decoupled. In 1927, Personnel Journal cited an expert who defined leadership as “the ability to impress the will of the leader on those led and induce obedience, respect, loyalty, and cooperation.” But after the Second World War the concept […]
First, on the good teams, members spoke in roughly the same proportion, a phenomenon the researchers referred to as ‘‘equality in distribution of conversational turn-taking.’’ On some teams, everyone spoke during each task; on others, leadership shifted among teammates from assignment to assignment. But in each case, by the end of the day, everyone had […]
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 […]
“If it becomes law, the computer-coding measure — which would take effect in the 2018-19 school year — would be the first of its kind in the country… But critics of the proposal worry it could dilute students’ cultural education and place a burden on public schools that already lack adequate technology resources.”
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 […]
Browsing through the bids posted on Studypool is revealing — it’s not uncommon to see students expecting to have their assignments fully completed in exchange for money. Everything from high school math quizzes to college-level essays. Negative reviews for tutors indicate that the work they did for the student got a bad grade or was flagged as […]
The regime of information may well sport its specific truths, but it is locked out of the associations — subjective but also moral and philosophical — that bathe all literature… Art not only brings us news from the “interior,” but it points to future knowledge. A humanistic education is not about memorizing poems or knowing […]
Recent studies are breathing new life into delayed feedback. One such study looks at an undergraduate engineering course at University of Texas, El Paso. Students in the course submitted a weekly homework assignment and either received feedback immediately, or a week later. Several weeks later all students completed a similar problem on the exam. The […]
Most of the survey questions show that today’s teenagers are among the best-behaved on record. They smoke less, drink less, and have sex less than the previous generation. They are, comparatively, a mild-mannered bunch who will probably shoo away from your lawn quite respectfully (and probably wouldn’t dare set foot on your lawn to begin […]
“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 […]
Already, the U.S. Department of Education has approved three states—Connecticut, Maine, and New Hampshire—to use the SAT as a high school assessment for federal accountability purposes… With the transition time and resources that ESSA provides, educators have an optimal moment to consider whether college prep tests can play the role of a national testing standard—or […]
The point is that relationships among employees can help disperse fear across an organization, rather than forcing individuals to carry those burdens alone. The encouragement and goodwill alone that those connections generate can improve employees’ mental, emotional, and even physical health. What’s more, the know-how and resources that come from associating with capable people help […]
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 […]
Micro-credentials can personalize professional learning to meet teachers’ individual needs, and allow them to quickly take what they learn and apply it to their classrooms. This new wave of personalized, competency-based professional development provides a way for teachers to earn recognition for the skills they acquire through formal and informal learning opportunities.”
A few studies suggest that introverted teachers—especially those who may have falsely envisioned teaching as a career involving calm lectures, one-on-one interactions, and grading papers quietly with a cup of tea—are at risk of burning out. And when these teachers leave for alternate careers, it comes at a cost to individual children and school districts […]
The findings showed that the classrooms with higher concentrations of African American students protected from stereotype threat by the intervention triggered higher academic performances among all classmates – regardless of race or participation in the intervention.
Turning the Tide: Inspiring Concern for Others and the Common Good through College Admissions, represents the first time that a broad coalition of colleges and universities have joined forces in a unified effort calling for widespread change in the admissions process. The report includes concrete recommendations to reshape the admissions process and promote greater ethical […]
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.”
More than eight in 10 of the nation’s chief K-12 education leaders say that student engagement with classwork, their hope for the future and the percentage of them who graduate from high school are very important measures of a public school’s effectiveness… Superintendents are less likely to highly prioritize the paths students take after high […]
When asked to illustrate the planning process, teachers across the country shared these images–responses that reveal the great variety of ways one can approach the extraordinarily complex profession of teaching. These are a testament to the art and science of teaching. We hope you find their work as thought provoking as we do, and we […]
While I like FaceTime and Skype, I prefer the faceless phone for important, emotional discussions, and Scott showed me why I feel that phone calls are more intimate. A phone silence, he observes, ‘is a thick rope tying two speakers together in the private void of their suspended conversation. This binding may be unpleasant and […]
By the early 1970s, the significance of these non-economic returns to higher education was recognised across the OECD, highlighting the futility of ‘manpower planning’. As the OECD put it, students had their own ideas of what to study. This student demand was a natural expression of contemporary ideas of democratisation, widening participation, and the emerging […]
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.”
When surrounded by others of the same ethnicity or race, participants were more likely to copy others, in the wrong direction. Mistakes spread as participants seemingly put undue trust in others’ answers, mindlessly imitating them. In the diverse groups, across ethnicities and locales, participants were more likely to distinguish between wrong and accurate answers. Diversity […]
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 […]
In most of the research on this topic, affluent students use technology for more creative purposes with more adult supervision, while less affluent students use technology for repetitive drill and practice without the same level of guidance… It doesn’t have to be this way.”
Last year, Britain became the first G7 country to introduce compulsory computer science on the school curriculum for all children aged five to 16. By the age of seven, all children will now be expected to be capable of writing and debugging a simple program… Coding lessons in school will not turn every child into […]
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 brain’s craving for novelty, constant stimulation and immediate gratification creates something called a “compulsion loop.” Like lab rats and drug addicts, we need more and more to get the same effect.”
Football has seen the steepest decline, but participation has also fallen in baseball, softball, soccer, and basketball. Meanwhile, more kids are playing racquetball, ice hockey, lacrosse, Ultimate Frisbee, and squash.”
All over the country there are schools and organizations trying to come up with new ways to cultivate character. The ones I’ve seen that do it best, so far, are those that cultivate intense, thick community. Most of the time character is not an individual accomplishment. It emerges through joined hearts and souls, and in […]
Formative assessment is one of the most widely used—but poorly understood—instructional techniques. This special report highlights common misconceptions about the approach and shows how formative assessment differs from other kinds of assessments, such as summative or benchmark tests.”
“I think about [my kids’] digital futures in precisely the same way that I believe all schools should think about educating our children: equip young people with technological agency; make sure they know how to apply their critical thinking, entrepreneurial, creative, and social skills by wielding digital tools. To do so, all kids will need […]
“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 […]
I want to be absolutely clear: I don’t have any problem with lecturing as one tool among many that we can use to help our students learn. It can be a very valuable strategy in certain instances…. Worthen [the author] not only dismisses discussion, group work, and other forms of pedagogy, but does so with […]
There are sound reasons for sticking with the traditional model of the large lecture course combined with small weekly discussion sections. Lectures are essential for teaching the humanities’ most basic skills: comprehension and reasoning, skills whose value extends beyond the classroom to the essential demands of working life and citizenship.”
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 […]
I’ve separated the strategies into three groups. The first batch contains the higher-prep strategies, formats that require teachers to do some planning or gathering of materials ahead of time. Next come the low-prep strategies, which can be used on the fly when you have a few extra minutes or just want your students to get […]
Statistics was primarily developed to help people deal with pre-computer data problems like testing the impact of fertilizer in agriculture, or figuring out the accuracy of an estimate from a small sample. Data science emphasizes the data problems of the 21st Century, like accessing information from large databases, writing code to manipulate data, and visualizing […]
Many educators who work in this field seem to understand at a visceral level that students are constructing meaningful and long-term knowledge with their tinkering. But the formal proof to back this theory is still being mined. The National Science Foundation is currently researching an evidence-based understanding of the design and development of STEM learning […]
The purpose of [this document] is to summarize the existing research from cognitive science related to how students learn, and connect this research to its practical implications for teaching and learning. This document is intended to serve as a resource to teacher-educators, new teachers, and anyone in the education profession who is interested in our […]
“Many teens in our focus groups described flirting with a crush by liking their photos or posting a comment on their social media profile. These interactions have their own unwritten – but widely understood – rules. Everything from one’s choice of emoji to the spelling of the word “hey” can carry a deeper meaning.”
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.”
Thus a person, sitting by herself in a room, may appear to others to be quite alone; but that person, if embedded, will have a world of relationships mapped inside her mind — a map that will lead to those who can be called on for nurture and support in time of need. But others, […]
“Zarr is part of a small but growing group of health-care professionals who are essentially medicalizing nature… Park prescriptions are a low-risk, low-cost intervention that, in Zarr’s experience, people are quick to accept… Researchers in the United Kingdom found that when people did physical activities in natural settings instead of ‘synthetic environments,’ they experienced less […]
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 […]
27.2 percent of female college seniors reported that, since entering college, they had experienced some kind of unwanted sexual contact — anything from touching to rape — carried out by incapacitation, usually due to alcohol or drugs, or by force.”
Are these efforts paving the way for universities who know their own business to create profitable ed tech and services offerings based on unique insights into how schools really work, or are they vehicles for star-struck administrators seeing glory and easy revenues? Or both? Only time will tell, but I would expect to see more […]
Even where computers are used in the classroom, their impact on student performance is mixed at best. Students who use computers moderately at school tend to have somewhat better learning outcomes than students who use computers rarely. But students who use computers very frequently at school do a lot worse in most learning outcomes, even […]
The sociologists offer structural explanations for why college students are addressing conflicts within the framework of “microaggressions.” Victimhood culture “arose because of the rise of social conditions conducive to it,” they argue, “and if it prevails it will be because those conditions have prevailed.” Those social conditions include the following…”
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 […]
“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 […]
The World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council… aims to help the broader society navigate the transition to the future digital and hyperconnected world by explaining the societal impacts generated by major technology trends and the new business models in plain language, and through engaging, accessible media. This report is the first of its kind – […]
The first eight principles relate to cognition and learning and address the question: How do students think and learn? The next four (9–12) discuss the question What motivates students? The following three (13–15) pertain to the social context and emotional dimensions that affect learning and focus on the question: Why are social context, interpersonal relationships, […]
“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).”
“Why are schools now buying new hardware and software? Try again if your answer is “because the tech is so good.” A technocentric response points our attention to the technology itself – new tools, data, devices, apps, broadband, the cloud – as though these are context-free. Computer criticism, as outlined by Papert, demands we look […]
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 […]
Speed of learning and the ability to perfect movements depend on the size of one’s stored experiences of movements (“movement erudition”). Yes, those who have more will get more, easier. This is why well-trained athletes do a wide variety of exercises besides those that are sport-specific for them and practice techniques of other sports.”
Are You In? What Will You Do? Who Will You Be? It’s All About You.”
These schools are moving out of the “getting-the-technology-to-work” phase and beginning to think deeply about the best ways to support student achievement. They are running their own internal evaluations of edtech effectiveness, training teachers on emerging best practices, exploring better ways to put data in the hands of teachers and students, and consolidating all their […]
AdmitSee found that the most common words on Harvard essays were experience, society, world, success, opportunity. At Stanford, they were research, community, knowledge, future and “skill. …It turns out, Brown favors essays about volunteer and public interest work, while these topics rank low among successful Yale essays. In addition to Harvard, successful Princeton essays often […]
Here are five exercises that students find particularly engaging. Each is designed to help freshmen identify their goals and reflect systematically about various aspects of their personal lives, and to connect what they discover to what they actually do at college.”
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 […]
With annual symposiums, mentorship programs and funding competitions, Middlebury is one of many small liberal arts colleges reinventing themselves as modern-day startup incubators–geared toward for-profit enterprises and nonprofits alike. Driven by market demand and the idea of teaching practical skills that would create larger impacts outside of traditional liberal arts classrooms, these colleges are encouraging […]
“All right let’s take a look at yesterday’s high school teacher draft from Radio City Music Hall, where Central Rapids High, recipient of the worst test scores last semester made the first pick, that was no surprise to anyone. ‘For the first pick, Central Rapids High takes calculus teacher Mike Yoast from Tulsa Teachers College!’ […]
The graduating classes of these coding schools support the trend. They will graduate about 16,000 students this year, more than double the 6,740 graduates last year, according to a survey published by Course Report in June. The 2015 total would be about one-third of the estimated number of computer science graduates from American universities.”
Although this openness to new ideas might sound like just waiting around for serendipity to strike, it’s a more deliberate process… Simonton’s research has similarly shown that the best predictor of creative achievement is an openness to experience and cognitive exploration.”
Surveys indicate that more than 30 percent of the top 300 largest global brands are now using or evaluating 3D printing (often with printing technology in-house) whether for prototyping and other innovation projects or in actual production of what they sell. Over 200 universities and colleges already offer 3D coursework in their curricula – covering […]
Maybe handwriting is neither an obsolete art nor a fundamentally human mode, now lost; in the symbol of a hybrid digital writing, perhaps there is some useful alchemy left in the way language, the body, and our sense of identity are so intimately intertwined.”
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.”
Nonviolence … does not seek to defeat or humiliate the opponent, but to win his friendship and understanding. The nonviolent resister must often express his protest through noncooperation or boycotts, but he realizes that these are not ends themselves; they are merely means to awaken a sense of moral shame in the opponent. The end […]
In a recent study that’s not yet published, Driska and his colleagues looked at an intense two-week wrestling camp, measuring feelings and attitudes of 89 teens before the camp experience and after. As expected, the players’ confidence increased — it was a tough camp to get through, Driska says. But what surprised him, he says, […]
Hunches make people over-confident. But if the hunch runs in the opposite direction to everyone else’s certainties, then over-confidence can be a strength… It’s not as if data solve the over-confidence problem, anyway. Indeed, they can exacerbate it, especially when people get hooked on the wrong measures… The hunch and the data can educate one […]
What we do know is that regardless of minority status, socioeconomic class and first-generation college student status, how you take advantage of college is more important than where you go. For example, graduates who had mentoring relationships, internships and jobs where they applied their learning, as well as long-term projects lasting more than a semester, […]
“We cannot march boldly into the future without demanding rapid advancement, too, in the faculties required to preserve our human dignity in a world of [artificial superintelligence]. Our capacities for ethical decision-making, compassion, and creativity must also grow, along with our intellectual capabilities to deepen our understanding of the human need for connection, accomplishment, and […]
The greatest influence on student progression in learning is having highly expert, inspired and passionate teachers and school leaders working together to maximise the effect of their teaching on all students in their care. There is a major role for school leaders: to harness the expertise in their schools and to lead successful transformations. There […]
An older generation may have spoken loftily about morality and virtue and nobility. But many of them could be callous, cruel, and selfish in the way that they treated so many of their fellow human beings… The young today are perhaps less articulate. They search for morality and the meaning of life in more incremental […]
This training provides: (1) an explanation of roles and responsibilities for mentors, student teachers, and university supervisors; (2) an introduction to co-teaching; (3) a description of the rubric used to evaluate student teachers, so that there is a shared understanding of what “proficient” teaching looks like; and (4) strategies for coaching a novice teacher at […]
The Student Academic Experience Survey was established in 2006 and is now in its tenth year. It has been continuously improved and this year’s survey includes new questions on how students rate the importance of training for those who teach in higher education, on information provided to students and on possible spending cuts.”
“Technology’s primary effect is to amplify human forces, so in education, technologies amplify whatever pedagogical capacity is already there… And what about computers outside of school? What happens when children are left to learn on their own with digital gadgets, as so many tech advocates insist we should do? Here technology amplifies the children’s propensities.”
the school’s principal… challenged a few members of the student council to find someone completely different from them—to ensure that the group had broad representation—and to bring those students to a series of lunchtime meetings. When the students arrived, [he] distributed copies of the survey and asked them to find a problem and come up […]
“The Times webpage can progressively disclose the answer graph, putting up a wall until you commit to a sketch… This isn’t just great digital pedagogy, it’s great pedagogy.”
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 credit hour is very good at telling us how long people have sat, not so good at telling us what they’ve actually learned. And in that model, time is pretty fixed… What they learn is variable… You flip that in a competency-based model. What happens is that learning becomes fixed and non-negotiable, and time […]
It’s 33 degrees out. He’s sitting in water. And he’s going to figure out whether that becomes uncomfortable or not, [Eliza Minnucci, the teacher] says. I don’t need to make a rule for him. He’s going to figure that out. This is a place where he can learn to take care of himself.” Minnucci worries […]
“4. Stay small, avoid hype, and pick a boring name… The shortest lived group at Xerox PARC was Office of the Future, because Xerox executives would not leave them alone. I chose the most innocuous name for my own group, the Learning Research Group. Nobody knew what it meant, so they left us alone to […]
Selective institutions should do more to enroll low-income students, and that it would be fair for the government to expect institutions that receive a large amount of federal aid to also enroll higher numbers of low-income students.”
Amongst major factors contributing to teacher stress, the survey results cite the adoption of new initiatives without proper PD (71%) and the negative portrayal of educators in the media (55%) as the two biggest factors. The survey results also identified the top three ‘everyday stressors in the classroom’ as mandated curriculum, large class size, and […]
“Sharing information and creating strong horizontal relationships improves the effectiveness of everything from businesses to governments to cities. His research suggests that the collective intelligence of groups and communities has little to do with the intelligence of their individual members and much more to do with the connections between them.”
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 […]
Stress is most likely to be harmful when the following conditions are present: it feels against your will, out of your control and utterly devoid of meaning. If you can change any of these conditions – by finding some meaning in it – you can reduce the harmful effects of stress.”
Somewhere between the tiny vision of innovation and the arrogance of grand progress lies a vision of collective destiny and confidence that with the right investments, a strong consensus, and patience we can generate a more just and stable world. We passed right by that point in the rush from the 20th to the 21st […]
“He’s concerned, as I am, that too many anxious parents and their addled children believe in, and insist on, an exacting, unforgiving script for success and (supposedly) happiness. Go to this venerable college. Pursue that sensible course of study. Tailor your exertions to the looming job market. They put too much faith in plotting, too […]
“Research and practical experience suggest that professional development focused on continual improvement of teaching is more effective than imitation of best practices. The best practice culture tends to search for and celebrate outlier teachers. But better teaching doesn’t come from imitating what star teachers do. Better teaching is built by steady, relentless, continual improvement—one lesson […]
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?”
Freshmen were assigned to attend one of two hourlong orientation sessions. In one, panelists gave advice about the transition to college and challenges like choosing classes. In the other, the same panelists wove their backgrounds into advice… Typically, first-generation freshman G.P.A.s lag behind their peers’ by 0.3 points. The gap was eliminated for students in […]
We need a kind of “attentional commons”: a regulation of noise and distraction in public space, and government intervention in areas like gambling, where some people are being manipulated beyond their reasonable ability to cope. More importantly, though, Crawford advocates skilled practices as a way of engaging with the world in a more satisfying way. […]
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 […]
I feel like here I’m moving up the socioeconomic ladder. But when I graduate, will I slip back down?”
The worlds of Richmond High School and Marin Academy are only one bridge away from each other, but they rarely collide. That was until a theater project asked students from both schools to interview each other, and perform each other’s lives on stage… You have to learn to move the way that person moves, and […]
Hidden behind a computer screen, the lonely person has control. They can search for company without the danger of being revealed or found wanting. They can reach out or they can hide; they can lurk and they can show themselves, safe from the humiliation of face-to-face rejection… But now a problem arises, for the contact […]
This is no gimmick. The medical school at U.C.L.A. has adopted perceptual modules as part of its standard curriculum, to train skills like reading electrocardiograms, identifying rashes (there are many varieties, which all look the same to the untrained eye) and interpreting tissue samples from biopsies. The idea is that you can learn to quickly […]
Scholarly study goes back a long time in history, but in terms of human evolution, many of the academic skills now required for successful functioning in the world are fairly new to the human brain. As neuroscientists investigate how humans learn, they often find that newer skills and aptitudes are mapped onto areas of the […]
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 […]
This does not mean how to become an entrepreneur. The entrepreneurial learner is constantly looking for new ways, new resources, new peers and potential mentors to learn new things.”
For the first time, students of color make up the majority of the class at 51.4 percent. Of these students, 13.8 percent are Asian, 11.6 percent Black/African American, 18.3 percent Hispanic, 7.4 percent multiracial and less than 1 percent Native American.”
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 […]
There’s a program that brings together kids from two schools. One school is public and in the country’s poorest congressional district. The other is private and costs $43,000/year. They are three miles apart. The hope is that kids connect, but some of the public school kids just can’t get over the divide.”
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 […]
“Until the 1960s boys spent longer and went further in school than girls, and were more likely to graduate from university. Now, across the rich world and in a growing number of poor countries, the balance has tilted the other way. Policymakers who once fretted about girls’ lack of confidence in science now spend their […]
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, […]
Across the board, more respondents said communication skills were most important, followed by reading, math, teamwork, writing and logic. Science fell somewhere in the middle, with more than half of Americans saying it was important. [See article for further breakdown]”
Many in government and business publicly question the value of [a liberal arts] education. Yet employers in every sector continue to scoop up my students because of their ability to apply cross-disciplinary thinking to an incredibly complex world. They like my chemistry grads because not only can they find their way around a laboratory, but […]
Pioneering efforts… to expand noncognitive development fall into four broad categories: collaborations between researchers and teachers; professional development for teachers; systemic reforms in school districts; and complementary efforts between in-school and after-school or expanded-learning time. Some initiatives are primarily in service of developing students’ social and emotional competence, while others aim to build academic mindsets […]
An educational focus on asking productive questions and defining meaningful problems isn’t just an academic skill. It is an important disposition across life, work and citizenship.”
“The practice of using single point rubrics is slowly but surely catching on. The simplicity of these rubrics — with just a single column of criteria, rather than a full menu of performance levels — offers a whole host of benefits.”
Reading a book is like carrying on a prolonged conversation with one individual writer, but the temptation on the other side of the screen is an ongoing conversation with everyone at once, as if all of your friends were hanging out in the same room in which you’re trying to peacefully read the latest dense […]
The practice has very real physical health benefits for the people who do it. According to Dr. James Pennebaker, a psychologist and leading expert in the field of Expressive Writing… journaling strengthens immune cells called T-lymphocytes and has been shown to be associated with drops in depression, anxiety, and increases in positive mood, social engagement, […]
“I want to see us recognize the work of the educators, those that analyze and characterize and critique, everyone who fixes things, all the other people who do valuable work with and for others—above all, the caregivers—whose work isn’t about something you can put in a box and sell.”
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.”
Jason kept on seeking out rejection. And as he did, he found that people were actually more receptive to him, and he was more receptive to people, too. ‘I was able to approach people, because what are you gonna do, reject me? Great!’
Our businesslike efforts to measure and improve quality are now blocking the altruism, indeed the love, that motivates people to enter the helping professions. While we’re figuring out how to get better, we need to tread more lightly in assessing the work of the professionals who practice in our most human and sacred fields.”
Art is not a second thought at the Integrated Arts Academy (IAA). Instead, artistic learning goals are held up as equals to academic standards and teachers work hard to design lessons that highlight content through art. “If you pick a subject area like science, social studies, math or literacy and you integrate it with an […]
“[Growth] required figuring out what a modern Lego should even be, which Knudstorp accomplished in part by investing in a kind of research the company had never done before—deep ethnographic studies of how kids around the world really play. Today, Lego may know as much about that subject as any organization on earth.”
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 […]
Attendance at “gap fairs” more than doubled in the United States between 2010 and 2013, and enrollment in gap-year programs grew 27 percent from 2012 to 2013 alone, according to Ethan Knight, executive director of the American Gap Association. Many college websites, including Harvard’s and Yale’s, now encourage prospective freshman to consider a gap year; […]
“Researchers have demonstrated that our perception of a speaker depends on whether we’ve been told ahead of time that he’s confident or shy. Our judgment of a child’s academic skill depends on whether we’ve been led to believe that she’s from a rich family or a poor one. When we serve on a jury, we […]
We offer a strand-by-strand overview of our developing work, and conclude by presenting the “big take away” from our research and by making suggestions for policymakers, educators, and other stakeholders. Along the way, we identify what we consider to be the most salient benefits of maker-centered learning for young people and, introduce some of the […]
“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 […]
“What we see in the new paradigm—in both the artist’s external relationships and her internal creative capacity—is what we see throughout the culture: the displacement of depth by breadth. Is that a good thing or a bad thing? No doubt some of both, in a ratio that’s yet to be revealed. What seems more clear […]
“‘The socket wrench we just manufactured is the first object we designed on the ground and sent digitally to space, on the fly,’ he adds. It’s a lot faster to send data wirelessly on demand than to wait for a physical object to arrive via rockets, which can take months or even years.“
“Indeed, for all the focus on the role of MOOCs in higher education, they might have a significant role to play in high schools and below. Teachers are already a big audience (a study of 11 MOOCs offered by MIT last spring found that nearly 28 percent of enrollees were former or active teachers).”
“The bootcamp certification – its prestige, its worth – will be an interesting thing to gauge in the coming years. Outside of the tech sector (perhaps), it’s not clear that having a certificate in a particular field is actually that helpful… But the benefit to students is hardly the point here, is it. The benefit […]
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 […]
“What is the matter with teacher preparation and how can we make it better? …Green’s thesis is simple: most teachers are never actually taught how to teach. After encountering a very thin introduction to the theory and practice of teaching at education schools, they’re sent into classrooms to learn on the job. What should be […]
“My parents taught me that you can have a creative approach to thinking that is almost scientific… You don’t have to be at the mercy of the muse. You need your own internalized thinking process that you can perform again and again… Everything that I do comes out of writing. It’s the genesis point… You […]
“The results across our two experiments were remarkably consistent: These cultural experiences improve students’… desire to become cultural consumers in the future. Exposure to the arts also affects the values of young people, making them more tolerant and empathetic… Arts experiences boost critical thinking, teaching students to take the time to be more careful and […]
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 […]
“Storytelling … [is] knowing your punchline, your ending, knowing that everything you’re saying, from the first sentence to the last, is leading to a singular goal, and ideally confirming some truth that deepens our understandings of who we are as human beings.”
“We have shifted our focus from the meaning of ideas to the means by which they’re produced. The same questions that always intrigued us—What is justice? What is the good life? What is morally valid? What is free will?—take a back seat to the biases embedded in our neural circuitry. Instead of grappling with the […]
“China has the best education system because it can produce the highest test scores. But… it has the worst education system in the world because those test scores are purchased by sacrificing creativity, divergent thinking, originality, and individualism.”
“Playing a musical instrument engages practically every area of the brain at once, especially the visual, auditory, and motor cortices… Several randomized studies of participants, who showed the same levels of cognitive function and neural processing at the start, found that those who were exposed to a period of music learning showed enhancement in multiple […]
“Students were more likely to even try to answer a word problem than an equation. Working through narrative problems also made students feel more empowered to explore different methods of solving a problem, rather than following a single sample process.”
“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 […]
“When someone hatches an original idea, it may be ungainly and poorly defined, but it is also the opposite of established and entrenched—and that is precisely what is most exciting about it. If, while in this vulnerable state, it is exposed to naysayers who fail to see its potential or lack the patience to see […]
“Accurate transmission of information had a massive impact on the outcome: with this model, increasing the fidelity of cultural transmission just a bit yielded huge increases in the amount and variety of culture. ‘It doesn’t matter how much novel invention or refinement is going on: if you don’t have accurate transmission you simply cannot build […]
“Vision… Culture… Transparency… System-wide alignment.”
“Students are tested not by their mastery of the material but by their skill, a far more subjective area of evaluation. “Readers” must make judgments about competence and inventiveness as they work their way through some 48,000 portfolios of student artwork. That’s more than double the number submitted a decade earlier… But the growth does […]
“From the standpoint of teachers, parents and the world at large, the problem with people with A.D.H.D. looks like a lack of focus and attention and impulsive behavior. But if you have the “illness,” the real problem is that, to your brain, the world that you live in essentially feels not very interesting.”
“A common thread with the three institutions’ experiments is that they seek to focus more on what students know and can do rather than how much time they spend in class. ‘They will emerge with proven competencies,’ Mitch Daniels, Purdue’s president, said last month.. ‘Businesses will not have to guess whether these students really are […]
“How could the public be better educated about the nature of scientific inquiry? Three recent books… lay bare the provisionality of science and may, paradoxically, actually help us find a way to address rampant denialism. Rather than focus single-mindedly on the technical aspects of science or the need to improve basic skills, they focus our […]
“For years, vocational high schools have been seen as a lesser form of schooling – tracking some kids off to work while others were encouraged to go on to college and pursue higher income professions. But things are changing. At one of those schools – Minuteman Regional High School in Lexington, Massachusetts – students can […]
“There must be ease, relaxation, and a general sense of permissiveness… If a single individual present is unsympathetic to the foolishness that would be bound to go on at such a session, the others would freeze. The unsympathetic individual may be a gold mine of information, but the harm he does will more than compensate […]
“7 teachers will receive a $10,000 stipend, support from Character Lab, and additional funding to test their ideas for cultivating character strengths and skills in schools. Application deadline is November 2nd.”
“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.”
“The material covered in the courses, which do include some algebraic topics, was vetted independently by the Mathematical Association of America, the American Statistical Association and other groups… [and] a report released in July showed that Pathways students, when given the same final exam as other college-level math and statistics students, scored as well or […]
“In a traditional college degree program, assessments and course requirements are typically decided by individual professors or within a department. Which can lead to wide variations in expectations, workload and grading… Freed of the credit-hour constraint, competency-based programs need to be a lot more rigorous and transparent about designing assessments. Otherwise, they risk turning into […]
“Six critical elements during college jumped off the pages of our research as being strongly linked to long-term success in work and life after graduation. Three of these elements relate to experiential and deep learning… But the three most potent elements linked to long-term success for college grads relate to emotional support… If graduates strongly […]
“To be nimble and innovative, part of the key is pushing decision authority as low as possible (but not lower). What’s as low as possible? That’s going to change from situation to situation. But the key is acknowledging that the more senior you make your decision makers, the more waste you’ll require of those looking […]
It seems obvious that a group of people with diverse individual expertise would be better than a homogeneous group at solving complex, nonroutine problems. It is less obvious that social diversity should work in the same way—yet the science shows that it does. This is not only because people with different backgrounds bring new information. […]
“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 […]
“Last school year, 13 juniors and seniors in the 6000-student Andover, Mass., school system enrolled in edX courses and received extracurricular credit—but no grades—upon completion of a pass-fail class. The district’s goal was to provide its students with a more rigorous and extensive list of course offerings… All but two students at Andover High completed […]
“As educators, we increasingly recognize that our institutions are not immune to the technological forces that have influenced almost every other industry that serves us… we are more likely to think that technology means the end of our schools and all the characteristics of them that we hold dear. This will likely not be the […]
“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.”
“When people were treated as though they were working together they: persisted 48 to 64 percent longer on a challenging task, reported more interest in the task, became less tired by having to persist on the task… became more engrossed in the task and performed better on it, and finally, when people were encouraged to […]
“Second, when innovative practices do emerge, they are much more likely to emerge in places serving affluent students. Low income students are much more likely to experience technology as a tool for drill and remediation, and wealthier students are more likely to experience technology as a tool for creation and innovation.”
“This report pulls together several years of research into the role of libraries in the lives of Americans and their communities with a special focus on Millennials, a key stakeholder group affecting the future of communities, libraries, book publishers and media makers of all kinds, as well as the tone of the broader culture.”
“‘When given access to appropriate technology used in thoughtful ways, all students—regardless of their respective backgrounds—can make substantial gains in learning and technological readiness,’ said Darling-Hammond.”
“Seeing the problem through another discipline’s lenses gives one the permission to think outside the norms and boundaries of one’s own… In most large organizations, this is a fundamental challenge. Coming out of your functional silo to roll up your sleeves with colleagues from another one is often an exercise in defensive posturing, rather than […]
“Preliminary results suggest that female students learn better when they are surrounded by female classmates—even virtual ones—and the more women in the room, the better. Perone’s and Friend’s findings suggest that the reason behind the success of the Online School for Girls may not be its stated emphasis on teaching girls differently, but simply the […]
Graduates who… had a professor or professors ‘who cared about them as a person — or had a mentor who encouraged their goals and dreams and/or had an internship where they applied what they were learning — were twice as likely to be engaged with their work and thriving in their overall well-being.’
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.
Many experiments have shown that after or during exercise, even very mild exertion, people perform better on tests of memory and attention. Walking on a regular basis also promotes new connections between brain cells, staves off the usual withering of brain tissue that comes with age, increases the volume of the hippocampus (a brain region […]
The way we move our bodies further changes the nature of our thoughts, and vice versa. Psychologists who specialize in exercise music have quantified what many of us already know: listening to songs with high tempos motivates us to run faster, and the swifter we move, the quicker we prefer our music. Likewise, when drivers […]
“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.”
“Even in the era of fast tracks and credentialism, the psychic mechanisms of an education are mysterious. Let teachers like Deresiewicz believe. For a couple of hours every week, students are theirs in the classroom to challenge and entrance. Then the clock strikes, and the kids flock back into the madness of their lives. Did […]
“Several decades after the Equality of Education Opportunity Study (a.k.a. the Coleman Study) revealed teacher verbal competence to be a strong predictor of student outcomes, an Abell Foundation study on teacher certification found that ‘the teacher attribute found consistently to be most related to raising student achievement is verbal ability.’”
“You should only use email as a tool to set up a one-on-one meeting with me if office hours conflict with your schedule. Use the subject line ‘Meeting request.’ Emails sent for any other reason will not be considered or acknowledged. I strongly encourage you to ask questions about the syllabus and assignments during class […]
Although we tend to think and talk about “technology” and “media” as undifferentiated monoliths, Greenfield’s work reminds us that each medium has its strengths and weaknesses in conveying information. Each medium, in turn, exercises and develops different faculties in us, its users.
“The moment we stopped compelling Fin to sit and draw or paint or write was the moment he began doing these things on his own. It was the moment he began carving staves of wood into beautiful bows and constructing complex toys from materials on hand… In other words, the moment we quit trying to […]
“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.”
“Students who learned a topic through tutoring, combined with regular formative assessment and corrective instruction, performed two standard deviations (2 sigma) better than students who received conventional classroom instruction… Can researchers and teachers devise teaching-learning conditions that will enable the majority of student under group instruction to attain [the same] levels of achievement?”
“In the background of an essay like “Don’t Send Your Kid to the Ivy League”—and of essays like “No Time to Think” or “The ‘Busy’ Trap,” both published in the Times—is the looming presence of the arrhythmic, unreassuring modern world, which seems always to be speeding things up in a senseless way. Modernity is the […]
“Researchers sorted the stresses into two groups: Type 1 stressors include experiences such as receiving a barrage of personal attacks, being impersonated, or being outed, shamed, or humiliated publicly. Type 2 stressors involve a controlling boyfriend, girlfriend, or friend constantly breaking into one’s social-media accounts to read digital communications with others; feeling smothered by the quantity […]
“After a geometry lesson, someone might note the inherent challenge for children in seeing angles as not just corners of a triangle but as quantities — a more difficult stretch than making the same mental step for area. By the end, the teachers had learned not just how to teach the material from that day […]
“Students aren’t waiting for the system to catch up. At Walnut Creek’s Northgate, students not only petitioned for a coding class, but also formed a science-technology-math-engineering club, then built a pipeline of future coders by engaging elementary and special education classes in fun projects.”
“Children who do eat dinner with their parents five or more days a week have less trouble with drugs and alcohol, eat healthier, show better academic performance, and report being closer with their parents than children who eat dinner with their parents less often, according to a study conducted by the National Center on Addiction […]
“A summer program with no course credit, no set curriculum to cover, no competing class schedule and no penalty for failure frees students to experiment, said Alan J. Snyder, a vice president and associate provost at Lehigh. Eventually, the university plans to offer the program year-round, with many more students involved.”
“Experiments growing bacteria on battery electrodes demonstrate that these novel, mind-boggling forms of life are essentially eating and excreting electricity.”
“Relationships are some of our most valuable creative resources. One way to enrich them is through creative circles – a small meetup of people who want to share inspiration and be accountable for their work.”
“The school chose to continue the program, which runs for one semester each year and involves nine to 12 students who receive credit and a pass/fail. ‘It was really risky, because we didn’t know how colleges would interpret this on a transcript,’ Powell says. ‘But so far we’ve had only an overwhelmingly positive response,’ including […]
“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 […]
“Every email and every tweet, every text, status update and comment I scribbled on one of our neglected small notebooks, photographed with my phone and shipped off as an image to its intended audience. … I did it to hack my brain. To make it slow down and notice the flurry of digital mutterings it […]
“OECD studies show that higher-performing countries intentionally focus on creating teacher collaboration that results in more skillful teaching and strong student achievement. U.S. researchers have also found that school achievement is much stronger where teachers work in collaborative teams that plan and learn together. Teachers repeatedly confirm that opportunities to work with their colleagues often […]
“In addition to the scholarships, which are worth about $19,000 each, the school will also be looking to hire a video game coach… The move marks yet another step in the mainstreaming of video games, which in this context are also called e-sports, within education. There’s already a Collegiate Star League dedicated to video gaming, […]
“I doubt that understanding the Great War will help young people compete in the global economy. In fact, insight into that war’s causes might lead kids to rethink entirely international competition as an educational goal. Yet I believe that wrestling with that war’s complexity will make for better citizens: thoughtful, cautious about letting a president […]
“The more time children spend in structured, parent-guided activities, the worse their ability to work productively towards self-directed goals.”
“Students who lack the self-discipline (or handwriting ability) to look away from the screen and take paper notes will not learn as much, or as well, in college. But that’s their responsibility. What’s going to happen when (if) all these laptop-policed students get jobs?”
“Employees are vastly more satisfied and productive, it turns out, when four of their core needs are met: physical, through opportunities to regularly renew and recharge at work; emotional, by feeling valued and appreciated for their contributions; mental, when they have the opportunity to focus in an absorbed way on their most important tasks and […]
At the very least, schools that believe in equity and justice and want their students to be future leaders need to help students — especially white students — understand the history of race and racism and how both play out in contemporary society. This racial content knowledge constitutes a basic social literacy that all students […]
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?”
“They enhance the academic performance of children from families at all educational and occupation levels.”
“Racism is a prejudice… coupled with discriminatory action. It’s a very simple definition, it took me a long time to arrive at it, but it is composed of these two parts. You need to have prejudices concerning a certain group of human beings — to whom you attribute mental and physical features reproduced from generation […]
“If you see how well students learn the next thing after these discovery experiences, it turns out that they prepare students for future learning.”
“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.”
“It has long been known that various aspects of the built environment impact on people in buildings, but this is the first time a holistic assessment has been made that successfully links the overall impact directly to learning rates in schools”
“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.”
Three out of four American families with school-aged children have at least one playing an organized sport — a total of about 45 million kids. By age 15, as many as 80 percent of these youngsters have quit, according to the Open Access Journal of Sports Medicine. One reason is the gap between the child’s desire to […]
“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.”
“[They] help your team work better together. When you capture every decision and put it on the wall, you don’t have to wonder if everyone is on the same page. The room is the page. The more you put on the walls, the more shared understanding you build.”
“When peer coaching (as happens in small, reciprocal groups) was added, an estimated 95 percent of teachers transferred the new knowledge to their classrooms.”
“Existing approaches to observation generally serve the observer. Teacher-driven observation flips this approach, placing the observed teacher as leader and primary learner in the observation process.”
While I think their report suffers from a misguided faith in the power of revolution, rejuvenation, disruption and innovation, there are still quite a few important take aways. Here are the five findings that are most interesting to me…
“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.”
“Contrary to popular belief, it’s not just first-year college GPA that SAT scores predict. In a four-year study… [researchers] found that test score (SAT or ACT—whichever the student took) correlated strongly with cumulative GPA at the end of the fourth year.”
“To Dr. Jones, Temple’s plethora of professional advisers is not indicative of administrative bloat but essential in “making sure students don’t drop out when they don’t have to.””
“The reality is that designing an intervention whereby young and inexperienced volunteers effectively and sustainably “help” a community overseas—one that speaks a different language and has different cultural assumptions—is extremely difficult.”
With so much information, hyperlinked text, videos alongside words and interactivity everywhere, our brains form shortcuts to deal with it all — scanning, searching for key words, scrolling up and down quickly. This is nonlinear reading, and it has been documented in academic studies. Some researchers believe that for many people, this style of reading […]
“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.”
“Students who did more hours of homework experienced greater behavioral engagement in school. But there were many negative effects of heavy homework loads, too, as enumerated in a Stanford University press release about the study.”
“You have John Quincy Adams on Desdemona having sex with Othello, Lincoln reading ‘Macbeth,’ and another president, Grant, rehearsing the role of Desdemona at a military camp. You couldn’t make this stuff up. This is how central a preoccupation Shakespeare was at the time.”
“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.”
“Because these were high school kids with, for the first time, a real business relying on them, this portion of the class shook them so badly they couldn’t move from their seats–literally…. Feeling the pressure, after 3 wasted days, one student on one team finally convinced her team they needed to get out of the […]
“This year’s gathering drew over 6,500 entrepreneurs, educators, investors, researchers, policymakers, and just about anyone interested in the booming education industry. The 300-plus panels, workshops and presentations were chosen out of 700 proposals that were evaluated by the SXSWedu advisory panel, event staff, and the public.
“Pope and her colleagues found that too much homework can diminish its effectiveness and even be counterproductive. They cite prior research indicating that homework benefits plateau at about two hours per night, and that 90 minutes to two and a half hours is optimal for high school.”
“Being able to poke at words on screen and have them spin out videos for us could be compelling in the short term…. but I’m not sure it’s intellectually fruitful.”
“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.’”
“Young people have slowly been deprived of agency, spare time, and the ability to socialize in public spaces that is crucial to coming of age. Against this backdrop, social media is not so much a drip-feed of digital narcotic as a release valve for circumscribed lives.”
“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.’”
“For academic achievement, only the group receiving medication and behaviour therapy combined outperformed [others]. By three years in, the four groups had become indistinguishable on every measure. Treatment conferred no lasting benefit in terms of grades, test scores, or social adjustment.”
“When people really get a chance to think, to have the space… they can quite easily discern between the things that are essential to them and those that are not. The problem is not our ability to discern, it’s that we don’t have the space to take the time to discern.”
“Lastly, the drill sergeants in Seligman’s program are taught two capacities that might seem at odds with mental toughness: gratitude and generosity.”
“When the flow of ideas incorporates a constant stream of outside ideas as well, then the individuals in the community make better decisions than they could on their own.”
“[Three teachers] traveled across the country documenting noteworthy teaching practices at district public schools, charter, private, and parochial schools.
“The role of the human is not to be dispassionate, depersonalized or neutral. It is precisely the emotive traits that are rewarded: the voracious lust for understanding, the enthusiasm for work, the ability to grasp the gist, the empathetic sensitivity to what will attract and linger in the mind.”
“You use [the QAMA calculator] just like a regular calculator, plugging in the numbers of the problem you want to solve – but QAMA won’t give you the answer until you provide an accurate estimate of what that answer will be.”
“For girls and boys, the trend is gaining steam despite the unhappiness of many of the coaches and parents who are most heavily involved, many of whom worry about the psychological and physical toll it is taking on youngsters.”
“Ms Mark’s research has found that people who stopped using email at work felt less stress and were more focused and productive.”
“Physics can explain chemistry, which can explain biology, which can explain psychology, and psychology might someday tell us, at least in the most general terms, how we create art and why we respond to it. But it will never account for the texture, the particularities, of individual works, or tell us what they mean. Art […]
“High-impact practices like service learning, research with faculty members, and capstone projects that are a cornerstone of residential learning and have been shown to improve student learning, none of those practices are incorporated into MOOCs right now. To transform higher education for the next generation, we need to better blend game-changing innovations with one another, […]
“In the Khan Academy era, content expertise can be outsourced to machines, but moral leadership cannot.”
“Not everybody likes Chaucer enough to spend 15 weeks on him, and that’s OK.”
“Humanities research constantly crosses in and out of the academy, and it’s so much a part of everyday life that most of the time we don’t even bother to think of it as ‘humanities.’”
“This constant, sophisticated dialogue between past and present would become a defining feature of Western Civilization.”
Prospecting and mining the past to gain a deep understanding of where things come from and why they exist is hugely important to creating meaningful new things.”
“What we need are new (and constantly evolving) technologies built specifically to allow educators to curate, create, share, and collaborate on the things that matter to them personally.”
“Yes, I said to myself, this is what we do; we think about problems and puzzles and try to advance the understanding of them.”
“Mathematical proofs, for all their rigorous logic, came to look more like narratives…”
“Modular, unbundled learning suggests much-expanded flexibility in the curriculum.”
“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.”
“Whatever it ends up looking like, the UI of the future won’t be made of just pixels.”
“Bridge offers a system built on easy replication: a template for setting up schools cheaply, enrolling children seamlessly, hiring instructors, creating a curriculum, and making sure children learn it. The schools themselves may be lo-fi, but Bridge’s back offices are very high tech.”
“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.”
“Juárez Correa had mixed feelings about the test. His students had succeeded because he had employed a new teaching method, one better suited to the way children learn. It was a model that emphasized group work, competition, creativity, and a student-led environment. So it was ironic that the kids had distinguished themselves because of a […]
“How you think and how you act can transform your experience of stress. Chasing meaning is better for your health than avoiding discomfort.”
“Odds are that no matter what you’re working on, someone somewhere, who is smarter than you, has probably thought about your problem and put it into a book.”
“Ideally ‘butterflies’ have most impact when they reinforce any of the following comments from Judith Little who said you know you are in an outstanding school where you can see that: 1) Teachers talk about teaching. 2) Teachers observe each other’s teaching. 3) Teachers plan, organise and evaluate their work together. 4) Teachers teach each […]
“In three prospective, longitudinal studies, negative life events reported by the mother (in Study 1) or child (in Studies 2 and 3) predicted rank-order decreases in self-control over time.”
“The purpose of the present review is to (i) summarize self-affirmation theory; (ii) review major new discoveries in affirmation research with an emphasis on how affirmations affect defensiveness, stress, and academic performance under identity threat; and (iii) present a general theoretical account of how these effects occur.”
“If we listen to a powerpoint presentation with boring bullet points, a certain part in the brain gets activated. Scientists call this Broca’s area and Wernicke’s area. Overall, it hits our language processing parts in the brain, where we decode words into meaning. And that’s it, nothing else happens. When we are being told a […]
“Avoid Flow. Do What Does Not Come Easy. “The mistake most weak pianists make is playing, not practicing. If you walk into a music hall at a local university, you’ll hear people ‘playing’ by running through their pieces. This is a huge mistake. Strong pianists drill the most difficult parts of their music, rarely, if ever playing through their […]
According to the study, people who feel pressured into changing prejudiced views will actually become more prejudiced. On the other hand, methods that persuade people that giving up prejudice is good for its own sake are more effective… Autonomy-primed students read statements like, “I enjoy relating to people of different groups,” and “It’s fun to […]
“By now enough has been written about academic assessment to fill a library, but when you stop to think about it, the whole enterprise really amounts to a straightforward two-step dance. We need to collect information about how students are doing, and then we need to share that information (along with our judgments, perhaps) with […]
“First, let your last night before work still be vacation, or at least your personal time. Don’t open your email or check your voicemail. Unpack, do laundry, make your kids’ lunches if you have kids and they need lunches — but don’t get back to work until you’re back at work.”
“Recent randomized experiments have found that seemingly “small” socialpsychological interventions in education—that is, brief exercises that target students’ thoughts, feelings, and beliefs in and about school—can lead to large gains in student achievement and sharply reduce achievement gaps even months and years later. These interventions do not teach students academic content but instead target students’ […]
All eight studies that examined the relationship between teachers’ participation in PLCs and student achievement found that student learning improved.”
“If you mention taste nowadays, a lot of people will tell you that taste is subjective.” …Most of us are encouraged, as children, to leave this tangle unexamined… Like many of the half-truths adults tell us, this one contradicts other things they tell us. After dinning into you that taste is merely a matter of […]
“When students are ability grouped into separate classes and given an identical curriculum, there is no appreciable effect on achievement. But when the curriculum is adjusted to correspond to ability level, it appears that student achievement is boosted, especially of high ability students receiving an accelerated curriculum. Heterogeneous grouping has not been adopted by enough […]
“Textbooks would not need to be partisan in order to point out the danger of the partisan skewing of public issues. Left and right so often prefer to cry wolf, or conspiracy, when dull fact says otherwise. And it Is not only in children’s stories that when the facts justify alarm they are not heeded, […]
The charge against credential requirements is that they are simultaneously too restrictive and too lax. They are too restrictive in giving a huge advantage to those who booked early passage on the IQ train and too lax in their sloppy relation to the skills that truly make for competence… If sports were run like the […]