“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.”
“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 […]
“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, […]
“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.”
“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.”
“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 […]
“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. […]
“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 […]
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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 […]
“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 […]
““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 […]
“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 […]
“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.”
“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 […]
“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 […]
“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 […]
“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 […]
“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 […]
“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 […]
“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 […]
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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 […]
“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, […]
“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 […]
“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.”
“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 […]
“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 […]
“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 […]
“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 […]
“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 […]
“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, […]
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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 […]
“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 […]
“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 […]
“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.”
“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 […]
“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 […]
“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.”
“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 […]
“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.”
“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.”
“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 […]
“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 […]
“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 […]
“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 […]
“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.”
“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 […]
“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 […]
“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. “
“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 […]
“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.”
“The manner in which the machinery of instruction bears upon the child… really controls the system.”
“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.”
“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 […]
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 […]
“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.”
“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 […]
“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 […]
“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.”
“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 […]
“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… […]
“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?”
“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.”
“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 […]
“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 […]
“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.”
“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.”
“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, […]
“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 […]
“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.”
“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 […]
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 […]
“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 […]
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 […]
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.”
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 […]
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 […]
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.”
“[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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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.”
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. […]
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.””
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 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 […]
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 […]
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.”
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.”
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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.”
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 […]
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 […]
“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, […]
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 […]
“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.”
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. […]
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 […]
“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.”
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 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 […]
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.”
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 […]
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.”
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 […]
It seems that schools are expected to position themselves as either traditional — “chalk and talk,” uniforms, a belief in canonical knowledge, a culture of discipline and compliance, or progressive — liberal, with more of a constructivist approach to teaching and learning, and a focus on the development of the individual building off his or her strengths rather than […]
Meyer thinks technology can change the math classroom’s reputation as a dull, mystifying, and even traumatizing place. But he doesn’t think tech can fix everything. ‘There’s limitations on what kinds of work can be done on a computer without a teacher… You’ll never see a free-form argument of the sort that students do in our […]
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 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 […]
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).”
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 […]
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 […]
“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 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.”
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 […]
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.”
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 […]
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.”
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, […]
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.”
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.”
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 […]
“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 […]
“Of the thirty-odd studies and articles I’ve consumed on the subject, only one graduate research paper claimed a benefit to RRR [Round Robin Reading, or taking turns reading in class] or its variations… Katherine Hilden and Jennifer Jones’ criticism is unmitigated: ‘We know of no research evidence that supports the claim that RRR actually contributes […]
“In many ways, the performance question has gotten caught up in this fight between active learning and lecturing. “We assume that performance only relates to lecture, only relates to the passive delivery. And thus it should be discarded along with the lecture,” says Robert Lue, the faculty director of Harvard University’s Derek Bok Center for […]
“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.”
“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 […]
“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?”
“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 […]
“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 […]
“The more time children spend in structured, parent-guided activities, the worse their ability to work productively towards self-directed goals.”
“If you see how well students learn the next thing after these discovery experiences, it turns out that they prepare students for future learning.”
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…
“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.”
“[Three teachers] traveled across the country documenting noteworthy teaching practices at district public schools, charter, private, and parochial schools.
“Now that, generally, one need not wait for things, patience becomes an active and positive cognitive state.”
“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.”
“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 […]
“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 […]