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 […]
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 […]
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.”
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, […]
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 […]
“[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 […]
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 […]
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.”
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… […]
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 […]
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.”
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”
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 […]
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 […]
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.”
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.
“The foundational reason for why we find it so difficult to rebuild school curricula around the needs of the modern world is that we lack an organizing framework that can help prioritise educational competencies, and systematically structure the conversation around what individuals should learn at various stages of their development. Four-dimensional education provides a clear […]
The 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 […]
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 […]
After thirty years of constant reform and little improvement, it’s clear that there’s a fundamental flaw in how the education field goes about effecting change. Quick fixes, sweeping transformations, and mandates aren’t working. Ongoing professional development isn’t working either. What might work much better is a sustained, systemic commitment to improvement—and a willingness to start […]
The 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, […]
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).”
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.”
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.”
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, […]
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 […]
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 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 […]
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 […]
“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 […]
“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 […]
“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?”
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 […]
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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 […]
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 […]
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. […]
“Modular, unbundled learning suggests much-expanded flexibility in the curriculum.”
All eight studies that examined the relationship between teachers’ participation in PLCs and student achievement found that student learning improved.”