“Our focus is on students’ achievement values. In academic motivation, “value” refers to students’ beliefs about whether and why certain content matters. Understanding the four different dimensions of achievement values (Wigfield & Eccles, 2000) can help us motivate all our students… Utility… Attainment… Intrinsic value… Cost.”
“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 aesthetic quality of a student’s lesson-based drawing has little bearing on learning. My students grumble about it, but as they get used to drawing as part of their routine work, they start to notice changes.”
“No one can be all things to all students, yet all students need love and a reason to show up. This requires a team capable of providing academic skills and content as well as consistency, emotional support, extracurricular activities, and so much more.”
“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 […]
“Small shifts in our feedback practices can lead to less work and more learning… These shifts are evolutionary, not revolutionary: they ask for modest and achievable adjustments in our pedagogy, not a wholesale overhaul.”
“I found that, far from being a natural state of high school, student boredom was driven by key differences in how the two histories were taught. Whereas the Holocaust was taught as a causal story that animated student interest, apartheid was taught primarily through lists (of laws and events).”
“Stories told about “successful” teachers and the counting of what these teachers actually do in classrooms are very compelling, even persuasive at times. But such evidence remains stories and lists. They neglect systematically collected data from comparison groups of teachers and students to sufficiently pass muster as evidence of which teacher actions cause students to […]
“Attitudes and approaches to the start of a lesson have progressed and tend to focus on recall and review. Barak Rosenshine’s Principles of Instruction: Research Based Strategies That All Teachers Should Know (2012) have become well known and widely referenced in education. Among these principles, Rosenshine encourages teachers to “begin a lesson with a short […]
“The researchers found that students who spent more time in class solving practice problems on their own and taking quizzes and tests tended to have higher scores in math. It was just the opposite in English class. Teachers who allocated more class time to discussions and group work ended up with higher scorers in that […]
“All 63* essays had hallucinated… The biggest takeaway from this was that the students all learned that it isn’t fully reliable. Before doing it, many of them were under the impression it was always right. Their feedback largely focused on how shocked they were that it could mislead them. Probably 50% of them were unaware […]
“Over the past decade, I’ve found it very helpful to analyze opportunities and changes in education by looking at 5 key parts of the education value chain: content, instruction, motivation, assessment, and delivery.”
“We tested the desire to give and receive feedback in all sorts of situations—with strangers and close friends; when the feedback was less consequential (like mispronouncing a word) and more consequential (like making an egregious error during an interview). We found that, in almost all of the situations we tested, people underestimated how much others […]
“Students score higher in math when their teacher devotes more class time to individual practice and assessment. In contrast, students score higher in English if there is more discussion and work with classmates. Class time allocation predicts test scores separate from the quality of the teacher’s instruction during the activities. These results suggest opportunities to […]
“One thing that is not changing is the best way for people to learn. We have made large advances in recent years in understanding pedagogy – the science of learning. We know some of the most effective techniques for making sure material sticks and that it can be retrieved and used when needed most. Unfortunately, […]
“Students in the passive group reported enjoying the lecture more and felt that the instructor was more effective at teaching. Yet in the test of learning, those in the active group did better.”
“The radical idea at the heart of Montessori’s method was not that children learn by play but that adults prevent them from learning by interrupting them.”
““It’s the immediacy of the feedback, the ability to answer a question and have someone say, ‘Tell me more,’ or ‘Explain this further,’ or ‘Given that, what about this’ — that’s what you don’t get on a written exam,” she said. This is a key point: Oral exams allow us to test a student’s intellectual […]
“Rigor doesn’t mean that the outcome of the assignment – the grade, the praise, the punishment – should make life difficult. It means that the task itself should make life difficult. “
“7Taps is the best tool I’ve encountered for creating a quick microcourse. A microcourse is a miniature learning experience. It’s useful anytime you want to teach or explain something quickly and concisely, without creating a complex course or writing a long memo. Here’s one I created with 7Taps about how to spend less time on email. It […]
“The good news is that moving to a mastery-based system and measuring students against a standard instead of each other can lift students and teachers into a positive-sum system. The success of some students would no longer be at the expense of others. Incorporating projects and small-group learning where students are actively giving each other […]
“If a student needs to create a presentation or write a paper based on research, and they don’t yet have the skills to find resources or take notes, you could supply them with pre-selected resources and pre-written notes on the topic, then just have them write the summary of the research. In the future, they […]
“As the skill premium and the economic cost of failing to ascend the education ladder rise in tandem, scholars find that adults are adopting differing parental styles — a crucial form of investment in the human capital of their children — and these differing styles appear to be further entrenching inequality.”
“Debate reinforces the idea that all issues only have two polar opposite viewpoints and that you must choose one.”
“There is a final step in the process of teaching students to change their minds: We—not just educators, but also school leaders, politicians, parents, and citizens—need to abandon our own desires to present certainty in our opinions and start revealing just how often we, too, change.”
“Hypothesis 4: Many students could do well with less effort in the past. The most interesting of all six hypotheses, and the one I’ve thought the most about, is that our experience this semester has revealed an unfortunate truth about how teaching and learning took place prior to the pandemic. This theory, explained by Jody Greene […]
“During the 2019-2020 school year, a group of teachers at Phillips Academy had the opportunity to design an immersive, term-long program called the Workshop. The basic parameters were: The Workshop would be a student’s sole academic commitment; they would stop all other classes. It would be ten weeks long. It would be made up of […]
“We created these resources to set a clear standard for assessing online learning experiences and to provide educators and school leaders concrete, actionable ideas and strategies. At the core, the norms and rubrics should drive 1) decisions about online curriculum and instruction 2) educator self-assessment and coaching conversations on online learning design and 3) thoughtful […]
“For older middle schoolers and high schoolers, recess and free play can take the form of frequent break times, self-determined passion projects and learning to solve real problems in their communities. As the American Academy of Pediatrics has noted, Cognitive processing and academic performance depend on regular breaks from concentrated classroom work. This applies equally to adolescents […]
“As Spring 2020 comes to a close, I decided to take stock. What worked in my online class during COVID-19 and what didn’t, from a teaching perspective? What can I take away for next semester? So, I conducted an informal survey last week with my students. Thirty-four responded.”
“I think all teachers teaching online during the Coronavirus online learning period should pay particularly close attention to the Transactional Distance Theory’s core constructs of dialogue and structure.”
“The results demonstrated that holding students to high standards of performance, academic honesty and professional conduct was the most important factor to both faculty in their online teaching and alumni in their online learning. Additionally, alumni valued engagement with their faculty more than engagement with other students or course content. Students need an online instructor […]
“Students didn’t always learn more from interacting with each other than working alone in the 71 underlying studies. The ones that produced the strongest learning gains for peer interaction were those where adults gave children clear instructions for what do during their conversations. Explicit instructions to “arrive at a consensus” or “make sure you understand […]
“Students didn’t always learn more from interacting with each other than working alone in the 71 underlying studies. The ones that produced the strongest learning gains for peer interaction were those where adults gave children clear instructions for what do during their conversations. Explicit instructions to “arrive at a consensus” or “make sure you understand […]
“The higher the ratio between the two — the more a teacher praised and the less they scolded — the better kids stayed focused on their lessons.”
“In the first year of the program… the English exams included a variety of writing tasks, each designed to train students to engage with information in different ways. The hope was to simultaneously strengthen and diversify students’ skill sets as readers, writers and independent thinkers.”
“These strategies have led to some pretty good results, the professors say. In a common national exam created by the American Chemical Society for undergraduate curricula, their students have performed well above the national average. The mean score is around the 80th percentile. (The national average would be the 50th.)”
“Restorative processes are intended to reduce the shame and stigma associated with negative behaviors, and to avoid ostracizing wrongdoers.”
“Rodriguez and her team include five distinct “awarenesses” in their framework: Awareness of the self as a teacher, awareness of the teaching process, awareness of the learner, awareness of interaction, and awareness of context. Each is a continuum, and teachers develop them at varying rates.”
“A teacher can be soft-spoken, not someone we’d describe as extroverted or funny, but still create an excellent learning environment. What really matters is the ability to demonstrate compassion and emotional constancy, the cultural competency needed to develop trust and understanding with students, and the courage to, as Brené Brown writes, take risks and be vulnerable.
“Formal and informal learning are two opposing learning styles. One is pragmatic and organized. The other, casual and unstructured. We’ve written about the merits and methods of both in the past, but today, we’re doing an ultimate comparison.”
“We have a conversation in class, and then we have a Twitter chat, and then we have a conversation about what’s possible in a Twitter chat versus what’s possible in a classroom.”
“Students are affected by more than just the quality of a lesson plan. They also respond to the passion of their teachers and the engagement of their peers, and they seek a sense of purpose. They benefit from specific instructions, constant feedback and a culture of learning that encourages resilience in the face of failure […]
“In 1907, a teacher from Italy proposed a new vision for the modern classroom… She designed a teaching style intended to identify and cultivate the unique potential, interests and aspirations of each learner. She named it after herself: the Montessori Method.
“Always default to compassion.”
“Teachers want the freedom to be able to bounce from idea to idea and ask students to make those important cognitive connections. However, without a foundation of skills and knowledge, those leaps in higher order thinking are impossible.”
“Students don’t do particularly well on standardized tests at The Met… School leaders, though, don’t pay much attention to test scores. Nancy Diaz Bain, a co-director, said she and her colleagues prefer to keep track of state survey data about student engagement, parent feedback about their children’s progress, student behavior, graduation rates and student performance […]
I’m not prescient enough to know the best why for instructional principles and practices in our schools, but here are a few possibilities1 that I believe would take us in a markedly more compelling direction as we answer the question, Why do we instruct young people?”
If we want to raise whole human beings, we have to become whole human beings ourselves. This is the really, really hard work. Want your kids to read more? Let them see you reading every day. Want your kids to practice an instrument? Let them see you practicing an instrument. Want your kids to spend more time outside? Let […]
“This seventh report… proposes ten innovations that are already in currency but have not had a profound influence on education in their current form.”
To be clear, the goal is not to create inherently boring classrooms with boring teachers delivering boring lectures. Permanent or extended boredom in school can lead to lower engagement and lower motivation, which can lead to lower student achievement levels and higher truancy rates (Saeed & Zyngier, 2012). Instead, the goal is to help students […]
“Inquiry-based lessons … begin with you do and give students the opportunity to figure things out for themselves. They rely on the first of the eight practice standards: Make sense of problems and persevere in solving them. The theory is that if a student works through the steps on his or her own, that student […]
“CUREs have five defining characteristics. First, they contain an element of discovery: the student scientists are bringing brand-new data to light. Second, the experimentation in which they engage involves “iteration”: repeating a process a number of times, altering a single variable to find out what happens. Third, participants experience a significant degree of collaboration, with […]
“Personalized learning is not new. Know your history. It predates Silicon Valley and it pre-dates educational computing and it most certainly pre-dates Khan Academy… Educational psychologists have been building machines to do this — supposedly to function like a tutor — for almost 100 years.”
“Rigor is not about making student tasks and assessments harder, but about creating high expectations for learning, supporting students as they perform at higher levels, and allowing students to demonstrate that they have learned at those levels.”
“At critical moments in time, you can raise the aspirations of other people significantly, especially when they are relatively young, simply by suggesting they do something better or more ambitious than what they might have in mind.”
“Dungeons & Dragons is an innately multidisciplinary and multimodal experience, which is why scholars and educators like Wells tend to describe its learning benefits in terms of lists and inventories. Its implementation as an instructional tool, then, is not only fun, but also becomes a sort of curricular node with the capacity to engage students in […]
“Meanwhile, new research documents the challenges that beset the effort seemingly from day one. And there remains little evidence that proficiency-based education has boosted student learning, in Maine or elsewhere.”
“Silence offers a structure that encourages internal discipline, and as a result, greater capacity for free thinking. It is an essential element of a pedagogical practice that supports ideas of continual growth, possibility, and fundamental care of students.”
“Let me be clear, I place no value for either end (or the middle) of the “personalized learning” continuum.”
“[My 5-year-old] sees me cutting things up and glueing them into my diary every morning, and he always wants to look at my notebook, so one day I (as casually as possible) asked him if he’d like his own special notebook to keep a diary in. That’s how he got started.”
I don’t think that it would be wise, necessarily, to not have disciplines where kids can go deeply into the mastery of those disciplinary ways of thinking, but I don’t think that it should stop there. History class should not necessarily just be about learning to think like a historian, it should also now include […]
“The constant presence of adults is intended to keep children safe, but what are its likely effects? How might kids deprived of opportunities for free play, risk-taking and self-governance differ from previous generations when they leave the nest? We would expect two main areas of difficulty.”
“When they arrive in class, students get into small groups, where they have 15 minutes to share thoughts, lingering questions, and epiphanies (TQEs) they have about the reading… By the time the 15 minutes is up, each group needs to choose their top 2 TQEs from the group and write them on the board… Thompson then moderates a whole-class […]
“It wasn’t that they didn’t care about teaching. It was that they knew too much about their subject, and had mastered it too long ago, to relate to my ignorance about it.”
The purpose is to get students thinking about how to frame an argument and defend their position using facts. As part of the unit, students work in teams and must write rationales for their case theories.”
Make yourself more interested in the sense that your students are making rather than the sense they aren’t making. Celebrate and build on that sense.”
“Human ability is not one thing, so it doesn’t make sense to talk about someone as “smart” or “dumb.” That’s unidimensional. Someone might be very good with numbers, very bad with words, about average in using space, and gifted in using of visual imagery. Indeed, any teacher will have noticed that different students have different […]
“There are many alternative grading schemes designed to ensure that feedback and reflection is a collaboration between the teacher and student, and not another thing teachers must do on their own.”
“Our brain has evolved to communicate face-to-face, the more we go away from that specific channel, the less efficient we are.”
“We found that personal microbiome analysis significantly enhanced the engagement and interest of students while completing microbiome assignments, the self-reported time students spent researching the microbiome during the two week microbiome unit, and the attitudes of students regarding the course overall.”
Though grounded in complex positive psychology research, the strength-based approach boils down to a simple rule: Focus on what students do well. It feels natural to do the opposite, because pulling up areas of weakness can seem like the best way to help children grow.”
In the same way the wheelchair ramp also helps all passengers, I have witnessed how my own (inexpert) shift toward UDL has helped all my students, not just the ones with the quirky learning profiles.”
“Foundations before choice. Learn the notes before you play the concerto. But while it is true that most fields have some sequential ordering of topics, it is also true that what David Perkins calls playing the whole game at the junior level has a lot of advantages. Perkins cites Little League as an example: we […]
Both of the studies mentioned found a negative relationship between students’ use of technology in their learning environments, and their feelings of academic engagement or sense of belonging in school.”
Cuban told me one of Summit’s key strengths is its skilled, well-trained teachers—teachers get eight weeks of paid time to improve their craft during the school year, in addition to one paid month during the summer—who use technology to achieve specific goals and their professional judgment to make decisions on how and why certain learning […]
Gesture seems to lighten the load on our cognitive systems. Cook has shown, for instance, that if you ask people to do two things at once — explain a math problem while remembering a sequence of letters — they do a far better job if permitted to gesture while explaining. Research suggests that when we […]
Students will be able to [accomplish outcome X] by [using method Y] so that [they will be helped in Z way].”
Our research group has published the results of two studies on two stage exams. One looks at student retention of content… And the second looks at student experiences.”
On the one hand, students now seem far more engaged in school and committed to college. From 2014 to 2016, the percentage of ChiTech freshmen on track to graduate in four years rose from 63 to 78 percent… On the other hand, ChiTech’s standardized test scores have remained stagnant and well below district averages.”
If you are reading something lengthy – more than 500 words or more than a page of the book or screen – your comprehension will likely take a hit if you’re using a digital device. The finding was supported by numerous studies and held true for students in college, high school and grade school. Research […]
This problem of replication and scale-up speaks more directly to the question of whether personalized learning holds promise to dramatically improve educational outcomes for all students. If effects diminish when implemented more broadly, it will not have the magnitude of impact that many are hoping to see.”
Who in our class supported you in an important way? Who in our class pushed you to think differently or more deeply? Who in our class inspired you by setting an example?”
I’ve analysed the data from over 100,000 learners on the University of Melbourne’s various MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) – every click, tap, swipe they make, every document they consult, and every word they write in chat forums and exercises.”
The Hattie/Donoghue learning model dives into… learning strategies that work best at the surface level, …[to] consolidate surface learning… [to] develop deep learning… [and to] consolidate deep learning… Interestingly, the only strategy that seemed to work in all four quadrants (acquiring surface, consolidating surface, acquiring deep, consolidating deep) was the jigsaw activity.”
Here are a few ideas as a kind of quick overview, with general summaries for each. I’ve added “tags” for each domain so that we can begin to see how existing and emerging initiatives (e.g., personalized learning), trends (e.g., the flipped classroom), and buzz words (e.g., digital footprint) might fit into each.”
“I know that they could learn anything they need to learn from their homes with a device on their lap still in their pajamas. They don’t need me to learn. They need me to care.”
“I asked Teller, a former Latin teacher and the silent half of the magical partnership known as Penn & Teller, about his years as an educator, and the role performance played in his teaching. Teller taught high school Latin for six years before he left to pursue a career in magic with Penn… As our conversation […]
1) There are many pedagogical techniques. 2) These techniques vary in usefulness, depending on the discipline, class size, role in the major/GE program, level of instruction, content, classroom layout, time of day…”
“1. Popcorn reading… 2. Giving students prepared notes… 3. Whole-class punishments… 4. Using learning styles to plan instruction… 5. “Differentiating” by having advanced students help struggling students”
“I learned these things about math and the process of learning not in the K-12 classroom but in the course of my life, as a kid who grew up reading Madeleine L’Engle and Dostoyevsky, who went on to study language at one of the world’s leading language institutes, and then to make the dramatic shift […]
“We looked around the nation for courses with buzz, according to campus newspapers, higher education experts and enrollment numbers. Students still file into lecture halls and classrooms, but once they’re seated, it’s clear that these courses are different. They mess with the old models. And they give students an experience that might change how they […]
“We tried to brainstorm what pedagogical foundation new teachers would need before entering the classroom and what was feasible to provide these individuals in a one-day workshop. We knew that one cannot teach someone how to teach in a day; but we realized there are basic principles that every new teacher should understand before entering […]