The Educator's Notebook

featured articles

Ivies Profs To (All) Students: “Think For Yourself.”
Princeton - 8/29/17

"Thinking for yourself means questioning dominant ideas even when others insist on their being treated as unquestionable. It means deciding what one believes not by conforming to fashionable opinions, but by taking the trouble to learn and honestly consider the strongest arguments to be advanced on both or all sides of questions—including arguments for positions that others revile and want to stigmatize and against positions others seek to immunize from critical scrutiny.”
“Memorize That Poem!”
New York Times - 8/26/17

"The truth is that memorizing and reciting poetry can be a highly expressive act. And we need not return to the Victorians’ narrow idea of the canon to reclaim poetry as one of the cheapest, most durable tools of moral and emotional education — whether you go in for Virgil, Li Po, Rumi or Gwendolyn Brooks (ideally, all four).”

character

Kids’ Books Have More Moral Impact When Characters Are Human
Guardian - 9/1/17
Fun Or Supportive: Kids Are Strategic When In Time Of Need
Stanford - 8/30/17

"The researchers found that individuals were more particular about whom they included in their trust networks compared to groups related to fun and excitement. In those selective trust networks, freshmen were more likely to include highly empathic students.”
Ending Behavior Rewards Dramatically Improved Student Motivation
KQED - 8/29/17

"Not only did the children shrug when the rewards disappeared… they also welcomed the character-infused approach to learning. Teachers overheard students talking about being responsible and respectful. Kids who ordinarily kept quiet in class volunteered frequently, and more stepped up to help their classmates.”
The Case For Board Games As Conflict Management Training
Quartz - 8/28/17

cognitive science

How Social Cues Shape Our Learning - Even When From Robots
New York Times - 8/26/17
How We Remember Space: The Hippocampus And The Case Of H.M.
New York Review of Books - 8/17/17

creativity

In Support Of Cultural Appropriation
New York Times - 8/30/17
Play As A Driver Of Creativity and Fresh Thought
Farnam Street - 8/21/17

curriculum

Two Questions To Imagine A Future Curriculum
EdWeek - 9/1/17
4 Principles For Curriculum Design
NPR - 8/28/17

diversity/inclusion

"Us And Them” - A Podcast About America’s Cultural Divides
Us and Them - 9/3/17
ACLU Speaks Up About Defending Free Speech
New York Review of Books - 8/24/17
A Critique Of Identity Politics
Chronicle of Higher Education - 8/20/17

"A whole scholastic vocabulary has been developed to express these notions: fluidity, hybridity, intersectionality, performativity, transgressivity, and more. Anyone familiar with medieval scholastic disputes over the mystery of the Holy Trinity — the original identity problem — will feel right at home.”

humanities

Emoji Poetry Contest: Read the Emojis, Guess the Poem
Paris Review - 8/31/17
Mary Shelley Wrote A Plague Dystopia Set In 2100!
Smithsonian - 8/30/17

international

"4 Charts On How People Around The World See Education”
Pew Research - 8/28/17

language

We Must Define “Violence” To Understand If Speech Is Violence
JStor - 8/30/17

"What, then, is the meaning of a word? If you were one of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s philosophy students, this question would have occupied the preponderance of your term, as it did Wittgenstein’s academic life.”

leadership

Job Perks That Matter Most To Employees
Gallup - 8/28/17

pedagogy

Emerging Research Less Sanguine About “Personalized Learning”
Brookings - 8/15/17

"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.”
“Radical Candor” - A Guide To Giving Good Feedback
Radical Candor - 5/17/16

reading/writing

Orhan Pamuk On Students Knowing His Work Better Than He Does
LA Times - 8/27/17

"The things [novelists] mean to describe and express when they write, the territory they wish to cover, may be very different from those elements that readers and students focus on. The author of a novel is not always the best placed to interpret it, and eventually others may become more familiar with the text than he is.”
Some Insight Into How People Used To Read: Aloud, Together
Spectator - 8/26/17

"It has long been thought, for instance, that the print revolution of the 18th century resulted in a shift from oral to silent reading, from shared reading to indulging in a book of one’s own, as books became more available to a wider range of people while leisure time also increased… On the contrary, reading aloud remained as popular as it had ever been because it was sociable and gave participants a glancing acquaintance with books that might otherwise take weeks to read.”
15 Tips On Writing Op-Eds… From A New York Times Editor
New York Times - 8/25/17
Personal Identity Vs. Stoicism In The Personal Essay
Boston Review - 8/22/17

"This brings us back to the personal essay. More than a fad and more than a form, we might think of the personal essay as a contract between reader and writer… This task is impossible, or at least impossible to derive pleasure from, without particularity and concreteness—a sense of reciprocity and respect… What we see in many personal essays today is not the shattering of language but the shattering of a pact.”
Be More Precise: Replacements For 16 Boring Words
Global Digital Citizen Foundation - 7/27/17

stem

Some Really Neat Machine Learning Work With Images
Medium - 9/1/17
"Letter Home From Wolfram Camp”
Wired - 8/23/17
Periodic Table: A Haiku For Every Element [Interactive]
Science - 8/4/17

tech

Audrey Watters On The Horizon Report
Hack Education - 8/30/17
How Coding Bootcamps Relate To College Degrees
Inside Higher Ed - 8/29/17
Horizon Report: Emerging Trends in Education and Tech (2017)
New Media Consortium - 8/29/17
Many Lessons Learned From Researching Coding Bootcamps
Medium - 6/29/17

other

What Happens When Teachers Are Tech Brand Ambassadors?
New York Times - 9/2/17
Is The Conversation Pit Poised For A Comeback?
Quartz - 9/1/17
Charlottesville Superintendent On The Start Of School This Year
Pacific Standard - 8/30/17

"Atkins is asking teachers to pay close attention to the age of their students, as well as to how much exposure they may or may not have had to the violence.”
A History Of Zork
MIT Technology Review - 8/22/17

The Educator's Notebook

Search thousands of curated articles from all back issues

Articles on September 03, 2017

featured articles

adolescence

assessment

athena

character

cognitive science

creativity

curriculum

diversity/inclusion

humanities

international

language

leadership

pedagogy

reading/writing

stem

tech

other