The Educator's Notebook

featured articles

"The Case For Applied History”
History Today - 9/1/18

“Historians are not seers; their analogies may be misplaced and their assessments can be wrong. Yet the idea of history constituting a valuable guide for present and future action was an established part of western culture. This makes sense. After all, the past is our sole repository of information about what works and what does not; we have nothing else to draw upon. In our everyday lives we constantly make decisions based on past experience. While two situations may not be perfectly alike, nevertheless we divine patterns and lessons in the past that can help us to make better choices. In recent decades, however, things have changed.”
“What To Do In Week One” — A Helpful List
ASCD - 9/1/18

“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 teachers do?”
The Case For Emotion And Empathy As Part Of The Curriculum
Atlantic - 4/5/16

“Yet while such a unit may be rigorous intellectually, it is arguably incomplete unless students tangle with the book’s emotional core… Standards rarely address it; administrators rarely explicitly encourage it; few people pay consultants to give presentations on it at staff meetings. To do the work mandated by the Common Core well (which, for a good English teacher, is nothing particularly new), it may be helpful. To make students kinder and more conscientious citizens, it’s perhaps imperative.”

admissions

Selective Colleges Increasingly Admit Students For Sophomore Year
Hechinger Report - 8/23/18

“Nearly one in five full-time freshmen drop out. Conditional admission gives universities a line on applicants ready to start as sophomores, filling the resulting empty seats and beds and keeping tuition coming in.”
Elite Schools Should Get Much Bigger (via Harvard Admissions)
Bloomberg - 6/28/18

adolescence

Kids (Age 14 to 22) Form A Consulting Business For How To Talk To Kids
New York Times - 8/18/18

“JÜV Consulting is staffed entirely by young people who range in age from 14 to 22. “I was honestly quite skeptical when I found out they were teenagers,” Mr. DeLeo admitted. “After the first call, they blew me away. They could walk into a regular business setting with people in their 30s and 40s and be completely comfortable. They are living the demographic we were targeting.””

assessment

The Princeton Review’s Woes - And How The Tutoring Industry Works
Chronicle of Higher Education - 8/19/18

athletics

US Olympics Hosts Reality Show Auditions To Woo Crossover Athletes
New York Times - 8/20/18

“The idea of “talent transfer” — that a sprinter could become a bobsledder or a gymnast could become a diver — is not new. But in the “Olympic Hopeful” model, the athletes don’t come from professional sports backgrounds. Most are full-time students or hold full-time jobs. Not everyone thought it would work, until Josh Williamson, then a 20-year-old lacrosse player, emerged as a winner in 2017. Within months, Mr. Williamson transformed into a world-class bobsledder, winning five international medals. He is expected to compete at the 2022 Winter Olympics.”

character

Deconstructing Why People Say “I Can’t”
Rob Jones Journey - 2/26/18

cognitive science

“The Pediatrician’s Case For Resuscitating Play”
Brookings - 8/21/18

“This week, the journal Pediatrics featured a clarion call to encourage play as a way to reduce stress, promote social skills, and to embolden cognitive growth in young children.”
Rote Drilling Can Actually Be Helpful
Psychology Today - 8/18/18

"Routine practice and drilling—especially when coupled with corrective feedback and ambitious but attainable goal-setting—should help students learn better. Such distributed practice is “necessary if not sufficient for acquiring expertise.” Procedural fluency and conceptual understanding influence each other bidirectionally over time.”
Just A New Reminder: Multitasking Hinders Long Term Performance
EdSurge - 8/17/18
Some Awards Actually Demotivate (For Attendance, Etc)
Harvard - 7/1/18

“Survey studies provide evidence suggesting that receiving retrospective awards may demotivate the behavior being awarded by inadvertently signaling (a) that recipients have performed the behavior more than their peers have; and (b) that recipients have performed the behavior to a greater degree than was organizationally expected. A school leaders survey shows that awards for attendance are common, and that the organizational leaders who offer these awards are unaware of their potential demotivating impact.”

creativity

A Talk By Austin Kleon Summarizing His Books On Creativity [video]
MIT Media Lab - 8/16/18

curriculum

Should Service Be Part Of The Required Curriculum?
Stanford Social Innovation Review - 8/20/18

“No matter how smart, educated, and well-resourced you are, when it comes to problem-solving, nothing can replace the power of lived experience.”

diversity/inclusion

Teaching Boys To Examine Gender In Patriarchal Societies (Via India)
Brookings - 8/23/18
On Overcoming Cultural Forces Telling You Others’ Approval Matters Most
New York Times - 8/21/18
“Why 'Crazy Rich Asians’ Marks…A Movement For Underrepresented Voices”
LA Times - 8/10/18

early childhood

On Motivating Young Children (Without Rewards Or Punishment)
New York Times - 8/21/18

humanities

A Close Look At The Drop In Humanities Majors
Atlantic - 8/23/18
10 Writers On Books They’d Like To See In The High School Curriculum
New York Times - 8/21/18
On How Students Struggle With Interpreting Literature
Smart Set - 8/16/18

“I want them to do all the things: read against the grain, interrogate their own assumptions, and the biggie: think critically about what they read. In the end, however, Eliot’s “sea-girls” must speak for themselves even if it means they’re whispering one thing into the ears of my male students while beckoning the women to follow them out of the fog and into the “chambers of the sea.””
Gerard Manley Hopkins: 100 Years Since Being Published
New Statesman - 8/8/18
“Wikipedia, The Last Bastion Of Shared Reality”
Atlantic - 8/7/18

“As the rest of the media has lost its power as something like a neutral arbiter of reality, Wikipedia’s grip on that center has tightened. In the current conspiracy-obsessed world, where real structural divisions, technological change, and racial, ethnic, and religious conflicts have created deep polarization, Wikipedia’s importance is recognized by (basically) all.”

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Narrative Texts Go Fully Digital: Into Social Media
New Yorker - 6/18/18

“Almost since the start of the smartphone era, film and TV producers have been trying to figure out how to capitalize on our new habit of jumping from one screen to the next. At first, many of these efforts felt like tricks. With “skam,” the multi-platform approach feels organic—after all, the characters themselves are constantly shuttling among YouTube and Instagram and Facebook Messenger.”

language

Irony Poisoning: When Being Ironic Turns Into — Or Masks — Real Problems
New York Times - 8/23/18
A (Surprisingly Deep) Look At Alternatives To “Hey, Guys!”
Atlantic - 8/23/18

pedagogy

"What ‘Mastery-Based’ Can Look Like In The [Elementary] Classroom”
Hechinger Report - 8/23/18
School Stages Murder Mystery As Tool For Using Evidence To Make An Argument
ThisWeek - 8/21/18

"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.”

reading/writing

Step-By-Step Guide For Teaching Narrative Writing
Cult of Pedagogy - 7/29/18

safety

Surveillance In Schools: Where Is This Taking Us?
Forbes - 8/23/18
Social Media Monitoring Companies Start Working With Schools
Wired - 8/20/18

“A Vermont company that provides social media monitoring to schools and other organizations, described business as “definitely booming”… Desmond Patton, a professor at Columbia, believes social media monitoring can work if managed correctly. “I think there’s an opportunity for schools to use this as a way to support people but I would do so with extreme caution.””
On Implementing Safety Drills With Children’s Safety In Mind
Medium - 6/12/18

"Shouldn’t school safety drills take into consideration the children’s developmental levels and weigh the consequences of frightening them to the point of traumatizing them?”

social media

New York Public Library Makes Novels Readable On Instagram
Hyperallergic - 8/21/18

"Soon-to-come literature includes digital renderings of Franz Kafka’s 1915 novella The Metamorphosis, and 1892 short story The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman.”

tech

The State Of MOOCs: 2018
EdSurge - 8/21/18
Information Overload — And The Tools We Develop To Overcome It
1843 Magazine - 8/1/18

“One example was the introduction, in the late 17th century, of scholarly journals that included book reviews, helpfully filtering and summarising (and in some cases excerpting) notable titles… And the centuries-old practice of prefacing longer works with a “list of headings” was refined and developed in two directions [table of contents and indexes] to help readers find passages of interest within individual books.”

workplace

No Walking While On The Phone At GM — Even For The CEO
Fast Company - 8/23/18

“At General Motors, employees are not allowed to walk around on their phones. That’s pretty standard behavior for warehouses and manufacturing facilities, but this rule extends to the office. That means no looking at a phone on the way to a meeting. No taking calls while en route to the bathroom. No checking email while you’re going to the kitchen to get a coffee.”

other

A Private School - Public School Partnership Model
KQED - 8/19/18

"“I don’t see independent schools going anywhere anytime soon,” Slangen said. “But what can we do with what we have now and how might we be able to make an impact, a difference? To be a little bit more equitable, a little bit more accessible, a little bit more of the solution.””
Flossie Lewis, the 94 Year Old Retired Teacher, And Viral Sensation
PBS - 8/17/18

“More than 7 million people viewed teacher Flossie Lewis's Brief but Spectacular take on growing old in 2016. When it aired, her former students contacted us by the dozen, many to express appreciation for the profound impact she had on their lives. Flossie, now 94, returns in this special installment for an inspirational class discussion with some of her biggest fans.”

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Articles on August 26, 2018

featured articles

admissions

adolescence

assessment

athletics

character

cognitive science

creativity

curriculum

diversity/inclusion

early childhood

humanities

language

pedagogy

reading/writing

safety

social media

tech

workplace

other