The Educator's Notebook

featured articles

Teens Give Advice For Social Media Use: To Parents And Each Other
New York Times - 9/20/23

“We spoke to girls from ages 12 to 17 who have participated in programs led by Girls Leadership, a nonprofit that teaches confidence-building and how to use social media responsibly. Here are some of their best pieces of advice for other teens — and what they want adults to know, too.”
“Unconditional Positive Regard” - What Students Need From Schools
Cult of Pedagogy - 9/18/23

“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 the foundation on which our students can thrive. And the more I learned about it, the more I was sold on its value.”
University Of Texas System Goes Big On Microcredentials
Inside Higher Ed - 9/14/23

““They’re voting with their enrollment, to start with—it’s an impressive sign of interest with the first semester alone,” UT system chancellor James B. Milliken said. “Everything I hear from students, from employers and others is they welcome this as an additional resource to prepare them for the marketplace.””
Is One-Size-Fits-All Better Than Personalized Learning? Maybe So.
Hechinger Report - 9/11/23

“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 are other advantages to having a class work on a common set of problems. It allows kids to work together, something that motivates many extroverted tweens and teens to do their homework. It can also trigger worthwhile class discussions, in which students explain how they solved the same problem differently.”
TextFX: A Writer/Poet/Rapper’s A.I. Companion
TextFX - 9/7/23

“TextFX is an AI experiment designed to help rappers, writers, and wordsmiths expand their process. It was created in collaboration with Lupe Fiasco, drawing inspiration from the lyrical and linguistic techniques he has developed throughout his career. TextFX consists of 10 tools, each is designed to explore creative possibilities with text and language.”

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How To Build An Institutional Research Culture At Your School
Maret - 9/5/23

“The goal of the final product of the work, Data-Informed Decision Making: A Guide to Institutional Research in Independent Schools, is to show the possibilities and value institutional research offers and to provide tools for the intrepid institutional researchers who are looking to grow their own skills and to foster their community's Data Culture.”
Caltech Allows STEM Admission Requirements Through Khan Academy
LA Times - 8/31/23

“In a groundbreaking step, the campus announced Thursday that it will drop admission requirements for calculus, physics and chemistry courses for students who don’t have access to them and offer alternative paths to prove mastery of the material… One of Caltech’s alternative paths is taking Khan Academy‘s free, online classes and scoring 90% or higher on a certification test.”
“Reframing Art History Through A BIPOC Lens”
Hyperallergic - 8/25/23

“Chiang reports that the reader has been well received by her students so far, with an end-of-semester survey indicating that they found the reader spoke more to their personal interests in art and history, made her courses more relevant to their lives, and provided a more nuanced and complex presentation of history.”
NASA Invites Student Entries To Human Exploration Rover Challenge, By Sept 21
Electronics Weekly - 8/22/23

“The Human Exploration Rover Challenge asks high school, college or university students from around the world to create “lightweight, human-powered rovers”. These will have to traverse an obstacle course simulating lunar and Martian terrain, while also completing mission-related science tasks.”
A.I. Is More Creative Than Most People. How Can It Help You?
One Useful Thing - 8/13/23

“Reading these studies, it seems like there are a few clear conclusions: AI can generate creative ideas in real-life, practical situations. It can also help people generate better ideas. The ideas AI generates are better than what most people can come up with, but very creative people will beat the AI (at least for now), and may benefit less from using AI to generate ideas. There is more underlying similarity in the ideas that the current generation of AIs produce than among ideas generated by a large number of humans. All of this suggests that humans still have a large role to play in innovation… but that they would be foolish not to include AI in that process, especially if they don’t consider themselves highly creative.”
Ideas For University Counselors Re: ChatGPT
Georgia Tech Admissions - 8/9/23

“I absolutely think you should experiment with AI as you write your recommendation letters this fall. The same advice applies to these letters as I provided for seniors writing essays. This is not a simple cut and paste, but instead a great tool for getting started, rephrasing, or discovering different ways to frame the content you are attempting to incorporate. Having done this personally for a few colleagues this summer, and after hearing from several college professors endorse the practice, I think you will find entering a few of your ideas or student provided details and specifics and then revising or “regenerating” in ChatGPT could save you precious time.”
The Surgeon General’s Full Report On Loneliness: What Schools Can Do (p. 60)
Health & Human Services - 8/1/23

“School administrators and leaders, boards of education, boards of trustees, teachers, parent teacher associations, state departments of education, and online learning platforms can all play a role. Develop a strategic plan for school connectedness and social skills with benchmark tracking… Build social connection into health curricula… Implement socially based educational techniques… Create a supportive school environment that fosters belonging…”
When Citizens Have Scaffolded Discussions, They Agree More Than Politics Might Suggest
America In One Room - 8/1/23

“The Stanford Deliberative Democracy Lab, in collaboration with Helena and various partners has conducted a national Deliberative Poll® to determine what Americans would really think about possible reforms to our democracy and our electoral processes if they had a chance to weigh the options under good conditions… What would Americans really think if they could discuss the issues in depth in moderated small group discussions with fellow citizens, if they had access to vetted and balanced briefing materials, and if they could get their questions answered by panels of competing experts representing different points of view? NORC at the University of Chicago convened a national sample of nearly 600 deliberators and a separate control group to consider reform proposals from across the political spectrum.”
Debate Vs. Discussion/Dialogue: An Excellent Frame And Resource Guide
Middle Web - 7/31/23

“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 available, but what they all have in common is an emphasis on student voice, listening, comprehending opposing views, and validating the lived experiences and values of others even though they may differ from our own. These are skills that we and democracies around the globe need to address the current crisis, prove that Dr. Rosenberg is wrong, and demonstrate that a bright future for democracy is still possible.”
“What If America Had A National Conversation Skills Curriculum?”
Intrepid News - 7/26/23

“Our conversation crisis has manifested in eye-watering political polarity. This bitter partisanship is not new, but fresh research has documented how it interferes with learning on college campuses and ultimately, decreases young adults’ faith in the power of communicating across differences. Their jadedness — and lack of ability and willingness to use conversation as a mechanism for compromise — is a fundamental threat to our democracy.”
“Six Mindset Shifts To Make Teaching Sustainable”
ASCD - 7/19/23

“Ultimately, sustainability in teaching came down to discussions about energy budgets. Teachers’ energy reserves are finite, and concerns about teacher agency, endless cycles of curriculum adoption, and limited time and resources wear on these energy reserves. Conversely, solutions like bolstering learner agency, creating collectivist school cultures where teachers collaborate regularly, and incorporating minimalist planning practices offered practical solutions for maintaining high quality instruction while distributing the energy demands of learning so teachers aren’t doing it all on their own.”
Harvard Student Best Shows Reality Of ChatGPT In Schools. Get Ready.
Slow Boring - 7/18/23

“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 model’s launch to the public. As it improves and develops a reputation for high-quality writing, this usage will increase. Next year, if college students are willing to use ChatGPT-4, they should be able to get passing grades on all of their essays with almost no work. In other words, ChatGPT-4 will eliminate Ds and Fs in the humanities and social sciences. And that’s only eight months after its release to the public — the technology is rapidly improving.”
Here’s 3 Ways A Middle School Teacher Used Generative A.I. Last Spring
Middle Web - 7/17/23

“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 even unpacked my units with it – gathering summaries, creating culminating projects of choice, and generating vocabulary from texts. Not only has this been informative for schema building, I’ve really been able to harness engagement from all learners. ChatGPT is my new recipe for differentiation.”
State Of Generative A.I. - July 2023 - An Orientation
One Useful Thing - 7/15/23

“I can’t claim that this is going to be a complete user guide, but it will serve as a bit of orientation to the current state of AI. I have been putting together a Getting Started Guide to AI for my students (and interested readers) every few months, and each time, it requires major modifications. The last couple of months have been particularly insane.”
On Intellectual Humility, Really Listening, And Fighting Polarization (Cf. Discussion)
Psychology Today - 7/5/23

“The contemporary cultural machinery is geared to chase folks out of the middle ground or push experts in one area out of their lane, leading them to confidently pronounce on matters they have no business banging on about. Call it cognitive narcissism. Curious, collaborative inquiry has been abandoned for the brute force of unilateral persuasion. Intellectual humility, instead, courts the kind of nuance that’s often found in the middle ground.”
“Why This A.I. Moment May Be The Real Deal”
The New Atlantis - 7/1/23

“So what’s different now? What follows in this essay is an attempt to contrast some of the most notable features of the new transformer paradigm (the T in ChatGPT) with what came before. It is an attempt to articulate why the new AIs that have garnered so much attention over the past year seem to defy some of the major lines of skepticism that have rightly applied to past eras — why this AI moment might, just might, be the real deal.”
“The Homework Apocalypse:” The Essay, Reading, And The Problem Set
One Useful Thing - 7/1/23

“Students will cheat with AI. But they also will begin to integrate AI into everything they do, raising new questions for educators. Students will want to understand why they are doing assignments that seem obsolete thanks to AI. They will want to use AI as a learning companion, a co-author, or a teammate. They will want to accomplish more than they did before, and also want answers about what AI means for their future learning paths. Schools will need to decide how to respond to this flood of questions. The challenge of AI in education can feel abstract, so to understand a bit more about what is going to happen, I wanted to examine some common assignment types… There is light at the end of the AI tunnel for educators, but it will require experiments and adjustment. In the meantime, we need to be realistic about how many things are about to change in the near future, and start to plan now for what we will do in response to the Homework Apocalypse. Fall is coming.”
The Affirmative Action Ruling: “Five Ways College Admissions Could Change”
New York Times - 6/30/23

“The Supreme Court’s ruling on Thursday that ended race-conscious admissions is widely expected to lead to a dramatic drop in the number of Black and Hispanic students at selective colleges. But the court’s decision could have other, surprising consequences, as colleges try to follow the law but also admit a diverse class of students.”
What Works In High School Reform Strategies
MDRC - 6/1/23

“Reviewed 13 evaluations of comprehensive reform efforts, identified the features of the models evaluated, and categorized them to create a high school reform framework that can be generally applied. The authors hope that school and district leaders can compare their current efforts with the framework to identify how they might refine or augment those efforts.”
How To Work With Your New A.I. Intern
One Useful Thing - 5/20/23

“This is really your intern. What it is worth using it for will be different for everyone, and the value will vary by task. Different people with different preferences may find very different uses. If you are a strong writer with a particular voice, you may never want to use AI for writing. If you are continually paralyzed when faced with a blank page, AI may be more useful. No one can provide clear guidance or a magical prompt; you are going to have to figure it out yourself. Your goal is to learn enough about your AI intern to fill out this chart:”
On Skipping Remedial Math And Taking Harder Math With More Support
KQED - 5/15/23

“An experimental psychologist by training, Logue designed an experiment. She compared remedial math classes to the alternative of letting ill-prepared students proceed straight to a college course accompanied by extra help. The early results of her randomized control trial were so extraordinary that her study influenced not only CUNY in 2016 but also California lawmakers in 2017 to start phasing out remedial education in their state.”
The Current Opportunity Of Generative A.I.
e-Literate - 4/23/23

“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 of structuring their arguments. Skills and knowledge aren’t dead. Writing and thinking skills most certainly aren’t. Far from it. If you doubt me, ask ChatGPT, “How might teaching students about Socrates’ philosophy and method help them learn to become better prompt engineers?” See what it has to say.”
“Your Email Does Not Constitute My Emergency”
New York Times - 4/13/23

“When we place too high a priority on the speed of our email replies, we destroy our ability to focus. Interruptions derail our train of thought and wreak havoc on our progress. When you know you don’t have to reply to emails right away, you can actually find flow and dedicate your full attention where you wish.”
Nationwide Survey Data On Sports Injuries For High School Aged Students
HealthDay - 3/15/23

“The researchers found that high school athletic trainers reported 15,531 injuries over 6,778,209 athletic exposures (AEs; practice or competition), yielding an estimated 5.2 million injuries nationally. Football (3.96 per AE), girls' soccer (2.65), and boys' wrestling (2.36) had the highest injury rates, with injury rates overall higher in boys' sports (2.52) versus girls' sports (1.56). Furthermore, the injury rate was higher in competition versus practice (rate ratio, 3.39). The head and face (24.2 percent), ankle (17.6 percent), and knee (14.1 percent) were the most commonly injured body sites, while sprains/strains (36.8 percent) and concussions (21.6 percent) were the most common diagnoses.”
Humanities Are In Decline. Or Are They?
New Yorker - 3/6/23

““Imagine if you had a voice assistant that could write code for you, and you said, ‘Hey, Alexa, build me a Web site to sell shoes,’ ” Sanjay Sarma, a professor of mechanical engineering at M.I.T., told me on the phone. “That’s already happening. It’s called ‘low-code.’ ” There has been much hand-wringing about ChatGPT and its ability to replicate some composition tasks. But ChatGPT can no more conceive “Mrs. Dalloway” than it can guide and people-manage an organization. Instead, A.I. can gather and order information, design experiments and processes, produce descriptive writing and mediocre craftwork, and compose basic code, and those are the careers likeliest to go into slow eclipse. “I think the future belongs to the humanities,” Sarma said.”
Teachers Use ChatGPT (For PD) More Than Students Do For School
Walton Family Foundation - 3/1/23

“Educators are innovators… They recognize the urgency of this moment and want to use every tool at their disposal to meet each students’ unique needs.”
A Globally-Oriented History Of Science
Boston Review - 2/22/23

“Poskett argues that this story is an empirical failure: it misses how science is actually done, and it does a disservice to practicing scientists. Above all, it misses where science is done. Against the standard narrative of a European scientific revolution, Poskett implores us to see science as a global enterprise, the result of the intermingling of people from different cultures and backgrounds.”
ChatGPT Is An Example Machine For Teachers. This Is Excellent.
Cult of Pedagogy - 2/19/23

“Our goal was to help students learn the underlying principles of kinetic and potential energy. We used ChatGPT to generate a range of different examples of kinetic and potential energy. Kids could sort these examples into categories and then explain their choices. In the screenshots below, the text next to the yellow icon is our prompt, and the text next to the green icon is ChatGPT’s response.”
Should School Breathe Life Into Students Or Equip Them For The Future?
The Point - 2/13/23

“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 only for the sake of something else outside of them, to be experienced later in life. Moreover, we tend to equate educational “success” with future material pleasures, won through the enjoyment of consumer goods, and afforded by maximally lucrative and socially respected occupations. These two tendencies are closely related: we have a circumscribed view of personal success in part because we overlook the kinds of goods that are already available to young people in the classroom.”
That Harvard Study: Positive Relationships And Success In Life
CNBC - 2/10/23

“Contrary to what you might think, it’s not career achievement, money, exercise, or a healthy diet. The most consistent finding we’ve learned through 85 years of study is: Positive relationships keep us happier, healthier, and help us live longer. Period.”
“High Performing Teachers With Low Tech Classrooms”
Larry Cuban - 2/4/23

“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.”
A Curriculum For Introduction To A.I., Middle And High School Level
MIT - 2/1/23

“The Daily-AI workshop, designed by MIT educators and experienced facilitators, features hands-on and computer-based activities on AI concepts, ethical issues in AI, creative expression using AI, and how AI relates to your future. You will experience training and using machine learning to make predictions, investigate bias in machine learning applications, use generative adversarial networks to create novel works of art, and learn to recognize the AI you interact with daily and in the world around you.”
A.I. Writing Policy Suggests “Coauthorship” With A.I.
Inside Higher Ed - 1/31/23

“In fact, OpenAI expects a collaborative disclaimer, one in which the published content is “attributed” to a human author (or company) at the same time that the “role of AI in formulating the content is clearly disclosed in a way that no reader could possibly miss.” …The company insists that we should not view the content generated by the human-AI interaction as entirely AI or “wholly” human. At the same time OpenAI insists that “it is a human who must take ultimate responsibility for the content being published.””
Kids Want To Know More About Careers In Climate Change
EdWeek - 1/19/23

“30 percent of the roughly 1,000 teenagers surveyed by the EdWeek Research Center last fall said they wanted to learn more about job opportunities related to sustainability and climate change.”
How We Debate: Highly Successful People Argue Differently
CNBC - 1/19/23

“Instead of trying to “win” every argument you find yourself in, you could have more success if you look at arguments as opportunities to learn and grow… The setup was simple: Participants had to debate hot-button topics in an online chatroom. One group was instructed to adopt a competitive mentality in order to “win” the argument, while the other group was told to “argue to learn.” An “arguing to learn” mentality rests in viewing contentious conversations as collaborative exchanges that can deepen your understanding of a given topic, rather than battles to be won.”
On ChatGPT: “AI Is The End Of Writing”
The Spectator - 1/10/23

“It’s at this point that the usual essay on ChatGPT points towards something consoling. Something like ‘Ah, but do not despair, humans will always yada yada’. I’m afraid I am not here to offer any such solace. I’ve done writing of all kinds for several decades, from travel journalism to art journalism to political journalism, from literary fiction to youthful memoirs to notorious-letters-to-No-10 to Fifty Shades porn (a pseudonym) to, lately, religious or domestic thrillers. And I have to say: we are screwed. By which I mean: we, the writers. We’re screwed. Writing is over. That’s it. It’s time to pack away your quill, your biro, and your shiny iPad: the computers will soon be here to do it better.”
The Future Of ChatGPT Will Be Combining It With Structured Knowledge
Stephen Wolfram - 1/9/23

“For decades there’s been a dichotomy in thinking about AI between “statistical approaches” of the kind ChatGPT uses, and “symbolic approaches” that are in effect the starting point for Wolfram|Alpha. But now—thanks to the success of ChatGPT—as well as all the work we’ve done in making Wolfram|Alpha understand natural language—there’s finally the opportunity to combine these to make something much stronger than either could ever achieve on their own.”
“ChatGPT For Teachers” - The Best Guide I Have Seen For Teachers
Evan Dunne - 1/9/23

“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.”
Quiz: Did A 4th Grader Write This, Or The New Chatbot?
New York Times - 12/26/22

“Most of us have never seen anything like it outside of science fiction. To better understand what ChatGPT can do, we decided to see if people could tell the difference between the bot’s writing and a child’s. We used real essay prompts from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (the standardized test from the Department of Education, known as the nation’s report card). We asked the bot to produce essays based on those prompts — sometimes with a little coaching, and always telling it to write like a student of the appropriate age. We put what it wrote side by side with sample answers written by real children. We asked some experts on children’s writing to take our variation on the Turing test, live on a call with us. They were a fourth-grade teacher; a professional writing tutor; a Stanford education professor; and Judy Blume, the beloved children’s author. None of them could tell every time whether a child or a bot wrote the essay. See how you do.”
What Is This New AI Chatbot, In Brief?
New York Times - 12/5/22

“ChatGPT is, quite simply, the best artificial intelligence chatbot ever released to the general public… For most of the past decade, A.I. chatbots have been terrible — impressive only if you cherry-pick the bot’s best responses and throw out the rest. In recent years, a few A.I. tools have gotten good at doing narrow and well-defined tasks, like writing marketing copy, but they still tend to flail when taken outside their comfort zones… But ChatGPT feels different. Smarter. Weirder. More flexible. It can write jokes (some of which are actually funny), working computer code and college-level essays. It can also guess at medical diagnoses, create text-based Harry Potter games and explain scientific concepts at multiple levels of difficulty."
Respect For Place: Japan Cleans Up After Itself In The World Cup
New York Times - 11/27/22

““It’s a sign of respect for a place,” said Eiji Hattori, 32, a fan from Tokyo, who had a bag of bottles, ticket stubs and other stadium detritus. “This place is not ours, so we should clean up if we use it. And even if it is not our garbage, it’s still dirty, so we should clean it up.””
A Cognitive, Pedagogical Argument For Rote Learning
Law and Liberty - 11/21/22

“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.”
Teen Perceptions Of Social Media
Pew Research - 11/16/22

“Majorities of teens credit social media with strengthening their friendships and providing support while also noting the emotionally charged side of these platforms”
When To Record Video Lessons
Edutopia - 11/11/22

“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.”
How To Have Political Discussions (Not Debate) In The Classroom
EdSurge - 11/7/22

“Constructive dialogue is a form of conversation in which people who have different values, beliefs and perspectives seek to build new ways to understand and interact with each other, even as they sustain commitments to their own stances. It builds opportunities for students to connect rather than argue, to understand rather than vilify, and to step into curiosity rather than judgment. Practicing constructive dialogue lends itself to developing conflict resolution skills, critical thinking and reflective thinking around ideological differences.”
Does Teaching Better Question-Asking Help Foster Curiosity?
Harvard - 11/1/22

“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 children to simply ask more questions: Children in the question-asking condition did not ask more questions about a novel animal than children in the listening condition. However, we found a whopping effect on “willingness-to-pay.” Children in the question-asking training were willing to pay many more stickers for new science content than children in the careful listening condition. We also found that children in the question-asking condition gained marginally more science knowledge than the careful listeners. Furthermore, practice with question-asking was more beneficial for children with lower baseline knowledge, suggesting that question-asking shows promise for enhancing children’s motivation to learn and equalizing academic disparities.”
On The Effect Of Computational Analysis On Culture
Atlantic - 10/30/22

“The analytics revolution, which began with the movement known as Moneyball, led to a series of offensive and defensive adjustments that were, let’s say, catastrophically successful… the quantitative revolution in culture is a living creature that consumes data and spits out homogeneity… It sacrifices diversity for the sake of familiarity. It solves finite games at the expense of infinite games… In a world that will only become more influenced by mathematical intelligence, can we ruin culture through our attempts to perfect it?”
A.I. Machines Can Write Essays. How Do We Teach Writing Now?
Inside Higher Ed - 10/26/22

““The essays that students turn in are about to get a lot better,” Ethan Mollick, associate professor of management at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, tweeted recently. “I just tried Moonbeam and it produced an outline & credible undergraduate essay with just the prompt ‘Legitimation and startups.’ And that is without human intervention, which would help.” In fact, Mollick misspelled the title as “legimation,” and the system corrected the error in the essay.”
“Did The Pandemic Change Your Personality? Possibly.”
New York Times - 10/22/22

“For more than two years, Covid disrupted social rituals and rites of passage. Now a recent study suggests we have become less extroverted, creative, agreeable and conscientious. The declines in some traits were sharper among young people.”
Rigor Without Support Misses The Needs Of Today’s Students
New York Times - 10/7/22

“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, without petitions and even without having to ask.”
“The Power Of Doing Less In Schools”
ASCD - 10/1/22

“If the system has to be fixed, and we can't fix the system by adding to it, then the logical place to start is with subtraction. We need to look closely at our schools and figure out everything that we don't need to be doing anymore. We need to find as many things as possible that we can take off the plates of overworked educators. At its heart, the art of subtraction is clearing away peripheral parts of a system so that we can put better focus on the most important things.”
Defining Equity: What Is the “E” In DEI?
Gallup - 9/26/22

“Gallup defines equity as fair treatment, access and advancement for each person in an organization. This definition considers the historical and sociopolitical factors that affect opportunities and experiences so that policies, procedures and systems can help meet people's unique needs without one person or group having an unfair advantage over another.”
“What Makes A Great Life?”
Gallup - 9/22/22

“Here are a few of the discoveries that are truly compelling: People who love their jobs do not hate Mondays. Education-related debt can cause an emotional scar that remains even after you pay off the debt. Volunteering is not just good for the people you are helping; it is also good for you. Exercising is better at eliminating fatigue than prescription drugs. Loneliness can double your risk of dying from heart disease. Using all these insights from across the industry combined with our surveys and analysis, we created the five elements of wellbeing. And our ongoing global research confirms that the five elements of wellbeing are significant drivers of a great life everywhere.”
“What Mrs. Bailey Taught Me In A.P. History Changed My Life”
New York Times - 9/21/22

“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. Crump had us fumbling around in Plato’s cave. Mrs. Carter taught us the art of stringing sentences together and making coherent arguments. Mrs. Miller introduced us to literature that posed the ultimate questions… Great teachers force us to wrestle with questions that have plagued philosophers, politicians, religious leaders, poets and scribes for millenniums.”
“How To Argue Well.” - On Debate And Polarization
New York Times - 9/11/22

“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 are superfluous,” she wrote. The novelist Ben Lerner, who also spent years as a debater, an experience he drew from in his 2019 novel, “The Topeka School,” told me he had to unlearn the idea “that every conversation ended with a winner and a loser.””
Random Acts Of Kindness Have Outsized (Large) Effects
New York Times - 9/2/22

“The notion that kindness can boost well-being is hardly new. Studies have shown that prosocial behavior — basically, voluntarily helping others — can help lower people’s daily stress levels, and that simple acts of connection, like texting a friend, mean more than many of us realize. But researchers who study kindness and friendship say they hope the new findings strengthen the scientific case for making these types of gestures more often.”
Relationships Matter: How Can Schools Make Relationship Data Visible?
EdSurge - 9/1/22

“Last month, a new study in Nature revealed a key predictor of economic mobility: connectedness. Specifically, researchers at Opportunity Insights found that relationships with higher-income students dramatically improved low-income students’ chances of upward mobility in adulthood, even more than traditional success metrics like school quality.”
On Civil Discussion In The Classroom
Chronicle of Higher Education - 8/29/22

“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.”
Four Styles Of Guiding Students On Social Media Use
Psychology Today - 8/28/22

“It should come as no surprise that parents vary widely in the way they manage their children’s social media use. According to the authors, there are four general approaches parents take when monitoring their teenagers’ social media use.”
Interdependent Mentoring Helps Both Mentor And Mentee
Edutopia - 8/26/22

“A difference between traditional and interdependent mentoring is that traditional mentoring can be one-sided. New teachers may feel compelled to show deference to experienced veterans, and mentors may be asked to respond to problems they’re not comfortable solving without additional help. In contrast, interdependent mentoring partnerships prioritize both teachers’ contributions. Mentors are appreciated for their deep knowledge and wisdom, and new teachers are valued for their innovative ideas and fresh instructional insights.”
“What's Actually Being Taught In History Class”
New York Times - 8/17/22

“All of the teachers we spoke with agreed that their political beliefs should not shape classroom discussions. But their personal experiences and teaching philosophies have informed their approaches to tough subjects like identity, representation and inequality.”
“Behind Their Screens” - Project Zero’s Book On Teens And Tech
Kirkus Reviews - 8/16/22

“However, they also believe that disconnecting is not an option. “For many teens, technologies are a non-negotiable for friendship preservation,” write the authors. “There’s no way to opt out without major social repercussions. They wish adults would acknowledge this reality.””
YouTube And TikTok Catapult To Top Of Teen Social Media Use
Pew Research - 8/10/22

“YouTube tops the 2022 teen online landscape among the platforms covered in the Center’s new survey, as it is used by 95% of teens. TikTok is next on the list of platforms that were asked about in this survey (67%), followed by Instagram and Snapchat, which are both used by about six-in-ten teens… This study also explores the frequency with which teens are on each of the top five online platforms: YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat and Facebook. Fully 35% of teens say they are using at least one of them “almost constantly.””
“How To Hold A Better Class Discussion” - A Deep Dive
Chronicle of Higher Education - 8/7/22

“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 avoid the frustration of a sea of impassive faces.”
McLuhan Was Right. The Medium Really Is The Message
New York Times - 8/7/22

“McLuhan’s view is that mediums matter more than content; it’s the common rules that govern all creation and consumption across a medium that change people and society. Oral culture teaches us to think one way, written culture another. Television turned everything into entertainment, and social media taught us to think with the crowd.”
On Friendship, Class, And Social Mobility
Brookings - 8/2/22

“Creating more connections across class lines – either through greater economic integration of our institutions and neighborhoods or more opportunities for cross-class social engagement – looks to be the most promising route to improving rates of upward economic mobility.”
Meet The Writers Using A.I. To Help Them Write Their Novels
The Verge - 7/20/22

“She’s a little embarrassed to say she’s become reliant on it. Not that she couldn’t write without it, but she thinks her writing wouldn’t be as rich, and she would certainly be more burnt out. “There’s something different about working with the AI and editing those words, and then coming up with my own and then editing it, that’s much easier. It’s less emotionally taxing. It’s less tiresome; it’s less fatiguing. I need to pay attention much less closely. I don’t get as deeply into the writing as I did before, and yet, I found a balance where I still feel very connected to the story, and I still feel it’s wholly mine.””
“168 Writing Prompts To Spark Discussion And Reflection”
New York Times - 7/13/22

“Each day of the school year we publish a Student Opinion question: an invitation for students to share their own opinions and experiences in response to New York Times stories on the news of the day. Each of these prompts is introduced with an article, interactive feature or video produced by The Times… The prompts are organized into two sections: questions that lend themselves well to persuasive writing, and questions that encourage narrative writing. We have also published a short, visual post highlighting five of the most popular questions we asked this school year.”
What Is “Revenge Bedtime Procrastination”?
ADDitude - 7/11/22

“Revenge bedtime procrastination is the act of deliberately putting off sleep in favor of leisure activities — binging Netflix or scrolling TikTok, for example — that provide short-term enjoyment but few long-term life benefits. Revenge bedtime procrastination is especially likely when busy schedules and daily responsibilities prevent the enjoyment of “me time” earlier in the day.”
On Good Teaching: Can We Have Both High Achievement And High Engagement?
Hechinger Report - 7/11/22

“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 researchers managed to find six teachers among the 53 in the study that could do both types of good teaching simultaneously. Teachers who incorporated a lot of hands-on, active learning received high marks from students and raised test scores. These teachers often had students working together collaboratively in pairs or groups, using tactile objects to solve problems or play games. For example, one teacher had students use egg cartons and counters to find equivalent fractions. These doubly “good” teachers had another thing in common: they maintained orderly classrooms that were chock full of routines.”
“What Do Teachers Know About How Colleagues Teach: Part 2”
Larry Cuban - 7/9/22

“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 message to send to kids. In the same way that children feel more secure when their parents are getting along, students feel something similar when they see us support each other.”
“What Do Teachers Know About How Colleagues Teach: Part 1”
Larry Cuban - 7/6/22

“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 tizzy. “And I don’t want to be the observer either! Who am I to tell someone else what they’re doing wrong?” Eventually, because it was mandated, they had to get over it. But their initial response showed a lack of understanding for how truly amazing peer observation can be. If we can get past the discomfort, opening our doors to other teachers can be a fantastic source of professional development.”
26 Astonishing Poems Written By A.I.
New Yorker - 6/21/22

“Dan pressed a button, and in less than a second the computer produced a poem in the style of Philip Larkin that was so much like a Philip Larkin poem, we thought it was a poem by Philip Larkin. We Googled the first line, expecting it to be an existing Philip Larkin poem, but we couldn’t find it on the Internet. It was an original work, composed by the A.I. in less time than it takes a man to sneeze.”
What Is Juneteenth? A Very Brief Explanation
Stanford - 6/15/22

“Also called “Juneteenth Independence Day,” “Freedom Day,” or “Emancipation Day” (among other names), Juneteenth is the annual commemoration of the end of slavery in the United States after the Civil War. On June 19, 1865, Union general Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston, Texas, with General Orders, No. 3, declaring: “… in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, ‘all slaves are free.’ This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired labor.” This came about two months after the war’s official end following surrender by the Confederate Army at Appomattox Court House, and more than two and a half years (Jan. 1, 1863) after President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation."
How To Rebuild Trust In A Workplace
Gallup - 6/14/22

“Authenticity is being true to yourself, and transparency is sharing that truth through words, behaviors and actions. Highly trusted companies tend to be radically transparent.”
Debate Is Not The Purpose Of University. But Discussion Might Be.
Inside Higher Ed - 6/12/22

“We discussed rather than debated. We opened up and shared, which would require some measure of vulnerability, a trait that is anathema to winning a debate. The desire for safe spaces, for warnings.. are really just a desire for a little understand, a little space to figure stuff out. Seeing the academic institution as a place of ideological debate and combat is not really conducive to that goal.”
On The Present Need To Rebuild Culture
NAIS - 6/1/22

“No matter what a school’s ultimate culture goal, given what we have all been through over the past two years, I would suggest that nurturing a caring culture is job one. This will ensure that as you build toward the future, you are building on a foundation of trust. Some of the middle five groups outlined above can be active participants in this process. Seek them out and engage them in finding that common ground so that you can begin moving from “me” to “we.”
“Using The Black@ Instagram Archive To Improve Schools”
NAIS - 6/1/22

“After collecting the data from 253 accounts, we focused our analysis on data by location. Our initial analysis focuses on New York City, home to the Klingenstein Center and to a robust and diverse micro-ecosystem of independent schools. This analysis examines more than 900 posts involving 11 New York City-area independent schools. Using the text mining tools and analysis, we grouped the experiences shared in these posts into the following categories: (1) racially charged incidents in the classroom, often involving curriculum and pedagogy; (2) interpersonal incidents outside of the classroom; and (3) students of color trying to share racist incidents only to be ignored or told by faculty, staff, and/or fellow students that they were being too sensitive or blowing things out of proportion.”
How To Use Student Surveys Successfully
Kappan - 5/2/22

“While many teachers are routinely observed, evaluated, and coached by other adults, they hardly ever receive formal feedback from their students. And this — useful evidence, solicited in real time from the attentive, perceptive, and astute students with whom they interact daily — can provide the most nourishing feedback of all.”
“Designing Work That People Love”
Harvard Business Review - 5/1/22

“Creating a place where all people can find love in their work means incorporating three principles in everything your business does: The people are the point. Employees, rather than customers or shareholders, are the most important stakeholders in your organization. One size fits one. Each of those employees is a unique person with distinct loves, interests, and skills. In trust we grow. For employees to discover and contribute their loves at work, leaders must explicitly make trust the foundation of all practices and policies.”
“How Music Primes The Brain For Learning”
Edutopia - 4/22/22

“Consistent exposure to music, like learning to play a musical instrument, or taking voice lessons, strengthens a particular set of academic and social-emotional skills that are essential to learning. In ways that are unmatched by other pursuits, like athletics for instance, learning music powerfully reinforces language skills, builds and improves reading ability, and strengthens memory and attention, according to the latest research on the cognitive neuroscience of music.”
12 Ways To Understand Equity In Education
Center for Curriculum Redesign - 4/1/22

“The difficulty in understanding equity and social justice in education and in developing effective policies comes from conceptual confusion. A large range of concepts populate this space of research and policy, often with conflicting meanings and consequences. An attempt is made to distinguish and define the most common conceptualizations of equity:”
“What We Can Learn From How The 1918 Pandemic Ended”
New York Times - 1/31/22

“Nearly all cities in the United States imposed restrictions during the pandemic’s virulent second wave, which peaked in the fall of 1918. That winter, some cities reimposed controls when a third, though less deadly, wave struck. But virtually no city responded in 1920. People were weary of influenza, and so were public officials. Newspapers were filled with frightening news about the virus, but no one cared.”
Redefining The Boss As A Master Collaborator, Not Director
Wall Street Journal - 12/1/21

“Bosses in previous generations, he says, tended to be excellent individual contributors who were promoted to management positions so they could teach teams… The changing job description of a boss and increased expectations from workers means a different type of employee will be considered management material. Those with highly developed social abilities, including “the capacity to interact with an unfamiliar person effectively, good listening skills, real-time processing skills,” will pull ahead, says Mr. Fuller. “Over time, this keeps gaining share relative to technical skills.””
Building Your Daily Schedule: Are You A Maker, Manager, Or Both?
Farnam Street - 11/20/21

“What we can learn from reading about the schedules of people we admire is not what time to set our alarms or how many cups of coffee to drink, but that different types of work require different types of schedules.”
Failure Is Learning: Eminent Education Leader Shares Resume Of Failures
Larry Cuban - 11/18/21

“Why note failures? Because successes in life, however defined, are built on failures that often go unnoted. The common pattern in talking or writing about a career is to deny or cover up failures. Carefully prepared resumes are silent on mishaps. The point is that everyone’s career is marked by failures but in our competitive, highly individualistic culture, talking about failure is like talking about body odor. Not done. Failure means you are a loser in a society that praises winners. So here I want to recount my career failures to make clear that chasing success in one’s life is anchored in confronting repeated failures.”
“How The Most Effective Leaders Give Feedback”
Psychology Today - 11/9/21

“Feedback structure is often thought of as the cliched “feedback sandwich.” Not only is this not a particularly useful model, but consistently delivering positive and negative feedback at the same time may cause the key message to be missed. And it does not necessarily improve the likelihood of driving behavior change, which is the goal of feedback.”
NYT Reflects On The 1619 Project, And How We Teach History
New York Times - 11/9/21

“The argument for 1619 as our origin point goes beyond the centrality of slavery; 1619 was also the year that a heroic and generative process commenced, one by which enslaved Africans and their free descendants would profoundly alter the direction and character of the country, having an impact on everything from politics to popular culture. “Around us the history of the land has centered for thrice a hundred years,” W.E.B. Du Bois wrote in 1903, and it is difficult to argue against extending his point through the century to follow, one that featured a Black civil rights struggle that transformed American democracy and the birth of numerous Black art forms that have profoundly influenced global culture. The 1619 Project made the provocative case that the start of the African presence in the English North American colonies could be considered the moment of inception of the United States of America.”
6 Charts That Explain The Concept Of Climate Justice
Fast Company - 11/6/21

“I study the justice dilemmas presented by climate change and climate policies, and have been involved in international climate negotiations as an observer since 2009. Here are six charts that help explain the challenges.”
“What We Did The Last Time We Broke America”
New York Times - 10/29/21

“From the 1860s through 1900, America was embroiled in a generation-long, culturewide war over democracy, fought through the loudest, roughest, closest elections in our history. An age of acrimony when engaged, enraged participation came to seem less like a “perversion of traditional American institutions,” as one memoirist observed, and more like “their normal operation.” The partisan combat of that era politicized race, class and religion but often came down to a fundamental debate about behavior. How should Americans participate in their democracy? What was out of bounds? Were fraud, violence and voter suppression the result of bad actors, or were there certain dangerous tendencies inherent in the very idea of self-government? Was reform even possible? Ultimately, Americans decided to simmer down.”
Head Of School Reflects On Maintaining Neutrality In High Conflict Times
Deerfield - 10/22/21

““The Kelvin Report” remains one of the most important statements describing the purpose and mission of universities, and by implication, all institutions committed to learning… It advances an argument for what the drafting committee called “neutrality” in political and social action. In order to protect mission—the “discovery, improvement, and dissemination of knowledge” —educational institutions, the committee concluded, “must maintain independence from political fashions, passions, and pressures.” Schools and universities are not, in other words, political organizations or political actors; they are places of learning, inquiry, and question-asking. In this way the university stands apart from the world, even as it remains, in its commitment to inquiry, in vital relationship to it. On the one hand, the institution, as a corporate entity, seeks to remain neutral, recusing itself from political engagement. On the other hand, it imagines itself as a space of open and robust civic inquiry, especially for students. It claims for itself the widest possible scope for discussion and debate.”
5 Concepts For Helping Develop Better Writers
Inside Higher Ed - 10/22/21

“Much as effective teaching benefits from an understanding of certain principles drawn from cognitive science – for example, those involving active engagement, retrieval and transfer, mental modeling, cognitive load, and metacognition – so writing, too, profits from an understanding of cognitive theory. Here are a few lessons that I draw out of my own engagement with cognitive theory and how these lessons can help us improve student writing at scale.”
Head Of School Reflects On Maintaining Neutrality In High Conflict Times
Deerfield - 10/22/21

““The Kelvin Report” remains one of the most important statements describing the purpose and mission of universities, and by implication, all institutions committed to learning… It advances an argument for what the drafting committee called “neutrality” in political and social action. In order to protect mission—the “discovery, improvement, and dissemination of knowledge” —educational institutions, the committee concluded, “must maintain independence from political fashions, passions, and pressures.” Schools and universities are not, in other words, political organizations or political actors; they are places of learning, inquiry, and question-asking. In this way the university stands apart from the world, even as it remains, in its commitment to inquiry, in vital relationship to it. On the one hand, the institution, as a corporate entity, seeks to remain neutral, recusing itself from political engagement. On the other hand, it imagines itself as a space of open and robust civic inquiry, especially for students. It claims for itself the widest possible scope for discussion and debate.”
8 Characteristics Of Effective Online Education
McKinsey - 10/18/21

“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 learning experience. We have organized these into three overarching principles: create a seamless journey for students, adopt an engaging approach to teaching, and build a caring network (exhibit). In this article, we talk about these principles in the context of programs that are fully online, but they may be just as effective within hybrid programs in which students complete some courses online and some in person.”
“How To Design Better Tests, Based On The Research”
Edutopia - 10/15/21

“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 and keeps implicit bias in check, while being mindful of the role that confidence, mindset, and anxiety play in test taking. Here are eight tips to create effective tests, based on a review of more than a dozen recent studies.”
“Remember Computer Labs? Today’s Kids Need Conversation Labs”
REAL Discussion - 10/7/21

“Traditionally, teachers use discussion as a means to an end – a learning activity that achieves content objectives, like untangling the events leading up to a world war or tracking character growth through a novel. But in today’s world, discussion skills need to be a learning objective. Conversation Labs would approach Discussion as a Discipline: a set of skills that students can name, practice, and use in school and for life.”
Simple Values-Based Intervention That Reduces Learning Gaps And Discipline
Fordham Institute - 10/4/21

“The findings are striking for such a simple intervention. How simple? The writing exercises were given just three times in each school year. Pencils, paper, and one hour of time spread out over seven or eight months—even doable virtually. It’s hard to get much simpler than that. Why wouldn’t schools want to jump on this even while the mechanisms at work here are being evaluated?”
GPA Correlates With Where Students Put Their Phones While Studying
Character Lab - 10/1/21

“The trick I like best is also the one most commonly recommended by undergraduates in the classes I’m teaching this year—what scientists call situation modification. It involves intentionally changing your physical surroundings to make it easier to resist temptation. Consider, for example, this data collected from thousands of high school students on Character Lab Research Network. The farther students reported keeping their phones when trying to study, the higher their report card grades.”
Flipped Learning: A Meta-Analysis Of When And Why It Works
Brookings - 9/28/21

“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 skills. Mathematics and engineering courses, on the other hand, demonstrated the smallest gains when implementing flipped pedagogies.”
“How Does Science Really Work?”
New Yorker - 9/28/21

“Science is objective. Scientists are not. Can an “iron rule” explain how they’ve changed the world anyway?”
A Handbook For Giving Excellent Feedback
Tang Institute - 9/25/21

“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 around feedback and offering actionable steps to help ensure that the time you spend giving feedback impacts student learning deeply.”
“Six Elements Of A Feedback Ecosystem”
Global Online Academy - 9/16/21

“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 to ensure that it is effective while still being sustainable. One way to navigate this tension is to think of feedback not as a single, one-way communication from teacher to student, but rather as an ecosystem made up of different strategies that work together.”
“How Do You Cultivate Genius In All Students?”
KQED - 9/14/21

“Cultivating a genius isn’t just about introducing someone to a set of facts or skills and believing in them. Muhammad distilled what matters into the five tenets of the Historically Responsive Literacy framework: identity, skills, intellectualism, criticality and joy.”
The Formula For The Most Creative And Innovative Work
Guardian - 9/13/21

“The team found that for all three career types, work tended to be more diverse just before a true hot streak than expected from the randomly selected points. However, once success had begun, individuals switched, sticking to a narrower than expected approach. That, the team says, suggests “that individuals become substantially more focused on what they work on, reflecting an exploitation strategy during hot streak”. But the researchers found that neither exploring new approaches nor exploiting one were alone linked to hot streaks. Instead it is the combination that is important.”
How School Leadership Can Drive Instructional Improvement
Larry Cuban - 9/9/21

“Over the past forty years, factors associated with raising a school’s academic profile include: teachers’ consistent focus on academic standards and frequent assessment of student learning, a serious school-wide climate toward learning, district support, and parental participation. Recent research also points to the importance of mobilizing teachers and the community to move in the same direction, building trust among all the players, and especially creating working conditions that support teacher collaboration and professional development.”
“Everything Is A Remix” Gets Updated
Kirby Ferguson - 9/7/21

“When you take something old and use it in something new, that's remixing. It might seem like just copying, but it's actually much more. Remixing can empower you to be more creative. Remixing allows us to make music without playing instruments, to create software without coding, to create bigger, more complex ideas out of smaller and simpler ideas.”
"Children's Brains On Stress”
Hechinger Report - 8/25/21

“Among the timely solutions the researchers have identified: having a structured daily routine and limiting passive screen time during the pandemic protects kids against depression and anxiety. Research is clear on the link between mental health and academics. Kids struggling with fears or having trouble regulating their emotions are more likely to experience challenges in school.”
How To Promote SEL To Parents
Fordham Institute - 8/11/21

“There is broad support among parents for teaching SEL-related skills in schools, although the term “social and emotional learning” is relatively unpopular… Based on those results, Tyner distills four policy implications, including recommending that SEL proponents focus on specifics rather than nebulous concepts. Faced with specifics such as schools teaching sensitivity to different cultures, parents get it and express approval, but abstract phrasing loses a lot of them. In addition, parents of all political stripes support indirect approaches to imparting the lessons of SEL, such as having teachers model common decency and common sense for their students.”
Bridging Difference Is An Act of Feeling, Not Thought
Aeon - 8/9/21

“It’s time to give up the idea that ‘truth’ is the almighty stop-gap for justification and the hope that reasons will win out if we just find the right ones. Politically transformative work should aim to cause feelings and experiences in one’s adversaries that invite further investigation and reflection. Science, the environment, racial justice – all of these things matter because we care about them. As Nietzsche once mused, the head is merely the intestine of the heart.”
“I Teach Math, And I Didn’t Give A Single Test Last Year. Here’s What I Learned.”
Blick Bytes - 8/6/21

“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, authentic contexts. Furthermore, the vast majority of students improved their relationship with the subject because the assessments were more meaningful and less stressful than traditional tests.”
Eight Predictions For Education In 2021
Global Online Academy - 8/1/21

“In 2021, schools have the opportunity to stop initiatives that either no longer fit strategically or that are distractions from core work. Schools will decide if/how to keep pandemic changes as part of larger strategic goals, such as rethinking schedules, allowing for remote work, shifting grading and assessment practices, later start times, etc. Schools will make time to reset their strategic goals while reflecting on what they have learned from the emergency initiatives that got them through the past 10 months.”
On The Role Of Spatial Thinking In School And Workplace Success
New York Times - 7/21/21

“Spatial ability, defined by a capacity for mentally generating, rotating, and transforming visual images, is one of the three specific cognitive abilities most important for developing expertise in learning and work settings.”
"Why Students Should Write In All Subjects”
Edutopia - 7/1/21

“Writing improves learning by consolidating information in long-term memory, researchers explain. Plus, five engaging writing activities to use in all subjects.”
What Skills Lead To Success Re: Employment, Income, Satisfaction
McKinsey - 6/25/21

“To future-proof citizens’ ability to work, they will require new skills—but which ones? A survey of 18,000 people in 15 countries suggests those that governments may wish to prioritize.”
Which Competencies Are Best Embedded In Which Disciplines?
Center for Curriculum Redesign - 6/18/21

“Is Math appropriate to teach leadership, or is critical thinking more likely? Beyond Communication and Creativity respectively, what should Language and Arts focus on? After three years of research, CCR publishes its ground-breaking recommendations in a new report, which describes which disciplines are most conducive to teach given competencies. Among the findings: The importance of the Arts for the development of many Competencies. The importance of modern disciplines such as entrepreneurship, for competencies that are difficult to cover via traditional disciplines (such as Courage and Leadership).”
“20 Teacher Questions To Ask Over The Summer”
Ditch That Textbook - 6/3/21

“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.”
Which Disciplines Focus Most On Which Competencies
Center for Curriculum Redesign - 6/1/21

“Every discipline has a key role to play for development of Competency expertise and transfer. If all disciplines focus on teaching their top Competencies, benefits will exist at the curricular, course, and learner level. Curricula will be integrated with relevant Competencies which will in turn increase content relevance and depth of understanding of what it means to proactively practice and contribute to each field. At the same time, teachers will feel less pressure to cover all the Competencies beyond their content area, by either addressing one cursorily or otherwise cognitively overloading learners.”
What Does “Rigor” Mean?
NAIS - 6/1/21

“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.”
Three Part Explanation Of Education Systems Thinking
Medium - 5/29/21

“Organizing schools in discipline-based classes that go for 45 minutes where quizzes and test assess understanding every so often works well when you’re focused on knowledge. But skills and competencies are fundamentally different. They require different contexts, different structures. Cultivating creativity, collaborative problem-solving, self-directed learning, empathy, can largely only happen effectively in rich, complex contexts — not squeezed into the 45-minute math lesson. That is why in many schools working to make this transition, you see a fundamental restructuring of the learning environment—to leverage richer, deeper, more meaningful and contextualized learning through project-based learning (PBL), competency developmental progressions, and integrated formative assessment (Levine & Patrick, 2019). Such a deep restructuring does not come easily, and for many learning environments can only happen in certain ways or hardly at all due to current constraints and demands.”
How Mentors Can Support First-Year Teachers
ASCD - 5/27/21

“We have focused our recent research on one interesting aspect of the transition for new teachers: the influential role of the induction mentor teacher in an educator’s first year. Through a case study approach, we looked at the in-depth experiences of seven recent graduates from our teacher preparation program, collecting interview and focus group data throughout their first school year.”
Stories, Games, Case Studies: How Counterfactuals Help Learning
Literary Hub - 5/24/21

“Whether reading a book, playing a video game, or losing oneself in a daydream, these mental activities are not cognitive idling. Even a couch potato does more than just sit on the couch like a potato. As we experience and manipulate alternative realities—evaluating the universe of counterfactuals that we mentally construct—we ponder options and perhaps improve our judgment. We are training our mind and honing our skills as framers.”
Brilliant, Brutal Short Film About Algorithms, The Pandemic, And Humanity
YouTube / Financial Times - 5/21/21

“We know what you did during lockdown.”
A PLC Framework For School Leaders
The Main Idea - 5/13/21

“The structure of these groups is key. Members say the hour goes by quickly, is energizing, and leaves them feeling inspired to enact concrete ideas. This is all because of the components that go into the Mastermind. While the structure we use is simple and predictable, the effects are powerful. The power comes from a strong routine that supports professional learning and growth. Each session involves a combination of coaching, modeling strategies, new content, support, honest feedback, and reflection.”
“What Makes A High Quality Professional Development Program”
K12 Dive - 5/11/21

“Based on an examination of research, the report finds four common prevailing features in high-quality professional development, regardless of whether it's focused on in-person, hybrid or virtual models: a focus on content, support for collaboration, the provision of feedback and reflection, and personalized coaching and support.”
Can Teachers Measure Student Engagement? Here Is An Excellent Summary.
Middle Web - 5/11/21

“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.”
What Happens When You Actually Reimagine School? This Does.
Cult of Pedagogy - 5/2/21

“Currently nearing the end of its second school year, this high school is the end product of a group of brave, forward-thinking educators who saw what education could be, and instead of trying to work within the system, asked themselves, “Why don’t we just build it?””
“Adolescent Brains Are Wired to Want Status and Respect”
Scientific American - 5/1/21

“A different interpretation of adolescence emerged in the 2000s, stemming from two important new findings. Neuroscientists showed that puberty ushers in a period of exuberant neuronal growth followed by a pruning of neural connections that is second only to the similar process that occurs in the first three years of life. They also showed that the maturation of the adolescent brain is not linear. The limbic system, a collection of brain areas that are sensitive to emotion, reward, novelty, threat and peer expectations, undergoes a growth spurt while the brain areas responsible for reasoning, judgment and executive function continue their slow, steady march toward adulthood. The resulting imbalance in the developmental forces helps to explain adolescent impulsivity, risk taking, and sensitivity to social reward and learning.”
“Don’t Mistake Training for Education”
Inside Higher Ed - 4/29/21

“Training has its uses. It can even save lives. (See CPR above.) But training is woefully inadequate when it comes to confronting social problems such as poverty, discrimination and racism. These are long-standing, knotty and complex issues that defy ready-made solutions. Any serious effort to address them must start with education, a process for which there are no shortcuts.”
“6 Leadership Paradoxes For The Post-Pandemic Era”
Harvard Business Review - 4/23/21

“[These leaders] learned how to work together with others who have different backgrounds and different ways of thinking, and they emphasized collaborating together to lead their business despite all their differences.”
“The Science of Climate Change Explained: Facts, Evidence and Proof”
New York Times - 4/19/21

“The science of climate change is more solid and widely agreed upon than you might think. But the scope of the topic, as well as rampant disinformation, can make it hard to separate fact from fiction. Here, we’ve done our best to present you with not only the most accurate scientific information, but also an explanation of how we know it.”
“What’s The Purpose Of Schooling?”
Christensen Institute - 4/15/21

“To help school communities think through what’s the purpose of schooling, a little history can help, as the dominant policy rationale for public schools’ purpose in society has changed over time. “
Adam Grant On Confident Humility In Leaders
TED - 4/1/21

“It's being secure enough in your strengths to acknowledge your weaknesses. Having enough faith in your knowledge to recognize your ignorance. Being so determined to get it right that you're willing to admit when you're wrong.”
Six Characteristics Of Effective Improvement Routines In Schools
Kappan - 3/22/21

“Because of their complexity, just getting such routines off the ground can seem like a victory in itself, but we cannot emphasize strongly enough how important it is that improvement routines be employed thoughtfully, and that everyone involved has a shared understanding of their purpose. It is important that routines run smoothly, but this is not the primary goal. Ultimately, the point must be to build educators’ capacity to deliver consistent, high-quality instruction to all students across all classrooms.”
The Narrative Of Learning Loss Is Unhelpful. It May Not Matter.
Atlantic - 3/20/21

“If students know that teachers value and believe in them, no matter what they have gone through over the past year, educators can create a classroom environment where high expectations are the norm. When students feel empowered, they care more and work harder. Next time you hear the phrase learning loss, think about whether we really want to define our students by their deficits instead of their potential.”
“How Some Mistakes Can Be Generative”
KQED - 2/22/21

“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 rushed or a distracted state of mind. Lastly, high-stakes mistakes are the ones that everyone wants to avoid because they cause harm.”
AP Courses With Project Based Learning Outperform Traditional Courses
Edutopia - 2/21/21

“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.”
Debate Vs. Discussion: How To Connect Rather Than Win
New York Times - 1/31/21

“When someone seems closed-minded, my instinct is to argue the polar opposite of their position. But when I go on the attack, my opponents either shut down or fight back harder. On more than one occasion, I’ve been called a “logic bully.” When we try to change a person’s mind, our first impulse is to preach about why we’re right and prosecute them for being wrong. Yet experiments show that preaching and prosecuting typically backfire — and what doesn’t sway people may strengthen their beliefs.”
Google Jamboard: Excellent For Online Collaboration And Whiteboard
History Tech - 1/28/21

“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 can save your bacon.”
“Helping Our Students Identify As Generalists”
Middle Web - 1/19/21

“Generalists are not experts—but they are skilled at accessing the work of experts. They know how to look at an issue from multiple angles, sift good information from less good information, corroborate and compare what they find.”
How Will Schools Change Post-Pandemic? Here Are Some Predictions
NAIS - 1/5/21

“Many schools will keep online learning offerings, and a few will invest in these programs in a big way. Some will move to online parent-teacher conferences held on a more frequent basis. Others will have a group of teachers and staff who are full-time remote and possibly part-time. Some will run virtual classes for some students, and others will offer virtual tutoring. Some schools will figure out how to increase total enrollment by leveraging a combination of online delivery and radically changing the way they do scheduling for high school grades and perhaps some middle school grades.”
An Epic Chronicle Of Decisions And Outcomes In The U.S. Pandemic Response
New Yorker - 12/28/20

“Pottinger’s White House experience has made him acutely aware of what he calls “the fading art of leadership.” It’s not a failure of one party or another; it’s more of a generational decline of good judgment. “The élites think it’s all about expertise,” he said. It’s important to have experts, but they aren’t always right: they can be “hampered by their own orthodoxies, their own egos, their own narrow approach to the world.” Pottinger went on, “You need broad-minded leaders who know how to hold people accountable, who know how to delegate, who know a good chain of command, and know how to make hard judgments.””
“A Racial Slur, A Viral Video, And A Reckoning”
New York Times - 12/26/20

“In one sense, the public shaming… underscores the power of social media to hold people of all ages accountable, with consequences at times including harassment and both online and real-world “cancellation.” But the story behind the backlash also reveals a more complex portrait of behavior that for generations had gone unchecked in schools in one of the nation’s wealthiest counties.”
2020 Is The Second “Year Of The MOOC”
EdSurge - 12/23/20

“Of all the learners that ever registered on a MOOC platform, one third did so in 2020... Data collected by Class Central show that pre-pandemic, technology-related subjects were the most popular: the ten most-followed courses were all career-focused. Post-pandemic, interest in soft skills and general topics increased. The most popular course during the pandemic turned out to be Yale University’s The Science of Well-Being, with over 2.5 million enrollments in 2020.”
College Board Shares 2021 AP Content Expectations, Schedule, And Supports
College Board - 12/18/20

“Maintaining the traditional scope of AP Exams was a challenging decision… Please know we honor and respect choices you may make to focus on fewer topics in a difficult year. The skills students develop in your course are often more valuable than how much content they get through, and students who cover fewer topics in greater depth may be better positioned to earn a qualifying AP score than students who cover more topics in less depth.”
“Jill Biden Is a Teacher. And She’s Not About to Change That.”
New York Times - 12/11/20

“Come January, when her husband’s job title changes, hers will stay the same: Unlike every other first lady in American history, she has said she will keep her full-time job. “I’m going to continue to teach,” she said in an interview on “CBS Sunday Morning” in August. “It’s important — I want people to value teachers.””
“How Friends Influence One Another — For Better Or Worse — In High School”
KQED - 12/10/20

“By the time students reach high school, friendships become more stable. “In middle school, it’s unusual for an individual to maintain the same group of close friends over the space of 18 months,” says B. Bradford Brown, an educational psychology professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison: “In high school, that is no longer the case.” Likely because individual identities are more solidified, older teens tolerate greater dissimilarity in one another. As a result, compromise and collaboration increasingly take the place of conformity.”
10 Compelling Findings From Education Research In 2020
Edutopia - 12/4/20

“We reviewed hundreds of educational studies in 2020 and then highlighted 10 of the most significant—covering topics from virtual learning to the reading wars and the decline of standardized tests.”
How Understanding Friendships Can Help Students Succeed
KQED - 11/30/20

“Among adults, healthy friendships are "voluntary, personal, positive, and persistent,” Lydia Denworth writes in her 2020 book Friendship, “and they usually assume some measure of equality.”… Eighty percent of adolescents experience loneliness at school, and about 12 percent of 6,000 sixth-graders in one of Juvonen’s studies were not named as a friend by anyone. Students with no friends “receive lower grades and are less academically engaged,” she says. Research has also tied friendlessness and exclusion to truancy, inability to focus, deficits in working memory, and lack of classroom participation.”
David Brooks: “Nine Nonobvious Ways To Have Deeper Conversations”
New York Times - 11/19/20

“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.”
How To Teach When Only Half Your Class Is In The Room
Cult of Pedagogy - 9/29/20

“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 literally all over the place.”
Does Experience Matter?
Education Endowment Foundation - 9/8/20

“There has been a longstanding belief in education that, after the early years of their career, a teacher’s experience has little to no influence on their ability to help pupils learn (Rice, 2003; Hanushek and Luque, 2003; Rockoff, 2004). It has been thought that teachers undergo a steep learning curve upon entering the profession, lasting three to five years, before plateauing for the remainder of their careers (Rivkin et al, 2005)… However, some more recent research appears to contradict this longstanding hypothesis. In their review of US research published on this subject since 2003, Podolsky et al (2019) suggest that effectiveness increases throughout a teacher’s career… In their review of 30 studies, Podolsky et al find that, after a steep initial incline upon entering the profession, teachers tend to follow an upward trajectory of effectiveness that continues into the second, and at times third decade of teaching.”
“To Build Emotional Strength [Resilience], Expand Your Brain”
New York Times - 9/2/20

“The theory: To deal effectively with change, it helps to be engaged in changing yourself.”
How To Prevent Cheating In Virtual Classrooms: Make Work Meaningful
EdWeek - 8/30/20

“In other words, instead of changing the assessment context or altering the severity of consequences, teachers simply take away students' reasons for cheating. Why cheat on an assessment if that hurts your chances of getting the individualized assistance you need to do well? Some teachers go so far as to make every assessment formative until students get it, and only then do they consider results for summative purposes related to accountability and grading.”
Six Ways To Support Teenagers During the Pandemic
Harvard Graduate School of Education - 8/27/20

“Hill identified six developmental areas, in addition to academics, that schools have traditionally helped nurture. Here, we summarize her suggestions for how schools can work with families to continue to do so in a pandemic.”
“What is College For? Rethinking…Purpose And Pedagogy”
Inside Higher Ed - 8/24/20

“These books decry the generational chauvinism that assumes that today’s educational system is superior to all that came before, that the kind of courses and pedagogies we offer are the best imaginable, and that our current curriculum -- which combines excessive requirements without a clearly defined sense of what a graduate should know or do -- is satisfactory. It isn’t.”
Sal Khan On What Makes Good Online Learning
New York Times - 8/13/20

“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 to drive conversations between students and teachers and among the students themselves. Teachers should do cold calling to ensure students are on their toes and to pull them out of their screens. Teachers need to constantly ask students to work on questions together and share their thinking. Ideally, virtual breakout sessions will allow students to debate and help each other.”
“Racism In America” A Free Collection Of Essays By Harvard University Press
Harvard - 8/4/20

“Racism in America has been the subject of serious scholarship for decades. At Harvard University Press, we’ve had the honor of publishing some of the most influential books on the subject. The excerpts in this volume—culled from works of history, law, sociology, medicine, economics, critical theory, philosophy, art, and literature—are an invitation to understand anti-Black racism through the eyes of our most incisive commentators. Readers will find such classic selections as Toni Morrison’s description of the Africanist presence in the White American literary imagination, Walter Johnson’s depiction of the nation’s largest slave market, and Stuart Hall’s theorization of the relationship between race and nationhood. More recent voices include Khalil Gibran Muhammad on the pernicious myth of Black criminality, Elizabeth Hinton on the link between mass incarceration and 1960s social welfare programs, Anthony Abraham Jack on how elite institutions continue to fail first-generation college students, Mehrsa Baradaran on the racial wealth gap, Nicole Fleetwood on carceral art, and Joshua Bennett on the anti-Black bias implicit in how we talk about animals and the environment.”
Screen Time Expert Calls Mea Culpa, Revises Recommendations Post Pandemic
New York Times - 7/30/20

“Before the pandemic, I was a parenting expert… I told worried parents about the nine signs of tech overuse, like ditching sleep for screens. I advised them to write a “family media contract” and trust, but verify, their tweens’ doings online… Now, like Socrates, I know better. I know that I know nothing… I have never, ever, spent this much time with my children, or anyone’s children, as I have over the past four months during shelter-in-place orders. Nor have I contemplated working full time, while my husband also works full time, without sufficient child care… I want to take this moment to apologize to anyone who faced similar constraints before the pandemic and felt judged or shamed by my, or anyone’s, implication that they weren’t good parents because they weren’t successfully enforcing a “healthy balance” with screens, either for themselves or their children… But on reflection, some of the ideas and principles I used to intone so confidently have actually shown their mettle in new ways in this new world. I offer them to you now, humbly. I speak softly and do not carry a mic.”
Chris Emdin: “Reality Pedagogy” Is Meeting Kids Where They Are
Atlantic - 7/24/20

“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 compete to show their knowledge through art, games, and music.”
“9 Ways Online Teaching Should Be Different From Face-To-Face”
Cult of Pedagogy - 7/5/20

“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.”
130 Pages Of Synthesized Research For How To Open A School This Fall
Coney Island Prep - 6/30/20

“The contents of this “playbook” are the result of an eight week effort during May-June of 2020 to inform a subset of CIP’s return-to-school planning… This document provides… A compendium of case studies, research, and expert perspectives meant to inform and support CIP’s thinking regarding select elements of its return-to-school planning; A snapshot in time based on publicly available information; CIP should note the “current as of” dates indicated on the top left of pages that may no longer be relevant as situations evolve. This document does not provide… Any recommendations on specific actions CIP should or should not take, or a comprehensive set of topics or options for CIP to consider as it advances its return-to-school planning.
On The Challenges Of Middle School Under Quarantine
Hechinger Report - 6/19/20

“That’s why both educators and researchers who study child development say the school shutdowns resulting from the coronavirus pandemic may be particularly disruptive for middle schoolers. These kids are being sequestered at home at exactly the stage in life they need their peers and teachers most.”
“Numb” - High Schooler Makes Extraordinary Short Film About Online School And Isolation
YouTube/Liv McNeil - 6/17/20

“This is a mini film, Numb by me. I did this for a school project but I'm really happy with how it came out, so I'm posting it here.”
Coronavirus Vaccine Tracker
New York Times - 6/13/20

“Work began in January with the deciphering of the SARS-CoV-2 genome. The first vaccine safety trials in humans started in March, but the road ahead remains uncertain. Some trials will fail, and others may end without a clear result. But a few may succeed in stimulating the immune system to produce effective antibodies against the virus. Here is the status of all the vaccines that have reached trials in humans, along with a selection of promising vaccines still being tested in cells or animals.”
“Learning Engineering” — What Is It? Should We Pay Attention?
EdSurge - 6/9/20

“It’s not clear how much more efficient teaching can be, and how much faster people can achieve mastery of skills and knowledge. But as Herbert Simon challenged more than 50 years ago, more educators could at least be open to learning from the data and evidence that is theirs for the taking just about every time they interact.”
A Gap Year At King’s Academy: Learn Arabic, Explore A New Culture, Prepare for College
King's Academy - 6/7/20

“Students are deferring college in numbers larger than ever before. This is an extraordinary opportunity to discover a language, history, and culture that is entirely new. Find ancient civilizations and IKEA, rigorous academics and relaxing excursions, desert landscapes and a lush campus covered in green quadrangles. All this and professionally-recognized university counseling for college repositioning. A post graduate Gap Year at King’s Academy is a life changing experience.”
“Reflections From A Token Black Friend”
Medium - 6/4/20

“If there is one thing every token black friend knows, it is that we are not to provoke serious discussions of racial issues among our white crowd. We should only offer an opinion on such matters when invited to do so by our white peers. Further, we should ensure that the opinion is in line enough with the shared opinion of our white friends, as to not make it too awkward or ostracizing. It doesn’t need to be, and shouldn’t be this way. Many of us are eager to share our stories, and we have been waiting for the invitation to do so.”
Learn Arabic. Study Islamic Art. Dive Into Modern Middle Eastern History. Online Summer Programs for Teachers (and Students).
King's Academy - 6/4/20

Three week, online courses, professional development for teachers. Dive into language, history, and culture of the Middle East for your summer professional development. The King’s Academy Summer Institute is designed to share the rich culture and language of Jordan and the larger Middle East with teachers and adult learners around the world. The program offers online learners an immersive experience in the language, arts and history of the Arab world.”
COVID-19: “The Risks - Know Them - Avoid Them”
Erin Bromage - 5/20/20

“Basically, as the work closures are loosened, and we start to venture out more, possibly even resuming in-office activities, you need to look at your environment and make judgments. How many people are here, how much airflow is there around me, and how long will I be in this environment. If you are in an open floorplan office, you really need to critically assess the risk (volume, people, and airflow). If you are in a job that requires face-to-face talking or even worse, yelling, you need to assess the risk.”
“Relationships Are The Foundation Of Online Learning Design.”
Global Online Academy - 5/19/20

“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 we’ve always rooted student surveys in two critical questions about relationships: How connected do you feel to the teacher in this class? How well do people in your class understand you as a person?”
“Diversity Wins: How Inclusion Matters”
McKinsey - 5/19/20

“Our latest report shows not only that the business case remains robust but also that the relationship between diversity on executive teams and the likelihood of financial outperformance has strengthened over time. These findings emerge from our largest data set so far, encompassing 15 countries and more than 1,000 large companies. By incorporating a “social listening” analysis of employee sentiment in online reviews, the report also provides new insights into how inclusion matters. It shows that companies should pay much greater attention to inclusion, even when they are relatively diverse.”
“I’m 13 Years Old. I’m Learning More With Distance Learning.”
New York Times - 5/5/20

“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 of the recorded lessons that my teachers post to Google Classroom over the lessons they taught in person.”
Deep, Neuroscience-Based Look At Meaning-Making As The Heart Of Effective Pedagogy
ASCD - 5/1/20

“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 work feels connected to big, life-relevant ideas!”
Excellent And Increasingly Sophisticated Modeling Of COVID-19 Futures
Ncase - 5/1/20

“This guide is meant to give you hope and fear. To beat COVID-19 in a way that also protects our mental & financial health, we need optimism to create plans, and pessimism to create backup plans. As Gladys Bronwyn Stern once said, “The optimist invents the airplane and the pessimist the parachute.””
Should Fall Classes Begin With Next Year’s Content, Or Picking Up From The Spring?
Education Dive - 4/30/20

“Sixty-five percent of teachers in a new nationwide poll favor starting next year with ‘"regularly scheduled instruction” over other options, such as revisiting concepts from the end of this semester, extending next school year or offering students the chance to repeat a grade… The results show administrators — who made up about 12% of the 5,555 respondents — think beginning the next year with April 2020 concepts is the best strategy for addressing learning loss due to school closures. Advocates and policymakers, about 250 respondents in the sample, agreed with administrators.”
“College Campuses Must Reopen In The Fall. Here’s How We Do It.”
New York Times - 4/26/20

“Institutions should develop public health plans now that build on three basic elements of controlling the spread of infection: test, trace and separate.”
“Why Are Lecturing And Questioning Still Around?”
Larry Cuban - 4/23/20

“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.”
“How To Edit Your Own Writing”
New York Times - 4/7/20

“The secret to good writing is good editing. It’s what separates hastily written, randomly punctuated, incoherent rants from learned polemics and op-eds, and cringe-worthy fan fiction from a critically acclaimed novel. By the time this article is done, I’ll have edited and rewritten each line at least a few times. Here’s how to start editing your own work”
Social Distancing, Or “So Shall Distance Sing” - A Reflection
Austin Kleon - 4/6/20

“Before this, I would stand outside my first grader’s school, waiting, and when he would walk outside when the bell rang, for a minute, I got to see him in his own world, for a brief few steps, until he saw me and entered our shared world again.”
A King’s Academy Teacher’s Guide To Transitioning From Onsite To Online Learning
King's Academy - 4/5/20

“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 series of meetings to distill principles and practices that would be useful for teachers when transitioning in-person classes to an online setting.”
Questions To Prompt Entrepreneurial Leadership In Times Of Crisis
McKinsey - 4/1/20

“For many companies, the only option is to accelerate their digital transformation. That means moving from active experimentation to active scale-up supported by ongoing testing and continuous improvement. These moves should happen across two dimensions: at the core of the company and through the development of new businesses.”
“The Best Distance Learning Is Reading A Book”
Austin Kleon - 3/26/20

“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.”
“Studying Current Events Boosts Literacy And Civic Engagement”
The 74 Million - 3/25/20

“Because the store of general knowledge we need for full language proficiency is fluid, not fixed, reading and watching the news should be a staple of the well-educated person’s knowledge and language diet. But at a time when it’s never been more important to be well-informed and literate, children have never been less likely to pay close attention.”
COVID-19: “I Will Survive” - COVID-19 Version For Teachers Going Online
YouTube - 3/16/20

“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.”
“How To Respond To Microaggressions”
New York Times - 3/3/20

“Should you let that comment slide, or address it head on? Is it more harm than it’s worth? We can help.”
“Study: Boosting Soft Skills Is Better Than Raising Test Scores”
Hechinger Report - 3/2/20

“The researchers compared siblings who attended different high schools, and the ones who attended schools that were better at boosting soft skills had better outcomes.”
What Is The Effect Of Bringing Low Income Kids Of Color To Selective Private Schools?
New Yorker - 3/2/20

“We are all embedded within systems, but each life—each child—is an unrepeatable anecdote. According to the adults I knew when I was a kid, the worst thing in the world was to be a “statistic,” subsumed into a mass of low expectations and bad outcomes determined by color and class and sustained by a bureaucracy that was, at best, inept and, at worst, intractably racist. Education, then, was triage; escape was a higher-order concern than reform. Parents murmured about how So-and-So had got her daughter into Such-and-Such school, and had spirited the kid away from a school system whose failures symbolized—and, in many ways, flowed out of—a larger set of brutal social facts.”
Writing Instruction And The Danger Of Helicopter Teaching
ASCD - 3/1/20

“When students haven't been required to wrestle with difficult writing decisions—and when much of that decision making has been done by the teacher—they lose their sense of agency and their confidence as writers. Bryant and Jillian have ended up frustrated because they've had years of the same kind of writing practice. Their good grades in previous classes represent acts of compliance, not decision making. Suddenly, they have their first understanding of just how unprepared they are.”
On The Need To Create A Common Language To Describe The Work Of Teaching
Kappan - 2/24/20

“The assumption that teaching is highly individualistic has often been used to resist efforts at specifying — or, some fear, prescribing or oversimplifying — what accomplished teachers actually do in the classroom. Yet, if we cannot describe the work that teachers do in some detail, then we risk resorting to vague generalities about it, leaving individuals to formulate their own idiosyncratic ideas about good teaching. And without clear definitions of good teaching, it becomes difficult to ensure equity for students across the tens of thousands of classrooms in our country.”
"How To Create A Project Based Learning Lesson”
Cult of Pedagogy - 2/16/20

“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 Real with PBL”
“More Complex Vocabulary Leads To More Complex Thought”
Middle Web - 2/4/20

“I found myself darting around the room having to explain what the word “inevitable” meant. The question of inevitability in history is a fascinating one that middle schoolers of all levels can discuss. But it sure helps to understand what the word “inevitable” means in order to have it. As I heard from another teacher, “vocabulary is a tool of thought.” Without a rich vocabulary, student thought is simplistic.”
The Case For High Expectations And High Performance Standards
Fordham Institute - 2/4/20

“The analysis yielded six major findings. Among them: Students of all racial/ethnic groups learn more from teachers with high grading standards, and these standards tend to be higher in schools serving more advantaged students. Moreover, the impact of rigorous grading practices can improve student performance in subsequent math classes up to two years later.”
The Case For Minimal Standards, Lots of Reading, And Lots Of Writing
ASCD - 2/1/20

“If we want people to perform well, concision is king: the fewer the criteria, the easier it is to reinforce, practice, monitor—and thus ensure—that those criteria are fully met. When organizations establish only a tiny set of crystal-clear criteria, both performance—and job satisfaction—skyrocket. The same goes for schools. There are both historic and contemporary precedents for minimalist literacy standards which would ensure that students read and write in larger—much larger—amounts.”
Is The Scientific Community Placing Collaboration Above Darwin’s Natural Selection?
Slate - 1/23/20

“Put simply, life is beginning to look ever more complex and ever more collaborative. All this has fractured Western biology’s consensus on Darwin. In response to all these new insights, some biologists instinctively defend Darwin, an ingrained impulse from years of championing his work against creationists. Others, like Margulis herself, feel Darwin had something to offer, at least in understanding the animal world, but argue his theories were simplified and elevated to a doctrine in the generations after his passing.”
Excellent, Short Reflection On How Cognitive Science Can Help Teachers
SchoolsWeek - 1/20/20

“Cognitive science does not provide a recipe for what teachers should do, but rather should inform their repertoire of approaches. And of course, it forms only one part of teachers’ extensive knowledge and expertise.”
A Regret Clause: A Sanctuary Policy For Plagiarism
Yale Daily News - 1/16/20

“If reported to Yale’s Executive Committee, those found guilty of academic dishonesty could face suspension, probation or other reprimands. But thanks to the regret clause, CS50 instructors on both campuses pledge not to bring such cases to the Executive Committee for students who admit to potential academic dishonesty within 72 hours of the submission deadline. Instead of traditional disciplinary measures, the report states, the team may give a zero for the problem set and connect students with mental or academic support structures across campus.”
The Balancing Act Of Creativity: Connectivity And Isolation
99u - 1/15/20

“For managers and teams, the takeaway is clear: a structure that allows for periods of collaboration and periods of uninterrupted individual work can boost creativity and productivity.”
7 Steps Adults Can Take To Discourage Bullying
SmartBrief - 1/8/20

“Parents and educational staff need different tactics to address -- and end -- bullying. Many of the suggestions that are provided here are what clinicians encourage clients toward during the course of therapy. While therapeutic intervention often only involves a single person, or a handful of individuals, the school environment provides the opportunity to affect positive change on a broad scale.”
Sleep Helps Learning. Even More: Consistent Sleep Helps Learning
Science News for Students - 1/3/20

“Sleep length, quality and consistency together accounted for 24.4 percent of the difference among the students’ test grades. And these factors appeared especially important for boys. Grossman’s team is not sure why. But boys who didn’t get enough sleep or regular sleep were likely to do worse on an exam than were girls who had similar sleep patterns.”
“100 Worst Ed-Tech Debacles Of The Decade” (2010-2019)
Hack Education - 12/31/19

“For the past ten years, I have written a lengthy year-end series, documenting some of the dominant narratives and trends in education technology. I think it is worthwhile, as the decade draws to a close, to review those stories and to see how much (or how little) things have changed.”
Dan Meyer: How Tech Can Help Math Instruction
EdSurge - 12/23/19

“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 from each other’s mathematical creativity. Here’s happy news for math edtech entrepreneurs in the next decade. Computers are great at the right tasks too: visualization, creation, and connection. Let’s put them to work.”
Greta Thunberg Is Time Magazine’s Person Of The Year
Time - 12/11/19

“At first, Thunberg’s father reassured her that everything would be O.K., but as he read more about the climate crisis, he found his own words rang hollow. “I realized that she was right and I was wrong, and I had been wrong all my life,” Svante told TIME in a quiet moment after arriving in Lisbon. In an effort to comfort their daughter, the family began changing their habits to reduce their emissions. They mostly stopped eating meat, installed solar panels, began growing their own vegetables and eventually gave up flying—a sacrifice for Thunberg’s mother, who performs throughout Europe. “We did all these things, basically, not really to save the climate, we didn’t care much about that initially,” says Svante. “We did it to make her happy and to get her back to life.” Slowly, Thunberg began to eat and talk again.”
An Excellent Post On Political (And Controversial) Discussions In Class
KQED - 12/3/19

“Surprise discussions sprung on students can go off the rails quickly. “If the Monday morning after the Charlottesville riots a teacher just walks into her classroom and asks the students, ‘Well, what did you guys think of that?’ That’s going to be a disaster,” McAvoy said. An open discussion right after a tragic event, with questions like “how do you feel about this situation?” or “do you have questions?” allows students to process—but it’s not the time to debate free speech, or what to do about monuments.”
When You Are Grading, Keep A List Of Common Errors
Middle Web - 12/3/19

“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 emphasis you gave to a certain point in class, or your lack of emphasis on another crucial point.”
On The Adolescent Search For Relevance Through Their Online Lives
New York Times - 11/29/19

“When he got home, Rowan would turn on his laptop and sit in front of the glowing screen for hours, or flop onto his bed, his phone hovering above his face. His Instagram feed flashed before him like a slot machine. His most popular account, @Zuccccccccccc, taking its name from Facebook’s chief executive, had 1.2 million followers. If his posts were good, his account would keep growing. If he took some time off, growth would stall. Rowan, like most teenagers on the internet, wasn’t after fame or money, though he made a decent amount — at one point $10,000 a month and more, he said. What Rowan wanted was clout.”
“How School Leaders Create The Conditions For Effective Coaching”
ASCD - 11/27/19

“At the same time, a coaching culture is wasted unless leaders design and implement positive conditions for coaching. We focus on ways school leaders can establish the four conditions that help coaches transform leading, teaching, and schooling: A strong model of high-quality instruction. A strong model of coaching. A strong model to build capacity for coaching. A strong system of logistics.”
How To Fight Polarization
Behavioral Scientist - 11/25/19

“When people discover that they don’t know as much as they thought they did, something interesting happens: their political attitudes become less extreme.”
“7 Ways Of Looking At Diversity”
Inside Higher Ed - 11/21/19

“There are all kinds of ways that people talk about identity and diversity these days. I’ve been trying to organize them into approaches. Here’s my first crack. My goal here is to be descriptive, not judgmental. I don’t think these approaches are necessarily mutually exclusive, but I do think some people within each of these approaches are fiercely committed to their own paradigms in a way that dismisses others.”
SEL And The Importance Of Teachers Being “Emotion Scientists”
KQED - 11/20/19

“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 of discovery, a method of investigation. After three decades of research and practical experience, we at the Yale Center have identiﬁed the talents needed to become what we’ve termed an “emotion scientist.””
“Is Plagiarism Wrong?” - A Provocative Essay by Agnes Collard
The Point - 11/20/19

“Academia has confused a convention with a moral rule, and this confusion is not unmotivated. We academics cannot make much money off the papers and books in which we express our ideas, and ideas cannot be copyrighted, so we have invented a moral law that offers us the “property rights” the legal system denies us.”
More Suggestions For Nurturing A Love Of Reading In Kids
KQED - 11/11/19

“She recommends starting a reading routine with infants, even though it may seem like they aren’t getting much out of books at that age… And there’s no reason this protected time has to stop as children grow older.”
High School Math Teacher Removes Homework, Sees Improvement
Channell 3000 - 11/4/19

“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.”
Teachers Should Have More Peer Observations Than Formal Evaluations
Harvard Graduate School of Education - 11/2/19

“The study found that low-stakes peer evaluations resulted in improvements in teacher job performance, as measured by test scores. The study found improvements for both the observed teacher and the teacher doing the observation.”
Population Density — Being Closer Together — Leads To Greater Creativity
CityLab - 11/1/19

“The actual physical capacity to connect people and ideas may, in fact, be one reason why cities, and some neighborhoods are more conducive for innovation than others.”
On The Wisdom Of Teachers: Scientific Vs. Craft Vs. Moral Knowledge
EdWeek - 10/30/19

“Scientific evidence is not the only source of knowledge nor is it the source of knowledge that always holds high ground in decision-making. Two other important kinds of knowledge are what might best be labeled craft knowledge and moral knowledge. Craft knowledge stems from the understanding gathered over time by practitioners, including through stories, ad hoc observations, and intuition. It is the evidence that usually legitimizes professional judgment in our field, in part because scientific knowledge is not available or cannot be generalized to the thousands of different situations educators face daily.”
Grades And Comments: What Actually Helps Learning?
Kappan - 10/28/19

“Page concluded that grades can have a beneficial effect on student learning only when accompanied by standard or individualized comments from the teacher. Studies conducted in later years confirmed these results.”
Trainers: Parents Should Limit Sports Participation/Specialization. Details.
New York Times - 10/17/19

“The six N.A.T.A. recommendations are endorsed by five societies of athletic trainers, including professional football, hockey, soccer, basketball and baseball trainers, as well as the group’s Intercollegiate Council for Sports Medicine.”
“How Art Can Help Center a Student’s Learning Experience”
KQED - 10/14/19

“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 a vehicle for learning about any subject.”
An Alternative To Debate: Teach Consensus, Not Persuasion
New York Times - 10/12/19

“School debate doesn’t have to be this way, though. In fact, many schools around the country are gravitating to alternative forms of debate that set the goals of truth and understanding over the goal of persuasion… In the Ethics Bowl, created at the intercollegiate level in 1993 and the high school level around 2012, a team is assigned a question — not a statement or conclusion, as in traditional debate — on a contentious topic, such as “When is the use of military drones morally permissible?” ..The winner is the team that does the better job of articulating its reasoning, listening and responding to questions, and advancing the collective understanding of the issue at hand.”
“A Record Number Of Colleges Stop Requiring The SAT And ACT”
Hechinger Report - 10/9/19

“Every 10 days, on average, another university makes these tests optional for admission. Forty-one schools have jettisoned this requirement in the last year, the largest number ever.”
“College Students Don’t Want Fancy Libraries”
Atlantic - 10/4/19

“Survey data and experts suggest that students generally appreciate libraries most for their simple, traditional offerings: a quiet place to study or collaborate on a group project, the ability to print research papers, and access to books. Notably, many students say they like relying on librarians to help them track down hard-to-find texts or navigate scholarly journal databases.”
Is It Time For Math Curricula To Focus More On Data Literacy?
Freakonomics - 10/2/19

“Most high-school math classes are still preparing students for the Sputnik era. Steve Levitt wants to get rid of the “geometry sandwich” and instead have kids learn what they really need in the modern era: data fluency.”
5 Ways To Be An Anti-Racist Educator
ASCD - 10/1/19

“The opposite of racist isn't 'not racist.' It is 'anti-racist.' … One either allows racial inequities to persevere, as a racist, or confronts racial inequities, as an anti-racist. There is no in-between safe space of 'not racist… Teaching for an antiracist future starts with us, the educators. An antiracist educator actively works to dismantle the structures, policies, institutions, and systems that create barriers and perpetuate race-based inequities for people of color.”
What Can School Leaders Learn From The Role Of CEO?
McKinsey - 10/1/19

“To answer the question, “What are the mindsets and practices of excellent CEOs?,” we started with the six main elements of the CEO’s job—elements touched on in virtually all literature about the role: setting the strategy, aligning the organization, leading the top team, working with the board, being the face of the company to external stakeholders, and managing one’s own time and energy. We then broke those down into 18 specific responsibilities that fall exclusively to the CEO.”
What Is Human Thinking Were A New Technology? How Would We Use It?
Behavioral Scientist - 9/30/19

“Recognition of the powerful pattern matching ability of humans is growing. As a result, humans are increasingly being deployed to make decisions that affect the well-being of other humans. We are starting to see the use of human decision makers in courts, in university admissions offices, in loan application departments, and in recruitment. Soon humans will be the primary gateway to many core services.”
How Collaboration Leads To Persistence In Students
KQED - 9/23/19

“In the workshops students worked on math problems together, considering together what it would take to achieve at the highest levels on different problems. The academic improvement that resulted from the workshops was significant. Within two years, the failure rate of African American students had dropped to zero, and the African American and Latino students who attended the workshops were outperforming their white and Asian classmates.”
Debunking The Idea That STEM Majors Earn More In The Long Run
New York Times - 9/20/19

“Men majoring in computer science or engineering roughly doubled their starting salaries by age 40, to an average of $124,458. Yet earnings growth is even faster in other majors, and some catch up completely. By age 40, the average salary of all male college graduates was $111,870, and social science and history majors earned $131,154 — an average that is lifted, in part, by high-paying jobs in management, business and law.”
Collaboration And Peer Networks Are Essential For Teacher Growth
Atlantic - 9/19/19

“In this model of professional development, peer networks became the main mechanism for transferring collective wisdom and acquiring tacit knowledge that can’t be learned by reading a book or listening to a lecture—skills such as designing a strong lesson plan with precise pacing, rhythm, and clear focus, for instance, or building positive relationships among students. When teachers plan classroom activities together, educators have a chance to implement improvements as a cohesive effort across the building, develop a shared vision and common language around learning goals, and learn how to detect outcomes using a broad range of data, including markers for key skills, such as resilience or collaboration, that can’t be captured using standardized test scores.”
Still Trying To Figure Out What “ESports” Are? Here’s A Simple History
Quartz - 9/11/19

“In 2018, 141 US colleges and universities offered varsity esports programs, 75 more than in 2017.”
“Measuring Actual Learning Versus Feeling Of Learning”
Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences - 9/4/19

“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 research), but their perception of learning, while positive, was lower than that of their peers in passive environments. This suggests that attempts to evaluate instruction based on students’ perceptions of learning could inadvertently promote inferior (passive) pedagogical methods… We discuss strategies that instructors can use, early in the semester, to improve students’ response to being actively engaged in the classroom.”
“Mathematics As A Cultural Force”
Longreads - 9/1/19

“In his new book, Proof!: How the World Became Geometrical, historian Amir Alexander advances an audacious claim: that Euclidean geometry profoundly influenced not just the history of mathematics, but also broader sociopolitical reality.”
“Retakes Vs. Test Corrections Vs. Neither”
Henri’s Math Ed Blog - 8/28/19

“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. “
“What’s Lost When We Rush Kids Through Childhood”
Edutopia - 8/23/19

“Quality education is about relationships. Caring teachers who understand child development and who know and are attuned to the children in their care are far more important than many of the measures of quality we use today, such as class size, physical environments, or a specific curriculum. Rich, open-ended conversation is critical, and children need time in the day to experience warm, empathic oral language—to converse with each other playfully, to tell a rambling story to an adult, to listen to high-quality literature and ask meaningful questions.”
A Brilliant, Wide-Ranging Essay On Linguistic Change, Slang, History & More
Guardian - 8/15/19

“Linguistic decline is the cultural equivalent of the boy who cried wolf, except the wolf never turns up. Perhaps this is why, even though the idea that language is going to the dogs is widespread, nothing much has been done to mitigate it: it’s a powerful intuition, but the evidence of its effects has simply never materialised. That is because it is unscientific nonsense.”
1619 Project: The Origins, Impact, And Legacy Of Slavery In The US
New York Times - 8/14/19

"The 1619 Project is a major initiative from The New York Times observing the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. It aims to reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are.”
“How Higher Ed Is And Is Not Changing”
Inside Higher Ed - 8/8/19

“Whether higher ed can overcome the barriers to institutional and departmental collaboration is, to my mind, the next great challenge facing our colleges and universities.”
How A Short Writing Intervention Helped Middle School Students Thrive
Time - 8/2/19

“As in a prior study of Wisconsin 6th graders, the 7th graders who participated in the writing exercise had fewer failing grades and better overall GPAs at the end of the school year than their peers who had not participated. The researchers found no changes in attendance or discipline, but did find that students who had participated in the writing test valued “doing well in school” more at the end of the year than their peers.”
Your Mindset About Stress Matters, And Can Change Your Health
NPR - 8/2/19

“Can changing how you think about stress make you healthier? And here, the science says yes. When you change your mind about stress, you can change your body's response to stress. Your heart might be pounding. You might be breathing faster, maybe breaking out into a sweat. And normally, we interpret these physical changes as anxiety or signs that we aren't coping very well with the pressure… Participants who learned to view the stress response as helpful for their performance - well, they were less stressed out, less anxious, more confident. But the most fascinating finding to me was how their physical stress response changed.”
On The Importance Of Teaching Content In Elementary Schools
Atlantic - 8/1/19

“What if the medicine we have been prescribing is only making matters worse, particularly for poor children? What if the best way to boost reading comprehension is not to drill kids on discrete skills but to teach them, as early as possible, the very things we’ve marginalized—including history, science, and other content that could build the knowledge and vocabulary they need to understand both written texts and the world around them?”
“Direct Instruction Is Still Necessary In A PBL Classroom”
John Spencer - 7/29/19

“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 districts, and universities. Great direct instruction is often an act of storytelling. It’s exciting and fun.”
The Neuroscience Of How Collaboration Leads To Creativity (Via Music)
Nautilus - 7/25/19

“The more tightly the social parts of our brain are connected, the more possible it is that performance will be more moving, more expressive… Brains are social, people are social, and when they’re connected, that has the best effect for creativity.”
Understanding Linguistic Communities On The Internet. Fascinating.
Baffler - 7/17/19

“By using informal writing to convey the regular dramas of human life, they also started reshaping informal writing into something that could deeply convey the full range of human emotions… This leads to miscommunication, of course, between generations of Internet People… How we talk online is determined by our linguistic community, which in turn is largely determined by where we were when we first encountered social media.”
No Tests. No Grades. Idaho School Pioneers Deep Character-Based Transcript
The 74 Million - 7/15/19

“In place of a straightforward transcript listing letter grades and a grade point average, admissions officers received the growth transcript, which provides rich information on student progress in four broad areas: Mindset, knowledge, creativity and skills. Under each of those four categories, eight subcategories provide a granular look at students’ progress over their three years at One Stone in a bar chart format. That’s 32 data points to analyze and evaluate.”
Woods And Federer: Specialist and Generalist. Where Is The Balance?
Guardian - 7/12/19

“The challenge we all face is how to maintain the benefits of breadth, diverse experience, interdisciplinary thinking and delayed concentration in a world that increasingly incentivises or even demands hyperspecialisation. While it is true that there are areas that require individuals with Tiger’s precocity and clarity of purpose, as complexity increases – as technology spins the world into vaster webs of interconnected systems in which each individual only sees a small part – we also need more Rogers: people who start broad and embrace diverse experiences and perspectives while they progress. People with range.”
Virtual Reality Is Not Just A Techno Gimmick
Hechinger Report - 7/4/19

“Unlike textbooks or video, virtual reality fully immerses users in a dynamic virtual world – and the headset device can be as simple as a mobile phone inserted into an inexpensive Google Cardboard viewer. Now, teachers around the world are using virtual reality to overcome barriers of physical distance and give their students a first-person view of the changes scientists are observing in remote areas. Many say these VR experiences are sparking new interest in global environmental issues.”
“Let Teachers Work And Learn In Teams — Like Professionals”
ASCD - 7/1/19

“The meetings of these groups aren't talkathons or just opportunities for teachers to spend time together in a group hoping to learn. Each team has a serious, important assignment with deadlines. And each assignment is expected to result in improvements to student performance. Opportunities for teachers to move ahead in their careers depend in significant measure on the contributions they make, as team leaders and members, to the systematic improvement of their school's performance.”
From Expertise To Generalists And Lifelong Learning: The Case Of The USS Gabrielle Giffords
Atlantic - 7/1/19

“Minimal manning—and with it, the replacement of specialized workers with problem-solving generalists—isn’t a particularly nautical concept. Indeed, it will sound familiar to anyone in an organization who’s been asked to “do more with less”—which, these days, seems to be just about everyone… In 20 years, we’ll know a lot more about the costs and benefits of minimal manning and lifelong learning. But nobody on the Giffords was pondering that after the crew finished its unloading job… Everybody I met on the Giffords seemed to share that mentality. They regarded every minute on board—even during a routine transit back to port in San Diego Harbor—as a chance to learn something new.”
Five Learning My Debunked.. Including: Using Examples?
Middle Web - 6/30/19

“Using examples in our teaching does not help students generalize or make lessons more interesting. In fact, the research shows that when we offer examples students tend to focus on the more trivial aspects of the example – the authors call these the “seductive details” – rather than the important content we had in mind. Similarly, when we offer entertaining examples to get students excited about a topic, it can have a diminishing effect as attention is pulled from the actual learning target.”
“The Case For Generalists”
Medium - 6/26/19

“The challenge we all face is how to maintain the benefits of breadth, diverse experience, interdisciplinary thinking, and delayed concentration in a world that increasingly incentivizes, and even demands, hyper-specialization. While it is undoubtedly true that there are areas that require individuals with Tiger’s precocity and clarity of purpose, as complexity increases — as technology spins the world into vaster webs of interconnected systems in which each individual only sees a small part — we also need more Rogers: people who start broad and embrace diverse experiences and perspectives while they progress. People with range.”
A Case Study Of A Closing College — And An Industry Review
Atlantic - 6/19/19

“The country’s colleges and universities have experienced a pronounced increase in the number of freshmen applications received over the past 15 or so years, a trend reflected in the U.S. undergraduate population’s dramatic growth, from 16.7 million in 1996 to 20 million in 2016, according to a recent Pew Research Center report... Yet selective colleges and universities—those that accept fewer than half of prospective students—have enjoyed a disproportionate share of that growth, receiving close to two out of every five applications despite accounting for fewer than a fifth of the country’s higher-education institutions. What’s more, the number of applications doesn’t correlate with the number of students… A recent report by the National Student Clearinghouse research center underscores just how dramatically this is playing out. In spring 2019, overall postsecondary enrollment decreased by 1.7 percent, or nearly 300,000 students, from the previous spring.”
A Deep, Searching Exploration Of The Justice And Merit Of Testing
New York Times - 6/12/19

“As a country we have moved past the idea that the basics of a decent life should be hoarded by an aristocracy, a hereditary class with a monopoly on wealth, power and property. Allocating resources on the basis of merit is arguably a better system, or at least, less unjust. Still, it is far from perfect… If we think about cognitive ability testing as a form of lottery, in which the winners are those who possess a certain inherent capacity for processing and analyzing information, without reference to morally salient criteria like goodness, mercy, kindness or courage, we are embarking on a new kind of impoverishment.”
On Deeper Learning, And The Value Of Extra-Curriculars
Strategy-Business - 6/6/19

“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 acquire the ability to create something new, such as original scholarship or art.”
Core Knowledge: On The Role Of Knowledge In Learning
Larry Cuban - 6/5/19

“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.”
McSweeney’s Calls For Stories From Young Immigrants (Any Country)
McSweeney’s - 6/1/19

“What You Need to Know About Me is a new anthology (published by The Hawkins Project, co-founded by Dave Eggers) that highlights the experiences of young people (ages 11-24) who have immigrated from one country to another… Of our contributors, we want to know: How has the experience of migration impacted your life? What have been the gifts and challenges of such a life-changing move? But most of all: What do we need to know about you?”
Solvitur Ambulando: It Is Solved By Walking.
Quartz - 5/25/19

“Walking is a way to be more present, ease anxiety, spark creativity, increase productivity, and detox from digital overload (that is, if you don’t walk with your face in your phone).”
“Why Generalists Triumph In A Specialized World”
New York Times - 5/24/19

“This pattern extends beyond music and sports. Students who have to specialize earlier in their education — picking a pre-med or law track while still in high school — have higher earnings than their generalist peers at first, according to one economist’s research in several countries. But the later-specializing peers soon caught up… The early specializers, meanwhile, more often quit their career tracks.”
Former FBI Agent Explains How To Read Body Language
Wired/YouTube - 5/21/19

“Nonverbals are anything that communicates but is not a word. The public knows them as body language… In fact we are never in a state where we’re not transmitting information.”
An "Adversity Score”? The SAT Seeks To Recognize Student Challenges
New York Times - 5/17/19

“The decision to give students who take the SAT test a numerical rating that reflects the challenges they have overcome in life is the most telling sign yet that universities across the country are searching for ways to diversify their classes without considering race or ethnicity… In the initial data the College Board has collected on some schools that have tried out the new tool, it found that disadvantaged students who did not attend high schools known to be regular feeders to college were more likely to be admitted.”
A Definition Of Computational Thinking For Any Subject
Education Dive - 5/15/19

"There are five core computational thinking skills… These are collecting data, analyzing data, decomposing, finding patterns and using abstract thinking.”
40 Interviews, 5 Findings: What Teens Say They Need
ASCD - 5/9/19

“I recently interviewed over 40 teens in grades 6 through 12 and asked them, "What do you need from schools to feel supported both academically and socially?" I share their responses, both honest and illuminating, here.”
“Why You Need A Network Of Low-Stakes, Casual Friendships”
New York Times - 5/6/19

"The more weak ties a person has (neighbors, a barista at the neighborhood coffee shop or fellow members in a spin class), the happier they feel. Maintaining this network of acquaintances also contributes to one’s sense of belonging to a community, researchers found.”
Larry Cuban On Challenging Instructional Paradigms
Larry Cuban - 5/3/19

“The manner in which the machinery of instruction bears upon the child… really controls the system.”
How The Arts Benefit Society: An Interactive Research Synthesis
Mellon Foundation - 5/1/19

“The Arts + Social Impact Explorer is designed as a gateway to research, projects, and support organizations. The goal is to enable people to extract key information at a quick glance, helping users visualize how the arts permeate community life while providing leaders what they need to make visible impact.”
On Integrating Student Data, From Enrollment To Graduation
EdSurge - 4/24/19

“Colleges and universities are increasingly turning to CRMs to track the life cycle of their engagement with students—from initial marketing outreach to financial aid, applications, enrollment, course registration, retention, alumni and donor relationships.”
On The Essential Nature Of Extra-Curriculars
EdSurge - 4/24/19

“We must revisit the largely held perception of school as a primarily academic institution that offers learning opportunities at a fixed time in a fixed setting… Expanding access to out-of-school activities propels our young learners to higher graduation rates, improved academic achievement and higher wages. Out-of-school spaces also offer fertile ground for developing critical thinking, problem-solving and social-emotional skills that are critical for future success.”
Does Teaching Design Thinking Strategies Durably Improve Performance?
Stanford - 4/17/19

“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.”
Sal Khan: Technological Literacy Is Necessary To Equalize Our World
USA Today - 4/11/19

"Free mass public education empowered nearly everyone with the historically scarce skills of reading and numeracy. But in an economy defined by artificial intelligence and robotics, people will need much more than literacy and numeracy.”
The Paradoxical Surge In Demand For Humanities, While Majors Decline
New York Review of Books - 4/2/19

“People like history—just look at the New York Times bestseller list—but not enough historians actually take the time to try to talk to the interested public… An obvious remedy would be to place more stress on good writing; courses on how to write for the informed laity should be central to all humanities instruction. But the humanities need a more thorough overhaul, drawing on the tools developed by the tech world to capture and convey the complex, tortured, confounding, and inspiring story of human cultures and civilization.”
Schools Should Focus Only On Their Academic Mission… Plus One
Howard Gardner - 4/1/19

“As one learns about so-called liberal arts institutions today, one swiftly encounters a wide range of aspirations, many of which have little to do with academic or even cognitive aspirations. Colleges are expected to produce good citizens; kind and empathic human beings; happy persons who are self-realized; individuals who want to lead the world, change the world, be good team players, make the world better; individuals who are healthier in mind and body. We admire these aspirations. But it’s clear that no institution can achieve all of these goals.”
Movement Aids Learning. Here Are Ways To Teach Kinesthetically.
Cult of Pedagogy - 3/31/19

“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.”
It’s The Quality Of Homework, Not The Quantity That Matters
Atlantic - 3/28/19

“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 to a certain curriculum or even an individual student. Given that homework’s benefits are so narrowly defined (and even then, contested), it’s a bit surprising that assigning so much of it is often a classroom default, and that more isn’t done to make the homework that is assigned more enriching.”
PD: More Teacher Choice Or More Shared Expectations?
Education Dive - 3/25/19

“Isolated examples of professional learning based on individual educator needs are a poor substitute for engaging teachers in ongoing collaborative learning that draws on their expertise to examine student data and design learning agendas that benefit everyone in the school… when teachers or schools have too much control over PD decisions, there tends to not be a shared vision of quality teaching and learning across the district.”
“Why Do Colleges Die?” - An Analysis
Inside Higher Ed - 3/20/19

“Practically speaking, high dependence on tuition -- as high as 80 to 90 percent -- is a good sign that an institution will not likely survive for long… Colleges and universities that are under threat of closure “have a full range of bad choices to make,” she noted: they can lower standards, defer maintenance, create new programs to generate new students or cut unpopular programs that aren't attracting enough students. All of these, she suggested, are terrible ways to save money or bring in new revenue.”
Drawing Helps Students Process And Retain Learning
Edutopia - 3/14/19

"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 to students’ ability to remember what they were learning.”
Is Teaching Growth Mindsets Effective? A Lengthy Exploration.
Aeon - 3/11/19

“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 interventions that try to instil it. Yet creating a culture in which students can believe in the possibility of improving their intelligence through their own purposeful effort is something few would disagree with. Perhaps growth mindset works best as a philosophy and not an intervention.”
“I Moved A Drone With My Mind. Soon Your Students Will Too.”
Brookings - 3/8/19

"Take a deep breath and try again,” said the young man, encouraging me in true Yoda fashion. “UP, UP, UP,” I thought, fixing my mind on the drove. And, amazingly, up it went. Hovering here and there and lurching around a bit, but most certainly skyward. After 30 seconds of amazing drone control, I’d had enough. I stopped repeating “up” but the drone kept flying. “Close your eyes” said the young man. I did and the drone immediately fell to the table. Afterward, one thing struck me. The future belongs not just to those who can write algorithms but to those who can control their thoughts.”
How To Manage The Dr. Seuss Controversy Without Giving Up Dr. Seuss
Teaching Tolerance - 3/4/19

“In light of a new study revealing stereotyped characters across Dr. Seuss’s children’s books, published just before Read Across America Day, how can educators engage students in a critical discussion of this canonical author?”
Four Essential Leadership Roles, And How To Balance Them
ASCD - 3/1/19

"Only one leadership personality, the architect, delivers sustained improvement—by balancing all four roles. In the words of the researchers, "they're insightful, humble, visionary leaders who believe schools fail because they're poorly designed," so they work with teachers to develop a collaborative school vision and engage directly in professional learning, coaching, mentoring, and peer collaboration.”
Teachers Are Trying Out In-Ear Coaching
EdWeek - 2/26/19

“The premise is simple: A teacher wears an earpiece during a lesson, which is being livestreamed for an instructional coach who is somewhere else. Throughout the lesson, the coach delivers in-the-moment feedback to the teacher, who can add something or switch gears based on what she's hearing in her ear. Typically, the coach and the teacher will meet to debrief after the lesson.”
Plagiarism: Even The Former Editor In Chief Of The New York Times
Rolling Stone - 2/13/19

“In her new book Merchants of Truth, Abramson, the former executive editor of the New York Times, had apparently plagiarized from several sources… The irony was thick. Here was a veteran of the industry, a Harvard journalism lecturer no less, getting facts wrong in a book about “the fight for facts” in contemporary news.”
Arts Experiences Improve Writing, Discipline, And Compassion
Brookings - 2/12/19

"We find that a substantial increase in arts educational experiences has remarkable impacts on students’ academic, social, and emotional outcomes. Relative to students assigned to the control group, treatment school students experienced a 3.6 percentage point reduction in disciplinary infractions, an improvement of 13 percent of a standard deviation in standardized writing scores, and an increase of 8 percent of a standard deviation in their compassion for others. In terms of our measure of compassion for others, students who received more arts education experiences are more interested in how other people feel and more likely to want to help people who are treated badly.”
"Seven Tenets Of Globally Competent School Leaders”
ASCD - 2/7/19

"The seven tenets of globally competent school leaders fall under four domains: (1) vision setting, (2) pedagogy and practice, (3) situated action, and (4) systems and structures. These domains reflect general best practices of educational leadership, while recognizing the ways in which one’s local professional context is interconnected to a broader global environment.”
Does Authoritative Parenting Actually Help Students Succeed?
New York Times - 2/7/19

"The most effective parents, according to the authors, are “authoritative.” They use reasoning to persuade kids to do things that are good for them. Instead of strict obedience, they emphasize adaptability, problem-solving and independence — skills that will help their offspring in future workplaces that we can’t even imagine yet.”
"Tech Is Splitting the U.S. Work Force in Two” - An Excellent Read
New York Times - 2/4/19

“A small group of well-educated professionals enjoys rising wages, while most workers toil in low-wage jobs with few chances to advance.”
Excellent, Fine-Grain Suggestions For Choosing Words When Giving Feedback
Cult of Pedagogy - 2/3/19

“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.”
Relationships: Doctors’ Kindness Drives Health Outcomes. Surely, Teachers, Too
New York Times - 1/22/19

“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 we don’t need to go to the doctor for minor questions, we should not overlook the value of interacting with a human doctor and hearing words of encouragement.”
"Six College Experiences Linked to Student Confidence on Jobs”
Gallup - 1/22/19

“The study also illuminates the importance of six collegiate experiences, including how supportive relationships and relevant, engaging learning experiences are linked to long-term outcomes such as higher workplace engagement and wellbeing for college alumni nationwide. The proportion of currently enrolled students who strongly agree that they are confident they will graduate with the skills and knowledge they need to be successful in the job market rises steadily with the number of these experiences they have had.”
David Brooks: Relationships Are Essential For Learning
New York Times - 1/17/19

“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 for any school or company is: What is the quality of the emotional relationships here?”
SF Delays Algebra Until HS. Numbers Of Advanced Math Classes Surge.
San Francisco Chronicle - 1/9/19

"While more students are taking precalculus now, the enrollment in Advanced Placement calculus courses has declined by nearly 13 percent over the past two years. Enrollment in AP Statistics, which requires only Algebra II as a prerequisite, has surged nearly 50 percent.”
What To Do On The First Day Of Class. A Deep & Thorough Exploration
Chronicle of Higher Education - 1/4/19

“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 your students. To show you how to put the principles and the logistics into practice, I will provide examples of what a good set of first-day activities might look like in four disciplines. I’ll finish with some suggestions for how to support the good work you have done on the first day with some follow-up activities.”
“How Learning Goals Can Stifle Deeper Learning”
Lustre Education - 1/4/19

“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.”
More On The Science Of Learning To Read
KQED - 1/2/19

"In 2015, before the new training began, more than half of the kindergartners in the district tested below the benchmark score, meaning most of them were heading into first grade at risk of reading failure. At the end of the 2018 school year, after the science-based training, 84 percent of kindergartners met or exceeded the benchmark score. At three schools, it was 100 percent.”
A Synthesis Of Research From The Learning Sciences
Digital Promise - 12/13/18

“Digital Promise and the Institute for Applied Neuroscience have teamed up to synthesize findings from the growing field of learning sciences research into 10 key insights about how people learn, along with suggestions for how to apply this information to classroom practice.”
“Does Where You Go To College Matter?” New Studies, Three Conclusions
Atlantic - 12/11/18

“First, to high-strung affluent parents, well-compensated counselors, and other members of the elite-admissions industrial complex: Just relax, okay? You are inflicting on American teenagers a ludicrous amount of pointless anxiety. Even if you subscribe to the dubious idea that young people ought to maximize for vocational prestige and income, the research suggests that elite colleges are not critical to achieving those ends. In the aggregate, individual characteristics swamp institutional characteristics. It’s more important to be hardworking and curious than to receive a certain thick envelope.”
Adam Grant Argues Against Getting Straight A’s
New York Times - 12/8/18

“The evidence is clear: Academic excellence is not a strong predictor of career excellence. Across industries, research shows that the correlation between grades and job performance is modest in the first year after college and trivial within a handful of years. For example, at Google, once employees are two or three years out of college, their grades have no bearing on their performance.”
A Striking Short Film About How Inclusion Works
Respectability - 12/6/18

“All kids want to play. Kids with disabilities are no different. “Ian” is a short, animated film inspired by the real-life Ian, a boy with a disability determined to get to the playground despite his playmates bullying him. This film sets out to show that children with disabilities can and should be included... “Ian” premiered at Cannes in May 2018.”
NYT Invites Student Essays Connecting Their Studies To The World Today
New York Times - 12/6/18

“So you’re studying the Civil War — or Shakespeare, or evolution, or “The Bluest Eye.” Why? What does it have to do with your life and the lives of those around you? Why should you remember it once you’ve turned in that paper or taken that test?”
Both Technology And Traditional Teaching Have Value: It’s The Pedagogy That Matters
Bright - 12/5/18

“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… worse? …When applied correctly to a specific set of problems, technology has proven to be a useful tool that can have positive impact. But it must be accompanied by an honest discussion about what pedagogy actually works.”
"Why Are Young People Having So Little Sex?”
Atlantic - 12/1/18

“From 1991 to 2017, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Youth Risk Behavior Survey finds, the percentage of high-school students who’d had intercourse dropped from 54 to 40 percent. In other words, in the space of a generation, sex has gone from something most high-school students have experienced to something most haven’t… Now some observers are beginning to wonder whether an unambiguously good thing might have roots in less salubrious developments. Signs are gathering that the delay in teen sex may have been the first indication of a broader withdrawal from physical intimacy that extends well into adulthood.”
Understanding Motivation: Down To The Neurochemical Detail
Harvard Center for the Developing Child - 12/1/18

“This Working Paper from the National Scientific Council on the Developing Child explains the science behind motivation–the “wanting” system and the “liking” system–as well as how those systems develop, and how that development can be disrupted. It also dives into the implications of the science for parents, caregivers, and teachers, as well as policy and public systems.”
Tips For Fostering “Civil Dialogue” On High Pressure Topics
History Tech - 11/30/18

“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?”
Here Are The Books Colleges Are Assigning To Incoming Freshmen
NPR - 11/22/18

“Every year since 2010, the National Association of Scholars surveys the schools that pick books. This year, throughout 481 colleges and universities, they found schools were more likely to pick new books over classics. 67 percent of common reading books assigned were published after 2011, according to NAS.”
NPR Starts A Student Podcast Challenge - Deadline March 15
NPR - 11/15/18

“We're inviting students around the country to create a podcast, then — with the help of a teacher — compete for a chance to win our grand prize and have your work appear on NPR.”
A Glorious, Scholarly Case For Puns, Replete With Historical Examples
Paris Review - 11/15/18

“Puns point to the essence of all true wit—the ability to hold in the mind two different ideas about the same thing at the same time. And the pun’s primacy is demonstrated by its strategic use in the oldest sacred stories, texts, and myths.”
Interview With Jill Lepore About Her New Book “These Truths”
Chronicle of Higher Education - 11/13/18

“There’s an incredibly rich scholarship on the history of evidence, which traces its rise in the Middle Ages in the world of law, its migration into historical writing, and then finally into the realm that we’re most familiar with, journalism. That’s a centuries-long migration of an idea that begins in a very particular time and place, basically the rise of trial by jury starting in 1215. We have a much better vantage on the tenuousness of our own grasp of facts when we understand where facts come from. Facts have been devalued for a long time. The rise of the fact was centuries ago. Facts were replaced by numbers in the 18th and 19th centuries as the higher-status unit of knowledge. That’s the moment at which the United States is founded as a demographic democracy. Now what’s considered to be most prestigious is data. The bigger the data, the better. That transformation, from facts to numbers to data, traces something else: the shifting prestige placed on different ways of knowing. Facts come from the realm of the humanities, numbers represent the social sciences, and data the natural sciences. When people talk about the decline of the humanities, they are actually talking about the rise and fall of the fact”
Atul Gawande On How Technology Is Changing Doctors’ Work
New Yorker - 11/12/18

“The story of modern medicine is the story of our human struggle with complexity. Technology will, without question, continually increase our ability to make diagnoses, to peer more deeply inside the body and the brain, to offer more treatments. It will help us document it all—but not necessarily to make sense of it all. Technology inevitably produces more noise and new uncertainties… We ultimately need systems that make the right care simpler for both patients and professionals, not more complicated. And they must do so in ways that strengthen our human connections, instead of weakening them.”
A Critique Of The NYT’s Recent Pieces On Tech And Parenting
Columbia Journalism Review - 11/5/18

“And here’s something that could have been especially relevant to these Times stories: there’s existing research on parental attitudes and successful parenting strategies regarding digital media. You can help your kids learn via digital media, experts say, and use it constructively. You can help manage and moderate their use.”
A Detailed, Thorough, Reliable Primer On Cognitive Science Research
Transcend Education - 11/1/18

“The fields of neuroscience, psychology, and cognitive science have unearthed important insights and established agreed-upon models that help explain how learning happens and inform the design of impactful learning environments. Our Designing for Learning resources aim to share these insights and models in a way that supports whole-school design.”
Another Deep Report On Competency Based Learning
iNACOL - 11/1/18

“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.”
Vote: Here’s Everything You Need To Know To Vote, Anywhere In The US
ProPublica - 10/31/18

“The midterms are here. Here’s everything you need to know to hit the polls and cast an informed vote this election season.”
An Excellent Support And PD Network Model For Math Teachers
KQED - 10/29/18

“Teachers in the BMTN [Better Math Teaching Network] choose to focus on deepening their students’ abilities in one of three areas: connect, justify and solve. They are grouped with other algebra teachers at schools across New England working on the same skill. They each test small changes in their classrooms, iterate on those changes, and bring their findings to monthly conference calls where they get ideas, feedback, coaching and encouragement.”
A Deep, Deep Look At The State Of Competency-Based Education
Getting Smart - 10/22/18

“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 the reader will find the evidence cited thought-provoking and engage in serious conversation about the compelling questions the report raises.”
AI’s Growth Means Schools Should Double Down On Interpersonal Skills
Brookings - 10/18/18

"K-12 education should prioritize teaching critical thinking, problem solving, and teamwork across subject areas. Teaching students to become analytical thinkers, problem solvers, and good team members will allow them to remain competitive in the job market even as the nature of work changes.”
Mathematics Is Overlooked In The History Of Ideas
Aeon - 10/11/18

"Taking mathematical ideas seriously might lead to discovering that technical ideas are as important as political or religious ones. Taking mathematics seriously might also, counter to stereotypes, lead thinking away from current preoccupations with culture and power, and back to questions of aesthetics and beauty. Aesthetics and beauty are ever-present concerns in art and in mathematics, though seemingly small matters to historians and humanists today, preoccupied as they are with power.”
Willingham Debunks Learning Styles. (Again.) But This Is Real:
New York Times - 10/4/18

"Instead of trying to transform a task to match your style, transform your thinking to match the task. The best strategy for a task is the best strategy, irrespective of what you believe your learning style is.”
We Teach Argument. Today, Is Teaching Understanding More Important?
EdWeek - 10/1/18

“If we are to survive as a nation, then our students must learn that the goal is not to win an argument. The goal is not to define reality according to the terms of one's beliefs. The goal is to see what is around us and respond wisely.”
Should You Have Honors Classes? A History Of Tracking
Larry Cuban - 9/30/18

“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 Placement courses, gifted and talented programs, and the like–including Algebra in the 8th grade–to all students.”
Is The Standardized Test A Flop?
Forbes - 9/20/18

“After almost two decades of its use, we've raised an entire generation of students around the notion of test-based accountability, and yet the fruits of that seem.... well, elusive. Where are the waves of students now arriving on college campuses super-prepared?”
A Conversation With John McPhee About Writing
EdSurge - 9/18/18

“An English teacher has the writing component to teach and also literature, and the ratio is kind of up to the teacher. This teacher, to a phenomenal extent, put emphasis on writing. Of course we read things, but I was in her class for three years, and we were assigned most weeks three pieces of writing. Each piece of writing had to be accompanied by a structural outline of some sort. It could be Roman numeral i, ii, iii, it could be doodles, but it had to show that you were thinking about how you were going to put your piece together before you wrote it.”
Why We Should All Be Drawing
Quartz - 9/15/18

“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 the “artists,” or even the weekend hobbyists. Think of it as a way of observing the world and learning, something that can be done anytime, like taking notes, jotting down a thought, or sending a text.”
“Teens Are Protesting In-Class Presentations.” Not Everyone Agrees.
Atlantic - 9/12/18

“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.”
FDA: Teenage Vaping Has Reached “Epidemic Proportion”
New York Times - 9/12/18

“Food and Drug Administration on Wednesday gave Juul Labs and four other makers of popular vaping devices 60 days to prove they can keep them away from minors. If they fail, the agency said, it may take the flavored products off the market… According to the agency, more than two million middle and high school students were regular users of e-cigarettes last year… E-cigarette users inhale far fewer toxic chemicals than do smokers of traditional cigarettes. But they can take in higher levels of nicotine than in cigarettes. It is nicotine which is addictive and poses a serious health threat to teenagers.”
How Our Expectations For Students Influence Their Success [video]
YouTube/NPR - 9/11/18

“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.”
A Really Good Summary Of The Research Regarding Note-Taking
Cult of Pedagogy - 9/9/18

"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.”
“Insights from 200+ Years Of Personalized Learning”
Nature - 9/5/18

“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, is different this time?”
7 Themes After Reviewing 25 Years Of Education Technology
EdTechie - 9/5/18

“Cycles of interest – there are some ideas that keep recurring in ed tech: the intelligent tutor, personalised learning, the end of universities. Audrey Watters refers to zombie ideas, which just won’t die. Partly this is a result of the aforementioned historical amnesia, and partly it is a result of techno-optimism (“This time it really will work”).”
How Teacher-Led PD Raised A School District From Bottom To Top
American Federation of Teachers - 9/1/18

"With a strong cadre of teacher leaders in place and a professional culture where staff share effective practices across classrooms, teachers constantly explore new ways to meet the needs of their students. Beyond their impact on classroom instruction, these factors have also led to high levels of teacher retention.”
“The Business Case For Curiosity”
Harvard Business Review - 9/1/18

“By making small changes to the design of their organizations and the ways they manage their employees, leaders can encourage curiosity—and improve their companies. This is true in every industry and for creative and routine work alike.”
"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?”
"Skim Reading Is The New Normal. The Effect On Society Is Profound.”
Guardian - 8/25/18

“Many readers now use an F or Z pattern when reading in which they sample the first line and then word-spot through the rest of the text. When the reading brain skims like this, it reduces time allocated to deep reading processes. In other words, we don’t have time to grasp complexity, to understand another’s feelings, to perceive beauty, and to create thoughts of the reader’s own.”
Turkle: Presence Matters. Machines Cannot Provide Artificial Intimacy.
New York Times - 8/11/18

“Years ago I spoke with a 16-year-old girl who was considering the idea of having a computer companion in the future, and she described the upside to me. It’s not that the robot she’d imagined, a vastly more sophisticated Siri, was so inspiring. It’s that she’d already found people to be so disappointing. And now, for the first time, she explained me, people have options. Back then I thought her comments seemed prescient. Now I find them timely.”
How (And How Not) To Discuss Sensitive Topics In Class
Medium - 8/5/18

“So often… class discussions become a reflection of existing power relations in society, rather than a tool for dismantling and reorganizing them.”
“Science Of Adolescent Learning”
Alliance for Excellent Education - 8/1/18

“The report recommends ways education practitioners and policymakers can support adolescent learning for all students, including historically underserved populations.”
How To Craft Your Teaching Job To Be The Best It Can Be For You
ASCD - 8/1/18

"We make countless choices to change how we interact with our job. Each of these choices influences how we feel about teaching. Psychologists call these choices "job crafting." Job crafting, say psychologists Amy Wrzesniewski and Jane E. Dutton, is the actions employees take to redesign their work in order to foster engagement, satisfaction, resilience, and thriving. This means being intentional about how we engage with the tasks, people, and purpose that compose our careers.”
Best Article Yet On The Science Of Sleep
National Geographic - 8/1/18

“Our brains aren’t less active when we sleep, as was long thought, just differently active… In sleep labs, when people have been introduced to certain new tasks, mental or physical, their spindle frequency increases that night. The more spindles they have, it seems, the better they perform the task the next day.”
Here Are Some Learning-Science Proven Practices You’re Already Using
EdSurge - 7/24/18

“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.”
"Why Diversity Wins” - A Succinct And Compelling Explanation [Video]
Everything is s Remix - 7/23/18

“This kind of diversity, diversity of thought, is the hidden advantage of diversity, because it better enables us to solve complex problems.”
Gratitude: Thank You Letters Have A Much More Profound Effect Than Thought
British Psychological Society - 7/18/18

“The senders of the thank-you letters consistently underestimated how positive the recipients felt about receiving the letters and how surprised they were by the content. The senders also overestimated how awkward the recipients felt; and they underestimated how warm, and especially how competent, the recipients perceived them to be.”
Effective Mentors Are Crucial For The Future Quality Of New Teachers
Chalkbeat - 7/16/18

“Three studies released this year offer real evidence that good teaching can be passed down, in a sense, from mentor teacher to student teacher. In several cases, they find that the performance of the student teachers once they have their own full-time classrooms corresponds to the quality of the teacher they trained under.”
What Real-Life Live Streaming Tells Us About Isolated Teenage Boys
New Yorker - 7/9/18

“I was going through a tough time, and watching his streams gave me an outlet outside of reality where I could just smile and not think about my problems.”
"Here's What’s Going On With Affirmative Action And School Admissions”
NPR - 7/7/18

“An announcement from Jeff Sessions, a Harvard lawsuit, changes in the Supreme Court and proposals for selective high schools in New York City. Here's a rundown of the facts in place, and the latest developments.”
Is Football In Schools Ethically Defensible, Asks Harvard Publication
Harvard Education Review - 6/19/18

“In this essay, ethicists… argue that the US public schools' sponsorship of tackle football is ethically indefensible and inconsistent with their educational aims. Their argument relies on three ethical principles and a growing body of evidence that many students who play football suffer traumatic brain injury and cognitive impairment that undermine their academic success and life prospects, whether or not they suffer concussions. The authors also address educational claims made on behalf of football, the legal principles governing custodial responsibilities of schools and parents, factors that limit the moral and legal significance of children's consent to participate in football programs, and evidence that sponsorship of football programs subjects educational institutions to unsustainable financial risk.”
8 Washington, DC Private High Schools Drop AP Courses
Inside Higher Ed - 6/19/18

“In a joint statement, they said that they were responding to "the diminished utility of AP courses and the desirability of developing our own advanced courses that more effectively address our students’ needs and interests. Collectively, we believe a curriculum oriented toward collaborative, experiential, and interdisciplinary learning will not only better prepare our students for college and their professional futures, but also result in more engaging programs for both students and faculty. We expect this approach will appeal to students’ innate curiosity, increase their motivation, and fuel their love of learning.”
Vermont Expands Work/Farm-Based Credit For High School
Hechinger Report - 6/18/18

“Vermont’s experiment in experiential learning goes back a number of years, but it took off in 2013, when the legislature passed a law that lets students meet state graduation standards through work-based experiences.”
Assessing Fact v. Fiction Varies with Political Awareness, Digital Savvy, And Trust In Media
Pew Research - 6/18/18

“Even though these characteristics relate in predictable ways to education, these relationships hold true even when accounting for level of education. Further, there is relatively modest overlap among the groups, meaning that each of these groups is distinct. For example, just 32% of those with high political awareness also have a lot of trust in national news organizations.”
Daniel Willingham Affirms, Updates The Argument Against Learning Styles
AFT - 6/11/18

“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 will think in pictures rather than words. But doing so confers no cognitive advantage.”
SNHU Issues Digital Diplomas On Blockchain
Campus Technology - 6/11/18

"Because Blockcert credentials can be linked to any blockchain… they can be read and verified anywhere in the world without the need to check with the original issuer.”
"Emotions Are The Rudder That Steers Thinking”
ASCD - 6/1/18

“Cognition happens because of emotion. There's really no such thing as a thought that doesn't have an emotion attached to it or that doesn't have an emotion that follows it. When we take in the world around us, we have an emotional reaction to that appraisal. That emotional reaction changes the way we think in the next moment and cumulatively, over time.”
Graduation Outcomes: A Research Synthesis To Help You Set Your Own
Transcend Education - 5/31/18

“Whether you are designing a completely new learning model or updating your approach as part of ongoing efforts to learn and improve, identifying the outcomes that learners will achieve as a result of their time with you [is a] critical step.”
“3 Keys To Effective Diversity And Inclusion Training”
Gallup - 5/31/18

“A meta-analysis of more than 40 studies on diversity and inclusion training found that training is effective when it meets these three conditions: 1. the training is complemented by other diversity initiatives. 2. the training targets both awareness and skills development. 3. the training is conducted over a significant period of time.”
So: You Really Want To Be An Adaptive, Evolving Organization?
Stanford Social Innovation Review - 5/24/18

“When it comes to developing strategy in a rapidly changing world, it’s no longer enough to just make a plan and stick to it; organizations instead need to learn to set a direction and make adaptations to it.”
"How History Explains America’s Struggle To Revive Apprenticeships”
Brookings - 5/23/18

“At one time, America’s most celebrated citizens trained entirely outside of college, such as Abraham Lincoln, who studied to be a lawyer with the help of local attorney offices. But, as college became the default path to top professions in the 20th century, apprenticeships fell out of favor with America’s upwardly mobile culture. In order to understand a way forward, I think it helps to understand that it’s possible for a country to have a system of apprenticeships for all types of careers and also investigate the historical reasons why American high skill professions shifted away from apprenticeships in the first place.”
Is Knowing Students Well Better Than Being An Instructional Expert?
Hechinger Report - 5/21/18

"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 were outweighed by the fact teachers had fewer interactions with each student.”
Abby Wambach’s Barnard Commencement Address: “Demand The Ball”
Ladders - 5/21/18

"Our landscape is overrun with archaic ways of thinking about women, about people of color, about the “other,” about the rich and the poor, about the powerful and the powerless. And these ways of thinking are destroying us. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We will not Little Red Riding hood our way through life. We will unite our pack, storm the valley together and change the whole bloody system.”
3-Step Process For Learning From Failure (Via Google)
Inc. - 5/14/18

“Our next step is to work together to create a written record for what happened, why, its impact, how the issue was mitigated or resolved, and what we'll do to prevent the incident from recurring.”
"45 Stories Of Sex And Consent On Campus”
New York Times - 5/10/18

“In the time of #MeToo, the debate about how to handle sexual consent has become louder than ever. Many sexual encounters seem to take place in a so-called gray zone of miscommunication, denial, rationalization and, sometimes, regret. We wanted to explore that complexity when we asked college students for their stories of navigating this gray zone: what they anticipated, how they negotiated consent and processed the aftermath, and what advice they would give their younger selves. These are their stories.”
Making The Case For Innovation Systems In Higher Ed
Educause - 5/7/18

“In general, higher education institutions have sound and rigorous processes for known, incremental, and precedent-setting change. What they lack is a valued parallel process for true bottom-up experimentation when the outcomes are unknown.”
Why Is Failure An Effective Learning Tool?
Atlantic - 4/25/18

“Research on failure as a motivator is limited, though the evidence that does exist suggests that students can grow both from learning about the failures of other successful people and from experiencing failure themselves. Crucially, for failure to “work,” research indicates that educators and parents need to encourage students to figure out what went wrong and try to improve.”
Why Metrics (For Students, Employees) Aren’t Effective Assessments
Aeon - 4/24/18

"The source of the trouble is that when people are judged by performance metrics they are incentivised to do what the metrics measure, and what the metrics measure will be some established goal. But that impedes innovation, which means doing something not yet established, indeed that hasn’t even been tried out. Innovation involves experimentation. And experimentation includes the possibility, perhaps probability, of failure. At the same time, rewarding individuals for measured performance diminishes a sense of common purpose, as well as the social relationships that motivate co-operation and effectiveness. Instead, such rewards promote competition.”
More Than Mission And Management, Teachers Need Clear Headspace
Cal Newport - 4/21/18

“What I mean by my above claim is that knowledge work management cannot stop at the boundary of the black box: providing workers only shared objectives and the tools/information needed to act on these objectives. It must also consider what occurs inside the box — setting up cultures, workflows, and environments optimized to help the human brain act on these objectives with maximum effectiveness.”
Even More Focus On Knowledge Instead Of Skills In Early Grades
Atlantic - 4/13/18

“The bottom line is that policymakers and advocates who have pushed for more testing in part as a way to narrow the gap between rich and poor have undermined their own efforts. They have created a system that incentivizes teachers to withhold the very thing that could accomplish both objectives: knowledge. All students suffer under this system, but the neediest suffer the most.”
Another Good Summary Of The Evidence Against Learning Styles
Lifehacker - 4/12/18

"Instead of teaching to learning styles, create lessons by asking, “How can I best help students grasp the meaning of the material?” That means if you want kids to understand what a French accent sounds like, you’d have them listen to a recording. If you’re trying to have them understand maps, you’d give them an actual map and have the practice getting from Point A to B.”
AI Won’t Ever Learn Like People: A Deep Dive Into Early Childhood
Guardian - 4/3/18

“These findings are clear: if you start on the decoding before you have an underlying understanding of story, experience, sensation and emotion, then you become a worse reader. And you like it less. Treat kids like robots during early learning and you put them off for life.”
Seeking Consistency In Classrooms Rarely Succeeds
Larry Cuban - 4/1/18

“Policies aimed at standardizing classroom practice seldom produce homogeneous lessons.”
Daniel Willingham Offers Proposal For Reforming Teacher Training
Education Next - 3/27/18

“K–12 teachers, I will argue, have little use for psychological theory, but could benefit from knowing the observations—developmental patterns and consistencies in children’s cognition, motivation, and emotion. Such knowledge roughly equates to “understanding children.””
“It's Time To Tell Your Kids It Doesn’t Matter Where They Go To College”
Time - 3/22/18

"Why don’t we tell our kids the truth about success? We could start with the fact that only a third of adults hold degrees from four-year colleges. Or that you’ll do equally well in terms of income, job satisfaction and life satisfactionwhether you go to an elite private college or a less-selective state university.”
How To Have Better Arguments
The Better Arguments Project - 3/19/18

“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 of government, the job of citizens, how to deal with the economy, and what it truly means to be American. Instead of papering over these differences, we need to understand their origins, grow smarter about engaging them, learn to ask better questions, and get better at arguing with one other about them.”
"12 Things Everyone Should Understand About Tech”
Medium - 3/14/18

“If we understand that most in tech mean well, but lack the historic or cultural context to ensure that their impact is as good as their intentions, we can ensure that they get the knowledge they need to prevent harm before it happens.”
How To Not Give Grades, Complete With Alternate Assessments
Jesse Stommel - 3/11/18

“I haven't put grades on student work since I started teaching as instructor of record in 2001… none of the institutions where I've worked (including R1s, community colleges, liberal arts colleges) has entirely dictated how I had to approach assessment—at every single one there was sufficient wiggle room for experimentation.”
UK Schools Are Intentionally Building “Risk-Enhanced” Playgrounds
New York Times - 3/10/18

"Out went the plastic playhouses and in came the dicey stuff: stacks of two-by-fours, crates and loose bricks. The schoolyard got a mud pit, a tire swing, log stumps and workbenches with hammers and saws… Now, Ms. Morris says proudly, “we have fires, we use knives, saws, different tools,” all used under adult supervision.”
Five Reasons To Read Aloud To Students (At All Grade Levels)
Hechinger Report - 3/8/18

“The benefits of reading aloud to students have been known for decades. A landmark report called ‘Becoming a Nation of Readers’ identified listening as ‘the single most important activity for building the knowledge required for eventual success in reading.’”
Danah boyd: Critical Thinking Can’t Solve Everything [video]
SXSWedu/YouTube - 3/7/18

“No matter what worldview or way of knowing someone holds dear, they always believe that they are engaging in critical thinking when they’re developing a sense of right and wrong… Much of what they conclude may be rooted in the way of knowing more than any specific source of information. That’s true for all of us. If we're not careful, media literacy and critical thinking will simply be deployed in the classroom as an assertion of authority over epistemology. Right now, the conversation about fact-checking has already devolved to suggest that there is only one truth.”
On the Psychological Impact Of Active Shooter Drills
Atlantic - 2/28/18

"A sense of safety and security in childhood is integrally tied to mental and physical health later in life—as well as emotional wellbeing, and the formation of the coping mechanisms that allow a person to deal with later adversity in ways that do not involve killing. It is this sense that can be undermined sometimes even by the best of intentions.”
Is The Parkland Curriculum The Reason The Kids Are So Impressive?
Slate - 2/28/18

"These kids aren’t prodigiously gifted. They’ve just had the gift of the kind of education we no longer value.”
"The Misguided Drive to Measure ‘Learning Outcomes’”
New York Times - 2/23/18

"Consider that holy grail of learning outcomes, critical thinking… Teaching it is not a cheap or efficient process. It does not come from… emphasizing short, quantifiable, standardized assignments at the expense of meandering, creative and difficult investigation. Producing thoughtful, talented graduates is not a matter of focusing on market-ready skills. It’s about giving students an opportunity that most of them will never have again in their lives: the chance for serious exploration of complicated intellectual problems, the gift of time in an institution where curiosity and discovery are the source of meaning.”
A Pedagogical Structure For Media Literacy Case Studies
Hapgood - 2/22/18

"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 have three acts as well.”
On The Value Of Difficulty, The Danger Of Convenience
New York Times - 2/16/18

"Today’s cult of convenience fails to acknowledge that difficulty is a constitutive feature of human experience. Convenience is all destination and no journey. But climbing a mountain is different from taking the tram to the top, even if you end up at the same place… We need to consciously embrace the inconvenient — not always, but more of the time. Nowadays individuality has come to reside in making at least some inconvenient choices.”
“A New Idea To Promote Transfer”: Analogous Thinking
Daniel Willingham - 2/11/18

"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.”
HappyOrNot: Simple Feedback
New Yorker - 2/5/18

"Filling out surveys isn’t something you can always do, so it came to my mind that maybe there could be an easier way to give feedback, and to send the data directly to people who are interested in the results… We saw that, if you make it easy, people will give feedback every day, even if you don’t give them a prize for doing it.”
On The Challenge Of Teaching The “Hard History” Of Slavery
NPR - 2/4/18

"How many students chose slavery as the reason the South seceded? Eight percent… Textbooks and teachers tend to accentuate the positive, focusing on heroes like Harriet Tubman or Frederick Douglass without also giving students the full, painful context of slavery.”
NYT Synthesizes Student Essays On How They Feel About News
New York Times - 2/1/18

"To participate, students had to complete three tasks: 1. Do a personal 24- to 48-hour news audit in which you record all the news you get now, where it comes from and how well it meets your needs and interests. 2. Change your “news diet” to make it better meet your needs. Tinker with sources, content and platforms to address what you discovered in your news audit. 3. In a personal essay (500 words or fewer) or video (one minute or shorter), reflect on your experiences before and after you experimented with your news diet, and sum up how you see the role of news in your life now.”
To Help Teachers In Schools, Try… Helping Teachers In Schools
EdExcellence - 1/24/18

"A conceptual failure lies at the heart of ed reform’s underperformance: the mistaken assumption that education policy, not classroom practice, is the most important lever to pull to drive enduring improvement. But educational failure is not a tale of unaccountable and union-protected layabouts refusing to do right by children. More often than not, it’s well-intended people trying hard and failing—and not despite their training, but because of it. In short, we have a product and practice failure more than a policy and process failure.”
"How To Write A Blog Post” Or Just: How To Write
Rands In Repose - 1/23/18

“Randomly think of a thing. Let it bump around your head a bit. If the bumping gets too loud, start writing the words with the nearest writing device. See how far you get. The more words usually mean a higher degree of personal interest. Stop when it suits you. Wait for time to pass and see if the bumping sound returns. Reread what you’ve written so far and find if it inspires you. Yes? Write as much as you can. No? Stop writing and wait for more bumping.”
Mitch Resnick: “Screen Time? How About Creativity Time?”
Medium - 1/20/18

"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 than trying to choose between high-tech, low-tech, and no-tech, parents and teachers should be searching for activities that will engage children in creative thinking and creative expression.”
On The Importance Of Having A Best Friend At Work
Gallup - 1/15/18

"Our research has repeatedly shown a concrete link between having a best friend at work and the amount of effort employees expend in their job. For example, women who strongly agree they have a best friend at work are more than twice as likely to be engaged (63%) compared with the women who say otherwise (29%). However, let's put the science aside for one moment and look more holistically at what's happening in the workforce.”
Trends In Foreign Language Study Since 2005
Quartz - 1/8/18

"From 2005 to 2015, the share of US schools offering major Western languages like Spanish and German fell. Chinese has overtaken Latin. And the “other” category—comprising Arabic, Japanese, and plenty of others—nearly caught up to French.”
On A Measured Approach To Experiential Learning
Inside Higher Ed - 1/8/18

"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 the foundational arts and sciences disciplines. Take, for example, the following three situations.”
Three Types Of Feedback During Teacher Observations
Principal Center - 1/5/18

"Reflexive feedback conversations involve both parties in talking, listening, reflecting, and taking action. The idea of reflexivity, which comes from the social sciences, suggests a two-way street—a feedback relationship that runs in both directions. Leaders who use reflexive feedback are more effective at changing teacher practice because they're willing and able change things other than the teacher, in order to support positive changes in the teacher’s practice."
What Makes A Safe School?
NEASC - 1/2/18

""Safety" is not a single static state; it is a capacity. A "safe school" is not an absolute, it is an approach and a practice. We must practice the ability to assess risk and make a sensible choice. Practice the perception of danger and the possible alternatives. Practice acting swiftly in some circumstances and behaving with restraint in others. "Safety," to paraphrase Reinhold Niebuhr, is the wisdom to know what needs to be changed.”
A Fantastic Conversation About How Language (And Thought) Works
New York Review of Books - 12/27/17

"When we say we are thinking, what we are actually doing is rearranging causal relations with past events, objects that we have encountered before, to see what happens when we combine them.”
A Chance Encounter With An SAT Tutor. A Life Changed.
New York Times - 12/25/17

"He spent hours with me that day demystifying the test-taking and application process and sharing study tools that I still find useful. He taught me the tricks to multiple-choice, and how to strategically answer math questions that I didn’t recognize. He walked me through my difficulties with subject-verb agreements and showed me how to “hack” large passages of text in order to answer reading comprehension questions.”
Facebook Asks, Answers: “Is Spending Time On Social Media Bad For Us?”
Facebook - 12/15/17

"In general, when people spend a lot of time passively consuming information — reading but not interacting with people — they report feeling worse afterward… On the other hand, actively interacting with people — especially sharing messages, posts and comments with close friends and reminiscing about past interactions — is linked to improvements in well-being… Simply broadcasting status updates wasn’t enough; people had to interact one-on-one with others in their network.”
Having ‘Intense Interests’ Fuels Cognitive Growth (In Elementary School)
CNN - 12/12/17

"A 2008 study found that sustained intense interests, particularly in a conceptual domain like dinosaurs, can help children develop increased knowledge and persistence, a better attention span, and deeper information-processing skills.”
A Helpful Historical Look At ‘Active Learning’
Long View On Education - 12/10/17

"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.”
Ancient Greeks Described Free Speech In Two Different Ways
Atlantic - 12/2/17

"In ancient Athens, isegoria described the equal right of citizens to participate in public debate in the democratic assembly; parrhesia, the license to say what one pleased, how and when one pleased, and to whom.”
Why Teaching Content Is Essential (Via The Mechanics Of Reading)
New York Times - 11/25/17

"Current education practices show that reading comprehension is misunderstood. It’s treated like a general skill that can be applied with equal success to all texts. Rather, comprehension is intimately intertwined with knowledge. That suggests three significant changes in schooling… Third, the systematic building of knowledge must be a priority in curriculum design.”
Most People Don’t Quite Know What Video Games Mean To Kids
New Yorker - 11/20/17

"Kongphan sat down in front of an array of four computer monitors and clicked a button to alert his followers that he was about to start streaming. Fans surged in, filling the chat window with emotes—small, emoji-like images that are Twitch’s preferred mode of expression… Kongphan put on a gaming headset and leaned in to the microphone above his keyboard. The moment the video feed kicked in, his demeanor brightened. “Hello, hello, everyone!” he called out, grinning. “What up? Twitch is alive!””
Have We Passed Peak Digital? Heading To A Healthier Balance?
New York Times - 11/18/17

“Independent bookstores have been steadily expanding for several years. Vinyl records have witnessed a decade-long boom in popularity (more than 200,000 newly pressed records are sold each week in the United States), while sales of instant-film cameras, paper notebooks, board games and Broadway tickets are all growing again… We do not face a simple choice of digital or analog. That is the false logic of the binary code that computers are programmed with, which ignores the complexity of life in the real world. Instead, we are faced with a decision of how to strike the right balance between the two.”
“Ungrading”: Why We Shouldn’t Give Grades And What To Do Instead
Inside Higher Ed - 11/14/17

"I had read many accounts of individual faculty members… but in mid-August, I discovered Starr Sackstein’s book Hacking Assessment: 10 Ways to Go Gradeless in a Traditional Grades School, which gave me some cover in case students or administrators challenged this.”
Nicholas Carr Reports On How Smartphones Impair Cognition
Rough Type - 11/10/17

"A 2015 Journal of Experimental Psychology study found that when people’s phones beep or buzz while they’re in the middle of a challenging task, their focus wavers, and their work gets sloppier — whether they check the phone or not. Another 2015 study, appearing in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, showed that when people hear their phone ring but are unable to answer it, their blood pressure spikes, their pulse quickens, and their problem-solving skills decline.”
On The Value of Conflict: 4 Rules for Productive Disagreement.
New York Times - 11/4/17

"If no one ever argues, you’re not likely to give up on old ways of doing things, let alone try new ones. Disagreement is the antidote to groupthink. We’re at our most imaginative when we’re out of sync. There’s no better time than childhood to learn how to dish it out — and to take it.”
First Translation Of The Odyssey Into English By A Woman
New York Times - 11/2/17

"I’d never read an “Odyssey” that sounded like this. It had such directness, the lines feeling not as if they were being fed into iambic pentameter because of some strategic decision but because the meter was a natural mode for its speaker.”
A Surprising Provocation Against—And For—The Humanities
American Affairs - 11/1/17

"The confusion over the purpose of the humanities has nothing to do with their relevance. The humanities are no more or less relevant now than they ever were. It is not the humanities that we have lost faith in, but the economic, political, and social order that they have been made to serve.”
Here’s Why We Have Grades In The First Place [video]
YouTube/Origin of Everything - 11/1/17

"A high GPA reflects skills like being prompt, working really hard, following directions, and being well rounded, all important skills for high-level careers.”
"10 Things To Know About Getting Into Your Dream College”
New York Times - 11/1/17

"There’s no magic formula for getting into a selective college, but over a decade covering admissions for The Chronicle of Higher Education, I’ve picked up a thing or two. These takeaways, based on hundreds of interviews with admissions deans over the years, may help you navigate the process.”
Brilliant Marble Tracks That Demonstrate Physics Principles [video]
YouTube - 10/29/17

“I built these pieces as a way of introducing or reinforcing students’ ideas on motion and acceleration, inertia and kinetic energy, so let’s take a look at some of them… This piece I refer to as a Galileo Track… This piece was important because it was actually a piece that Galileo designed to help explain the idea of inertia.”
Science Journal “Nature” Reviews Efficacy Of Montessori Education
Nature - 10/27/17

“[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 with those materials. Some key elements of each of these aspects will now be considered in turn.”
Is Numeracy Biological Or Cultural?
Aeon - 10/26/17

"What seems innate and shared between humans and other animals is not this sense that the differences between 2 and 3 and between 152 and 153 are equivalent (a notion central to the concept of number) but, rather, a distinction based on relative difference, which relates to the ratio of the two quantities. It seems we never lose that instinctive basis of comparison.”
How Fact Checkers Evaluate Sources Differently Than Historians
Stanford - 10/24/17

"The fact checkers read laterally, meaning they would quickly scan a website in question but then open a series of additional browser tabs, seeking context and perspective from other sites. In contrast, the authors write, historians and students read vertically, meaning they would stay within the original website in question to evaluate its reliability.”
Questioning Innovation and Change, And Who Defines the Narrative
Educause - 10/23/17

"We are certainly obsessed with "innovation" — there's this rather nebulously defined yet insistent demand that we all somehow do more of it and sooner… We should question this myth of the speed of technological change and adoption (and by "myth" I don't mean "lie"; I mean "story that is unassailably true") if it's going to work us into a frenzy of bad decision-making… We have time — when it comes to technological change — to be thoughtful.
On Social Psychology, Replicability, And Its Toll On People
New York Times - 10/18/17

"After 2012, questions of methodology started dominating every social-psychology conference, as did the topic of replications. Across disciplines, a basic scientific principle is that multiple teams should independently verify a result before it is accepted as true. But for the majority of social-psychology results, even the most influential ones, this hadn’t happened… in the years after that Society of Personality and Social Psychology conference, a sense of urgency propelled a generation of researchers, most of them under 40, to re-examine the work of other, more established researchers. And politeness was no longer a priority.”
“Next Generation Science Standards” - A 3-Part Curriculum
Hechinger Report - 10/11/17

"This type of project reflects the best intentions of the Next Generation Science Standards, which encourage teachers to enable students to learn science by doing… Each lesson should combine “practices,” or the behaviors of real scientists and engineers; “cross-cutting concepts,” which clarify connections across science disciplines and help students create a coherent view of the world based on science, and “disciplinary core ideas,” or the fundamental ideas students must know to understand a given science discipline.”
Deep Data & Narrative About The Surge In Adolescent Anxiety
New York Times - 10/11/17

"The more she looked for explanations, the more she kept returning to two seemingly unrelated trend lines — depression in teenagers and smartphone adoption. (There is significantly more data about depression than anxiety.) Since 2011, the trend lines increased at essentially the same rate. In her recent book “iGen,” and in an article in The Atlantic, Twenge highlights a number of studies exploring the connection between social media and unhappiness. “The use of social media and smartphones look culpable for the increase in teen mental-health issues,” she told me. “It’s enough for an arrest — and as we get more data, it might be enough for a conviction.””
A Modern History Of The “Diversity” Movement In Schools
New Yorker - 10/9/17

"The modern history of diversity began on June 28, 1978. That was the day the Supreme Court decided a case brought by Allan Bakke, a white military veteran who had applied to medical school at the University of California, Davis… The Court’s decision was not particularly decisive—there were six separate opinions.”
Silicon Valley Insiders Describe How Tech Hijacks Your Attention
Guardian - 10/6/17

"Designers, programmers and tech entrepreneurs from across the world gathered at a conference centre on the shore of the San Francisco Bay. They had each paid up to $1,700 to learn how to manipulate people into habitual use of their products, on a course curated by conference organiser Nir Eyal… [Attendees] might have been surprised when Eyal walked on stage to announce that this year’s keynote speech was about “something a little different”. He wanted to address the growing concern that technological manipulation was somehow harmful or immoral.”
A Deep Dive Into Sleep Science. Go To Bed, Everyone.
Guardian - 9/24/17

"To take just one example, adults aged 45 years or older who sleep less than six hours a night are 200% more likely to have a heart attack or stroke in their lifetime, as compared with those sleeping seven or eight hours a night.”
"The Dying Art Of Disagreement”
New York Times - 9/24/17

"In other words, to disagree well you must first understand well. You have to read deeply, listen carefully, watch closely. You need to grant your adversary moral respect; give him the intellectual benefit of doubt; have sympathy for his motives and participate empathically with his line of reasoning. And you need to allow for the possibility that you might yet be persuaded of what he has to say.”
The Business Case For Inclusive Decision Making
Forbes - 9/21/17

"Teams that follow an inclusive process make decisions 2X faster with 1/2 the meetings. Decisions made and executed by diverse teams delivered 60% better results.”
Big Data? How About Small Data: That’s Best For Teachers
Pasi Sahlberg - 9/20/17

"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 what works best and why in schools. Does this sound familiar? Indeed, small data has always been part of the process for experienced teachers, doctors, social workers and psychologists. It is not new, except the name.”
Academic Leaders Discuss: How Fast Should Institutions Change?
EdSurge - 9/20/17

"Where officials stood during this exercise seemed to depend largely on what type of institution they were from.”
Towards Interdisciplinarity: Mathematician Addresses World Problem
Politico - 9/13/17

"Part of the problem, Loladze was finding, lay in the research world itself. Answering the question required an understanding of plant physiology, agriculture and nutrition―as well as a healthy dollop of math.”
A Good Discussion About Personalized Learning & Tech In Schools
EdSurge - 9/12/17

"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 students to provoke themselves in the ways that teachers can provoke those students.”
Red State, Blue State: A School Pen Pal Exchange
San Francisco Friends School - 9/6/17

"Today, we write back. We thank them for looking at our projects and ask for more details about what they mean when they say “safety net.” We try to answer their questions about our thoughts on the “Muslim ban.””
Sweet Briar College Reinvents Its Curriculum And Cost Structure
Chronicle of Higher Education - 9/6/17

"The curriculum changes, hammered out in just three months by the college’s faculty, will abolish traditional academic departments and instead align professors in three groups, one focusing on engineering, science, and technology, another on the environment and sustainability, and the third on creativity and the arts.”
Game-Changing PD in Louisiana Through Curriculum Development
Education Next - 9/1/17

"The brilliance of what happened in Louisiana is they didn’t make a single choice for any school district in the state. They simply provided good information, training, and incentives.”
E-Sports Continue To Expand At Universities
Education Dive - 9/1/17

"This past fall, Miami University became the first Division 1 school to have a varsity e-sports team, and Platt said a game last semester had more streaming viewers the school’s football, basketball and hockey matches throughout the entire year. The Guardian even reports the possibility that e-sports will be included in the 2024 Paris Olympics… There are about 40 schools with varsity teams throughout the country, according to Platt, and many are offering scholarships. While some are thousands of dollars — others, like the University of Utah, are offering full ride scholarships to talented gamers.”
Stunning Data On The Effects Of The Smart Phone On Kids
Atlantic - 9/1/17

"The Monitoring the Future survey, funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse and designed to be nationally representative, has asked 12th-graders more than 1,000 questions every year since 1975 and queried eighth- and 10th-graders since 1991. The survey asks teens how happy they are and also how much of their leisure time they spend on various activities, including nonscreen activities such as in-person social interaction and exercise, and, in recent years, screen activities such as using social media, texting, and browsing the web.”
5 Types Of Communities, And How To Find Your Tribe When You Don’t Fit In.
TED - 8/30/17

“To find your people, you have to know how to signal your passions and interests and seek out theirs. But you can also search Google, or scan LinkedIn profiles and send “Connect with Me” notices. You can tweet links about what you’re interested in, or leave comments on an Instagram feed. Here is a brief taxonomy that identifies five different types of communities you can tap into.”
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).”
Teenagers Respond: What Defines American Values? [Video]
New York Times - 8/23/17

“"What are your values as a person? What are American values? Do you think the country is living up to those values today? Why or why not?”… I wrote to dozens of teenagers — young people I’d met at protests, young Republicans I’d talked to around Election Day, teenagers who were already vlogging about their high school experiences on YouTube. I also reached out to Christian youth groups, home-schooling associations, L.G.B.T. rights organizations, groups representing Native American youth and many other organizations, asking them to recommend young people who might want to participate.
Care Might Be One Of The Most Important Determiners Of Success
Gallup - 8/22/17

"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.”
“I'm Teaching Kids Way More Than They're Teaching Me” [Humor]
McSweeney’s - 8/22/17

"What I never imagined was that these kids would end up teaching me more than I could ever teach them. And it’s good that I never imagined that, because it hasn’t happened at all… I am an unstoppable teaching machine, whereas my students are like a different kind of machine that just happens to do a little bit of teaching inadvertently.”
"Maybe We All Need a Little Less Balance”
New York Times - 8/22/17

"Ever since I can remember, I’ve been told to strive for balance. Yet I’ve noticed something interesting: The times in my life during which I’ve felt happiest and most alive are also the times that I’ve been the most unbalanced… I think far better than striving for balance is striving for what psychologists call internal self-awareness, or the ability to see yourself clearly by assessing, monitoring and proactively managing your core values, emotions, passions, behaviors and impact on others.”
Hashtag Emerges For Resources To Teach About Charlottesville
Twitter - 8/13/17

"Educators: Be thinking now about how to engage students in critical discussions about white supremacy. Check out #CharlottesvilleCurriculum”
9 General Tips For Talking With Kids About Racial Violence
LA Times - 8/12/17

"Mental health experts and parents discussed their experiences Saturday, and shared advice for talking to children about the violence in Charlottesville. Here are their tips:”
The Google Memo: Echoes Of Campus “Free Speech” Issues
Gizmodo - 8/5/17

"Psychological safety is built on mutual respect and acceptance, but unfortunately our culture of shaming and misrepresentation is disrespectful and unaccepting of anyone outside its echo chamber. Despite what the public response seems to have been, I’ve gotten many personal messages from fellow Googlers expressing their gratitude for bringing up these very important issues which they agree with but would never have the courage to say or defend because of our shaming culture and the possibility of being fired. This needs to change.”
A Good Look At Writing Instruction: Different Modes For Diff Students
New York Times - 8/2/17

"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. In classrooms where practices like freewriting are used without any focus on transcription or punctuation, “the students who struggled didn’t make any progress,” Dr. Troia, the Michigan State professor, said. But when grammar instruction is divorced from the writing process and from rich ideas in literature or science, it becomes “superficial,” he warned.”
"The Usefulness Of Useless Education”
Huffington Post - 7/31/17

"The quest for knowledge is best driven by intense curiosity rather than utility. It requires not only structure but also passion. And as Flexner pointed out, what seems useless today frequently turns out to be exactly what one needs tomorrow. Education is the same. Of course education provides career skills, but like research, it is more than useful facts and skills. Students need to explore because they are themselves curious. They need to develop a thirst for learning. They need to be excited and passionate about knowledge. They need to learn unencumbered by the demands of utility.”
Trace The Path Of The Eclipse With This Interactive Graphic
Washington Post - 7/28/17

"Follow the shadow of the moon as it completely blocks out the sun on Aug. 21, moving along a 3,000-mile path from Oregon’s Pacific coast to the eastern shore of South Carolina.”
Really Extraordinary: A Game Theory Simulation Of Trust
Nicky Case - 7/26/17

“It was Christmas 1914 on the Western Front. Despite strict orders not to chillax with the enemy, British and German soldiers left their trenches, crossed No Man's Land, and gathered to bury their dead, exchange gifts, and play games. Meanwhile: it's 2017, the West has been at peace for decades, and wow, we suck at trust... Why, even in peacetime, do friends become enemies? And why, even in wartime, do enemies become friends?"
12 Lessons From The Life Of Claude Shannon
Medium - 7/20/17

“We just published the biography of Dr. Claude Shannon… We’ve distilled what we’ve learned from him over these last few years into this piece. It isn’t a comprehensive list by any means, but it does begin, we hope, to reveal what this unknown genius can teach the rest of us about thinking — and living.”
The Short History Of The Concept Of “Empathy”
Zocalo Public Square - 7/17/17

"The feeling we call “empathy” has shifted dramatically over the last century from a description of an aesthetic response, to a moral and political aspiration, to a clinical skill, and today, to the firing of neurons. Returning to empathy’s roots—to once again think about the potential for “in-feeling” with a work of art, a mountain, or a tree—invites us to re-imagine our connection to nature and the world around us.”
Recommendations For Making Good Ed Tech Decisions: Big Survey
The 74 Million - 7/10/17

"For EdTech decision-makers: 1) Beware of living in an echo-chamber: talk to people outside of higher education. 2) Make sure decisions are being led by clearly identifiable pedagogical needs rather than simply by what technology is out there. 3) Involve stakeholders, including faculty, staff, and students early in the decision-making process to build buy-in and avoid bumpy rollouts. This may include using creative ways of understanding faculty challenges.”
One School Goes Deep Into Focus On “Personalized Learning”
Hechinger Report - 7/10/17

"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.””
A New Look At Hard Skills vs. Soft Skills
Harold Jarche - 6/29/17

"I would now suggest that hard skills are really temporary skills. They come and go according to the economy and the state of technology. Today, we need very few people who know how to shoe a horse. Soft skills are permanent ones.”
The UK Parliament No Longer Requires Ties (Watch The Video)
Quartz - 6/29/17

"The debate started when Peter Bone, a Conservative MP, enquired as to why a tie-less MP had been allowed to ask a question the previous day. In days gone by, this would have been viewed as an impertinent… Watch the video above to see John Bercow, the Speaker of Britain’s House of Commons, wrangle with the notion of updating a centuries-old tradition of formal wear. The glorious exchange includes whether women should also be obliged to wear ties.”
Designer Of “Oregon Trail” Describes The Origin Of The Game
Medium - 6/28/17

"I felt that the best way to build an innovative but successful design was to start with an ambitious set of new ideas, and then to gradually build and test these ideas through successive refinement — first by creating a simple prototype, and then by building up the real product one aspect at a time. At each step of the process we should evaluate where we are, compared to where we want to be, and then prioritize what to do next. Some of our cherished ideas would have to be shed along the way, but by constantly prioritizing and improving, we would achieve a successful result in the end.”
"Before the Internet”: Delightful Nostalgia [Humor, Kind Of]
New Yorker - 6/26/17

"Before the Internet, you’d have yawning summer afternoons when you’d flop down on one couch, then flop down on another, then decide to craft a fake F.B.I. card. You’d get some paper from your dad’s office, copy the F.B.I. logo and your signature, laminate it with Scotch tape, put it in your wallet, take it out of your wallet, look at it, then put it back in your wallet with a secretive smile.”
Clear Thinking And Clear Writing: The Purpose Of The Humanities
New York Times - 6/23/17

"Writing well used to be a fundamental principle of the humanities, as essential as the knowledge of mathematics and statistics in the sciences. But writing well isn’t merely a utilitarian skill. It is about developing a rational grace and energy in your conversation with the world around you. No one has found a way to put a dollar sign on this kind of literacy, and I doubt anyone ever will.”
We Need To Be Well Read. (About Journalists, But For Everyone)
Columbia Journalism Review - 6/14/17

“Being well-read is a transcendent achievement similar to training to run 26.2 miles, then showing up for a marathon in New York City and finding 50,000 people there. It is at once superhuman and pedestrian… There are only so many hours in a day, but the most common workaround for devoted readers is surprisingly uninventive. “I have yet to meet a great journalist who is not well and widely read,” Tom Lutz, editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books, told me. “In my life, the only way that happens is if one carries a book at all times, and uses the odd moments life provides to read.””
Extraordinary: “A Sociology Of The Smartphone”
Longreads - 6/13/17

"Equipped with these devices, we’re both here and somewhere else at the same time, joined to everything at once yet never fully anywhere at all. The individual networked in this way is no longer the autonomous subject enshrined in liberal theory, not precisely. Our very selfhood is smeared out across a global mesh of nodes and links; all the aspects of our personality we think of as constituting who we are—our tastes, preferences, capabilities, desires—we owe to the fact of our connection with that mesh, and the selves and distant resources to which it binds us. How could this do anything but engender a new kind of subjectivity?”
Distinguishing Process Goals (i.e. Habits) And Outcome Goals
Farnam Street - 6/7/17

"We want to learn a new language. We could decide we want to be fluent in 6 months (goal), or we could commit to 30-minutes of practice each day (habit). We want to read more books. We could set the goal to read 50 books by the end of the year, or we could decide to always carry one (habit). We want to spend more time with family. We could plan to spend 7 hours a week with family (goal), or we could choose to eat dinner with them each night (habit).”
Lakeside School Spins Off A Micro-School In Its Own Back Yard
NAIS - 6/6/17

"Much like colleges and universities, costs at independent schools have grown as they provide more services and amenities. Micro-schools seek to trim expenses in ways easier to do as a smaller, nimbler operation. They may rent a storefront, for example, rather than maintain a campus. They can hire fewer faculty who would wear more hats, such as taking on major administrative responsibilities and working longer hours for higher pay. And they can emphasize academics while taking a cafeteria-menu-style approach to other offerings. So, for example, if students are involved in off-campus performing arts or music groups or sports teams, they may prefer not to pay for comprehensive arts and sports programs.”
Harvard Rescinds At Least Ten Acceptances For Obscene Memes
Crimson - 6/4/17

"The description for the official Facebook group for the Class of 2021, set up and maintained by the Admissions Office, disclaims all administrative responsibility for “unofficial groups” and warns members their admissions offers can be rescinded under specific circumstances. “As a reminder, Harvard College reserves the right to withdraw an offer of admission under various conditions including if an admitted student engages in behavior that brings into question his or her honesty, maturity, or moral character,” the description reads.”
The Science Of How Space Affects Thinking, Creativity
Medium - 6/2/17

"Our mental space stands in direct proportion to our perception of physical space.”
Colleges Hold Separate Commencement for Black, 1st Gen Students
New York Times - 6/2/17

"Participants say the ceremonies are a way of celebrating their shared experience as a group, and not a rejection of official college graduations, which they also attend. Depending on one’s point of view, the ceremonies may also be reinforcing an image of the 21st-century campus as an incubator for identity politics.”
We Can No Longer Singletask, And We Are Interrupting Ourselves
Nautilus - 5/25/17

"In fact, of the approximately 86 daily changes in an employee’s work activity, the workers themselves generated 65 of them internally, with the vast majority involving “checking in” with no obvious external alert or notification. Even without the “You’ve Got Mail” notification, these workers checked their email anyway and continued to check other sources of electronic communication and information without being externally directed to do so.”
The Cognitive Magic Of Shakespearean Wordplay
Nautilus - 5/25/17

"His theory may explain the ineffable mind-states that poetry creates in us: poetic experience as the interaction of barely perceptible mental processes whose delicate, scintillating play is usually washed out by the spotlight of conscious attention.”
8 Lessons From Gallup’s 2016 Student Poll
Gallup - 5/25/17

“3. Many students have a best friend at school, but few get to do what they do best every day. 4. Getting to do what they do best drives high school students' perception of success at school.”
Data Scientist Writes On How To Be Both Data Driven And Creative
Medium - 5/23/17

"The idea here is that we should use data as information, not as insight. Put another way, it’s not about the ingredients, it’s about the cook.”
Why Memorizing (And Not Googling) Is Necessary: Speed, Context
New York Times - 5/19/17

"Kids who look up the quadratic equation may end up like the child who looked up “meticulous”; they have a definition, but they don’t have the background knowledge to use it correctly. Students should learn not only the formula but also why it works and how it connects to other math content. That’s how contextual knowledge develops in the brain, and that’s why vocabulary instruction seldom consists of simple memorization of definitions — students are asked to use the words in a variety of sentences. The same should be true of more advanced concepts and for the same reason.”
“4 Standout College Application Essays On Work, Money and Class”
New York Times - 5/12/17

"The truth, I recently learned, was that not all service is created equal… But I was taught all work is noble, especially the work we do for others. Slowly, my mother’s gingham apron began to look more like metal armor. I learned how to worship my parents’ gift for attentive listening, easily hearing the things guests were incapable of asking for — not sugar with their tea, but somebody to talk with while they waited for a conference call.”
4 Approaches To Finding Truth (From Math, Law, Science & History)
Harvard Graduate School of Education - 5/10/17

"Similar to arguments in law, but unlike those in mathematics, scientific arguments may not need to be perfect for them to be successful. What’s more important is clearly communicating the relationship between an argument and the evidence.”
Bezos: Success Today Comes From Planning Three Years Ago [video]
YouTube - 5/5/17

"I'm working on a quarter that is going to happen in 2020, not next quarter. Next quarter, for all practical purposes, is done already and it’s probably been done for a couple of years, and so if you start to think that way it changes how you spend your time, how you plan, where you put your energy, and your ability to look around corners improves.”
"The Survivor’s Guide To Adulthood”
Yale Daily News - 4/28/17

"The happiness of adulthood is not as intoxicating as the rapture of youth, but is perhaps more valuable because it is not narcissistic and thus can be truly shared. After doing the dishes, my fiancee and I sit on the couch with nothing but the Christmas lights on, listening to the sound of cars of Chapel Street. We sit there with the long day finished, our shapes reflected on the window, dark masses surrounded by speckles of light inside a room of no great size. And I think, This is enough. But something pricks me from inside. The question: Will I ever change the world. I remember what I had aspired to be three years ago: a hero like Hercules or Prometheus.”
A Deep Reflection On Inclusion, When It’s Real, And When It’s Not
Medium - 4/25/17

"By celebrating the inclusion of insiders — people of different genders and races who have been pre-assimilated into Silicon Valley via Harvard or Georgetown or Stanford — the industry misdirects attention from the inclusion of actual outsiders. We don’t change much by publicizing that we have hired people that we would have hired anyway… You’re a woman who went to Harvard, we have a job for you! You are an African American engineer from MIT, we have 6 competing offers! That’s not to say that these candidates aren’t fantastic, they are. It’s saying that we’re not looking past race and gender to other forms of socioeconomic mobility.”
Is Your School A “Thick Institution”?
New York Times - 4/18/17

"A thick institution is not one that people use instrumentally, to get a degree or to earn a salary. A thick institution becomes part of a person’s identity and engages the whole person: head, hands, heart and soul.”
Rethinking Accountability For Educators
Brookings - 4/13/17

"Behavioral science has identified four discrete accountability mechanisms: evaluation, identifiability, reason-giving, and the mere presence of another. Good professional accountability practices will employ all four behavioral mechanisms, though in various ways. Consider the practice of medicine: Doctors must pass a series of exams to be certified for practice (evaluation); board certifications for specializations are publicly reported (identifiability); medical rounds require doctors to explain cases and treatment plans to their colleagues (reason-giving); and surgery is conducted with other hospital staff attending (mere presence of another).”
Thoughts On Feedback, And Getting Rid Of Grades
Medium - 4/8/17

"The first finding [is] regarding feedback. Butler examined 3 types of feedback: scores alone, comments alone, and scores with comments. Her study showed that scores alone made students either complacent or unmotivated depending on how well they did. Scores with comments were just as ineffective in that students focused entirely on the score and ignored the comments. Surprisingly, it was the students who received comments alone that demonstrated the most improvement. The second finding comes from John Hattie (2012) whose synthesis of 800 meta-studies showed that student self-assessment/self-grading topped the list of educational interventions with the highest effect size.”
Shakespeare, Text Analysis, And The End Of Sole Authorship?
Literary Hub - 4/5/17

"The author is sacred, singular, reified. There is something monotheistic about this idea of the single author-creator; there is something of the primacy of the individual one may see in Caspar David Friedrich’s paintings. We write our own work, of course, but writing, and art more broadly, is often collaborative at some level: our all-too-often-unacknowledged editors, our readers who make substantial suggestions, the writers we channel or even borrow from.”
On The Growth Of Code-Free Computer Science Principles Courses
New York Times - 4/4/17

"Just as children are drilled on the scientific method — turn observations into a hypothesis, design a control group, do an experiment to test your theory — the basics of working with computers is being cast as a teachable blueprint.”
Audrey Watters And The History Of “The Future Of Education”
Hack Education - 4/3/17

"We must be more critical about the stories we tell and we’re told about the future of education. Indeed, we need to look at histories of the future and ask why certain people have wanted the future to take a certain shape, why certain technologies (and their stories) have been so compelling.”
Personalized Learning: A State Of Industry (Getting Past Buzzwords)
Center for Curriculum Redesign - 4/1/17

"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.”
What Are The Skills Needed To Be A Successful… Adult?
Kappan - 4/1/17

"What skills do you need to be a successful adult? It turns out there are roughly 25, if you review the relevant literature. Which of these skills do schools regularly teach? Just three, as we found in a recent study… And that was in nine of the highest-rated secondary schools in Massachusetts.”
Selection Bias In Schools: Admit Eagle Eggs -> Graduate Eagles
Frederik deBoer - 3/29/17

"When you have a mechanism in place to screen out all of the students with the biggest disadvantages, you end up with an impressive-looking set of alumni. The admissions procedures at these schools don’t determine which students get the benefit of a better education; the perception of a better education is itself an artifact of the admissions procedure. The screening mechanism is the educational mechanism.”
Garrison Keillor Shares How To Write Poetry [Humor-ish]
Washington Post - 3/28/17

“Love is never easy to express… But you can do it. The first step is: Imitate. Google “great love poems” and find one you like a lot and copy and paste it onto a blank page — Burns’s “My love is like a red, red rose” or Stevenson’s “I will make you brooches and toys for your delight” or Yeats’s “Wine comes in at the mouth and love comes in at the eye” — and simply change the nouns, e.g. “My love is like a double bed” or “a trip to town,” “a vision pure,” “a red T-shirt”; “I will make you coffee and serve by candlelight”; “I come in the front door and love comes down from upstairs” — and then go on to plug in new verbs and adverbs, prepositions. It’s like remodeling an old house.”
Susan Cain Writes About The Need For Followers, Not Leaders
New York Times - 3/24/17

"My sons are avid soccer players, so I spend a lot of time watching the “beautiful game.” The thing that makes it beautiful is not leadership, though an excellent coach is essential. Nor is it the swoosh of the ball in the goal, though winning is noisily celebrated. It is instead the intricate ballet of patterns and passes, of each player anticipating the other’s strengths and needs, each shining for the brief instant that he has the ball before passing it to a teammate or losing it to an opponent.”
Use Lego Kits To Create Research Lab Equipment
Stanford - 3/21/17

"Stanford bioengineers have shown how an off-the shelf kit can be modified to create robotic systems capable of transferring precise amounts of fluids between flasks, test tubes and experimental dishes. By combining the Lego Mindstorms robotics kit with a cheap and easy-to-find plastic syringe, the researchers created a set of liquid-handling robots that approach the performance of the far more costly automation systems found at universities and biotech labs.”
Re-understanding Pedagogy In An Age Of Digital Distraction
Chronicle of Higher Education - 3/13/17

"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 provided by Gazzaley and Rosen, a new set of questions began to emerge: What goal had I established for Kate’s learning that day? How had I created an environment that supported her ability to achieve that goal? And perhaps most important — assuming that the class had a learning goal that mattered for her — did she know about it?”
"Are Teenagers Replacing Drugs With Smartphones?”
New York Times - 3/13/17

"The trend has been building for a decade, with no clear understanding as to why. Some experts theorize that falling cigarette-smoking rates are cutting into a key gateway to drugs, or that antidrug education campaigns, long a largely failed enterprise, have finally taken hold. But researchers are starting to ponder an intriguing question: Are teenagers using drugs less in part because they are constantly stimulated and entertained by their computers and phones?”
Dr. Chris Emdin Electrifies SXSWedu: Kids, Trauma, & Learning
EdSurge - 3/6/17

“When a student is brilliant on the street corner but falling asleep in class, something is wrong with the schooling system.”
Teachers Reflect On How Taxonomies Inform Their Teaching
EdWeek - 3/4/17

"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 taxonomy has value.”
Deliberate Practice: Anders Ericsson, Critics, Champions, & Examples
Quartz - 3/2/17

"Deliberate practice involves the pursuit of personal improvement via well-defined, specific goals and targeted areas of expertise. It requires a teacher or coach who has demonstrated an ability to help others improve the desired area of expertise—say chess, ballet, or music—and who can give continuous feedback. It also requires constantly practicing outside of one’s comfort zone.”
A Case For Intrinsic Motivation At The Heart Of Any Pedagogy
ASCD - 3/1/17

"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 applying any approach is to engage students in the learning process. And engagement is not about baiting a hook. It's about helping students find their spark and make their own fire.”
“Should We Lose The Lecture?” Nobel Physics Prof Wants To Know
Stanford - 3/1/17

"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 remember the answer much better,’ Schwartz, the dean of the GSE, says. ‘Lectures have it backwards. They basically give you the answer, then you practice it.’”
Micro-Masters Programs Grow To 16 Universities
EdX - 2/28/17

"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 to an accelerated Master’s program. Top employers, including industry-leading companies like IBM, PWC, Hootsuite, Bloomberg, Fidelity and more, recognize MicroMasters programs for real-time, real-world relevancy.”
An Elementary School No Homework Policy
Washington Post - 2/26/17

"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.”
"The Martian” - Andy Weir Releases School Version With No Swears
New York Times - 2/24/17

"Apart from the four-letter words, “The Martian” is a science teacher’s dream text. It’s a gripping survival story that hinges on the hero’s ability to solve a series of complex problems, using his knowledge of physics, chemistry, astronomy and math, in order to stay alive on a hostile planet. (The Washington Post called the novel “an advertisement for the importance of STEM education.”)”
How Do Different Disciplines Read, Write, And Think?
ASCD - 2/23/17

"The following lists for each of the major content areas, although not comprehensive, can act as starting points through which communities of teachers can begin to think in terms of disciplinary literacy.”
Look, We All Really Need To Sleep More
Time - 2/16/17

"Sleep deprivation is so strongly linked to disease and premature death. One recent study even showed that sleep deprivation in mice can cause death faster than starvation can.”
Apollo School Has A Four-Hour, Team Taught, Morning Class Every Day
Cult of Pedagogy - 2/12/17

"Apollo is a semester-long, four-hour block of classes—English, social studies, and art—all blended together and co-taught by three teachers, one from each subject area. Throughout the semester, students are responsible for designing and completing four major projects, each of which is aligned with standards in all three subject areas. Students set their own goals for each day based on whatever project they happen to be working on at the time: This includes independent and group work, one-on-one appointments with teachers, and attending optional, self-selected mini lessons taught by the teachers. By lunch time, when the Apollo block is over, students resume a regular schedule for the rest of the day.”
Why Many Artists And Creative Companies Are Going Analog
New York Review of Books - 2/9/17

"Creativity and innovation are driven by imagination, and imagination withers when it is standardized, which is exactly what digital technology requires—codifying everything into 1s and 0s, within the accepted limits of software… Like all respectable commentators, Sax takes pains to assure us that he’s not a Luddite; the correct and responsible deity is Balance, blandest of goddesses. And it is at least possible that digital technology is reaching a high-water mark and might before long begin to recede to a more manageable level, possible that after our initial intoxication we can come down from our binge and learn to handle this new drink responsibly.”
The Age Of Algorithms: A Thorough List Of Pros And Cons
Pew Internet - 2/8/17

"To illuminate current attitudes about the potential impacts of algorithms in the next decade, Pew Research Center and Elon University’s Imagining the Internet Center conducted a large-scale canvassing of technology experts, scholars, corporate practitioners and government leaders. Some 1,302 responded to this question about what will happen in the next decade: Will the net overall effect of algorithms be positive for individuals and society or negative for individuals and society?”
Constraints Are A Major Stimulator Of Creativity
Fast Company - 2/7/17

"Creativity is in many ways situational, not some inborn faculty or personality trait. When people face scarcity, they give themselves freedom to use resources in less conventional ways—because they have to. The situation demands a mental license that would otherwise remain untapped. Seen in this light, resource abundance can actually be counterproductive. Our problems, challenges, and opportunities may become more manageable with constraints that direct us to make the best out of what we have. Without constraints, the research suggests, we tend instead to simply retrieve exemplary use cases from memory.”
Really, Really, Really Short Workouts Can Change Your Fitness
New York Times - 2/1/17

"He and his colleagues asked sedentary men and women to complete three 20-second intervals on a stationary bicycle, pedaling as hard as they could manage, with two minutes of gentle, slow pedaling between each interval. This was the one-minute workout. After six weeks of performing three of these sessions per week, for a total of 18 minutes of intense exercise tucked in to slightly longer periods of less intense exercise, the volunteers were significantly more aerobically fit and healthier, with improved blood pressure numbers and markers of muscular health.”
Maybe Knowledge Is More Important Than Skill After All (Via Reading)
ASCD - 2/1/17

"Recent research shows that reading comprehension, deep thinking, and even creativity all rely heavily on prior knowledge. Although you can find a thousand articles claiming that knowledge is essentially irrelevant nowadays—that mere facts are not worth teaching in the age of Google, when anyone can look up anything at any time—in fact, cognitive scientists now mostly believe that this apparently tidy logic is wrong”
How To Foster Civic Competence And Responsibility
Quartz - 1/23/17

"To holistically prepare this new generation for life in an open society, what’s needed is a new model for high-school civics; one that integrates American history and government, critical thinking, media literacy, and digital literacy. The goal of such education should not be merely to instill understanding of our online civic landscape, but how to navigate and participate in it in constructive and meaningful ways: Not what to think, but how to think.”
How Iceland Made Massive Gains In Preventing Teen Substance Abuse
Atlantic - 1/19/17

"Today, Iceland tops the European table for the cleanest-living teens. The percentage of 15- and 16-year-olds who had been drunk in the previous month plummeted from 42 percent in 1998 to 5 percent in 2016. The percentage who have ever used cannabis is down from 17 percent to 7 percent. Those smoking cigarettes every day fell from 23 percent to just 3 percent. The way the country has achieved this turnaround has been both radical and evidence-based, but it has relied a lot on what might be termed enforced common sense.”
The Fall Of Statistics, Rise Of Data Analytics, And Relevant Implications
Guardian - 1/19/17

"In recent years, a new way of quantifying and visualising populations has emerged that potentially pushes statistics to the margins, ushering in a different era altogether. Statistics, collected and compiled by technical experts, are giving way to data that accumulates by default, as a consequence of sweeping digitisation… In the long term, the implications of this will probably be as profound as the invention of statistics was in the late 17th century.”
Meditation On Reclaiming One’s Attention From Mobile Technology
BackChannel - 1/13/17

"There is a qualitative and quantitative difference between a day that begins with a little exercise, a book, meditation, a good meal, a thoughtful walk, and the start of a day that begins with a smartphone in bed.”
The History Of Math Is The Soul Of Math
Hackernoon - 1/8/17

"Historical context gives mathematics (and mathematicians, dare I say) a rich personality that is all too often lost in formal study. It reveals the human side of mathematics; the pain and ecstasy of pursuing new mathematical frontiers. It normalises struggle and perseverance as traits of the common mathematician. It snips away the binary view that many students take towards maths and replaces it with a world replete with discovery and surprise.”
Danah Boyd: Media Literacy Alone Isn’t The Solution
Points - 1/5/17

"In the United States, we’re moving towards tribalism, and we’re undoing the social fabric of our country through polarization, distrust, and self-segregation… We cannot fall back on standard educational approaches because the societal context has shifted. We also cannot simply assume that information intermediaries can fix the problem for us, whether they be traditional news media or social media. We need to get creative and build the social infrastructure necessary for people to meaningfully and substantively engage across existing structural lines.
What Is Design Thinking?
Atlantic - 1/4/17

"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.”
On Extra-Curriculars As Central To Learning And Character Development
Harvard Graduate School of Education - 1/1/17

"Extracurriculars, our work suggests, tend to differ from core classes in a number of important ways. They are voluntary rather than mandatory; they often involve work that is undertaken collectively rather than individually; they feature opportunities for peer leadership and peer-to-peer learning; they involve dimensions of playfulness; and they are aligned to activities that are valued in broader American culture… Finally, extracurriculars draw together opposing virtues that are critical for sustained and deep learning: passion because students have chosen the arena and are seeking to excel in it, and precision because there are ample opportunities for practice and feedback.”
“Liberal Arts And The Ends Of Education”
NAIS - 1/1/17

"This utilitarian narrowness plagues the American pedagogical conversation, and our persistent promotion of so-called 21st-century skills has made the problem worse… Instead of interrogating the assumption that the demands of the marketplace should drive educational practice, we have rushed to impose new economic models — global, 21st-century ones — on our classrooms. Many educational progressives make the same mistake that the scientist, engineer, and economist made in the joke: They are so busy solving a problem, so captivated by data and method, that they have failed to pose any of the fundamental questions that might lead to self-knowledge.”
A Summary Of The Research On Sleep, School Start Time, And Success
Kappan - 1/1/17

"As we started our yearlong study, the evidence began piling up. Our research team found amazing changes were happening. Students were now awake the first hour of class, the principal reported fewer disciplinary incidents in the halls and lunchroom, and students reported less depression and feelings of greater efficacy. Over 92% of the parents said their kids were “easier to live with.””
We're Finally Getting A Closer Picture Of The Science Of Reading
New York Times - 12/28/16

"How many more studies will it take? We know that readers vote more and volunteer more, and that reading literature deepens empathy. And — as finally, categorically demonstrated in a landmark Yale study last year — that readers live longer. Control for any variable, for income, for ZIP code, for anything you please, and proficient reading still makes all the difference in life.”
What Does “Personalization” Really Mean, Anyway?
Hack Education - 12/19/16

"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 check on students’ progress; they adjust their lessons and their assignments in both subtle and conspicuous ways. In other words, “personalization” need not rely on technology or on data-mining; it does, however, demand that teachers attend to students’ needs and to students’ interests.”
The Surprisingly Long History Of Fake News
Politico - 12/18/16

"To whip up revolutionary fervor, Ben Franklin himself concocted propaganda stories about murderous “scalping” Indians working in league with the British King George III. Other revolutionary leaders published fake propaganda stories that King George was sending thousands of foreign soldiers to slaughter the American patriots and turn the tide of the War of Independence to get people to enlist and support the revolutionary cause. By the 1800s, fake news was back again, swirling around questions of race. Like Jewish blood libel, American racial sentiments and fears were powerful in producing false stories. One persistent “cottage industry” of fake news in antebellum America was stories of African-Americans spontaneously turning white.”
Teachers: Take A Break During The Holiday, Your Health May Depend On It
Guardian - 12/17/16

"The research asked teachers to complete a survey at the end of eight weeks – capturing their feelings before, during and after the Christmas break in 2013. It found that teachers who continued to worry about work during their holidays were less likely to recover from the demands of the term, while those who satisfied their basic psychological needs (competence, autonomy and feeling connected to others) improved their mental health.”
The Story Of How A.I. Is Coming To Dominate Technology
New York Times - 12/14/16

“It’s an uncommon story in many ways, not least of all because it defies many of the Silicon Valley stereotypes we’ve grown accustomed to. It does not feature people who think that everything will be unrecognizably different tomorrow or the next day because of some restless tinkerer in his garage. It is neither a story about people who think technology will solve all our problems nor one about people who think technology is ineluctably bound to create apocalyptic new ones. It is not about disruption, at least not in the way that word tends to be used. It is, in fact, three overlapping stories that converge in Google Translate’s successful metamorphosis to A.I. — a technical story, an institutional story and a story about the evolution of ideas.”
On Fake News: ”The Ethics Of Information Literacy”
The Frailest Thing - 12/6/16

"It is one thing to be presented with a set of skills and strategies to make us more discerning and critical. It is another, more important thing, to care about the truth at all, to care more about the truth than about being right. In short, the business of teaching media literacy or critical thinking skills amounts to a kind of moral education.”
“Against Empathy”: A Case For Rational Compassion
New York Times - 12/6/16

"It turns out that Mr. Bloom’s view is far more nuanced than the provocative declaration above… And he is by no means making the case for heartlessness. His point, rather, is that empathy is untempered by reason, emanating from the murky bayou of the gut. He prefers a kind of rational compassion — a mixture of caring and detached cost-benefit analysis. His book is a systematic attempt to show why this is so.”
Embrace Technology’s Opportunity; Resist Its Diminishment Of Humanity
Guardian - 12/3/16

"Most of our communication technologies began as substitutes for an impossible activity. We couldn’t always see one another face to face, so the telephone made it possible to keep in touch at a distance… Online communication originated as a substitute for telephonic communication, which was considered, for whatever reasons, too burdensome or inconvenient. And then texting, which facilitated yet faster and more mobile messaging. These inventions were not created to be improvements on face-to-face communication, but a declension of acceptable, if diminished, substitutes for it. But then a funny thing happened: we began to prefer the diminished substitutes.”
Discipline And Grit… Soul Crushing Or Ultimately Redemptive?
Washington Post - 12/2/16

"The technical mastery I’d achieved during my studies had stripped away much of my expressivity, and I was no longer convinced that I had anything worthwhile to say. Without the belief that I was of use to the world or that my voice mattered uniquely, I lost my ambition. I became disillusioned and resentful of my apparent disposability… But as we began to play, I felt something shift inside me. Suddenly, the months of estrangement and resentment and sadness and confusion, and the uncertainty about my future as a violinist, became part of a new story.”
Willingham Reviews Anders Ericsson’s Book On Practice And Expertise
Education Next - 12/1/16

"In Ericsson’s formulation, deliberate practice has several components: evaluating what needs improvement, selecting one small aspect of the skill to work on, developing a strategy, and then evaluating the results of the revised performance… The mere distinction between experience and deliberate practice can help guide educators in imparting certain skills. For example, many schools want students to work well with others, so they assign group projects. But working in a group is simply experience. If you want students to become better group members, they need to practice being a group member. They must be explicitly taught how to work in groups, and that’s something few schools do.”
Audrey Watters: 2016 As A Year Of Tragedy And Wishful Thinking
Hack Education - 12/1/16

"Perhaps it’s time to ask why – why this is the ritual and the story that education continues to turn to? …Why are we in this fog of educational make-believe? Why are we so wrapped up in the magical thinking and wishful thinking of education technology? What do we hope the practices of ed-tech will deliver, will relieve? What are we hoping to preserve? What are we hoping to absolve? What might we be afraid to admit has died? Why is wishful thinking, in and through and with education technology, a balm for so many of us? At what point should we just let go…"
The Trump Effect, 2,500 Acts Of Hate In Schools, And How To Combat It
Teaching Tolerance - 11/29/16

"The results of a survey taken by more than 10,000 educators following Donald Trump’s election and a divisive campaign that targeted racial, ethnic and religious minorities… described an increase in the use of slurs and derogatory language, along with disturbing incidents involving swastikas, Nazi salutes and Confederate flags. The report also cited more than 2,500 specific incidents of bigotry and harassment that can be directly traced to election rhetoric, including assaults on both students and teachers and acts of vandalism depicting hate symbols and speech… The report also offers a set of recommendations to help school leaders manage student anxiety and combat hate speech and acts of bias.”
Starting To Realize The Promise of Automated, Personalized (Math) Tutoring
Jo Boaler - 11/29/16

"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 jumped around and gave up often), they encourage them to reflect and reconsider before they quit a level… For students who seem to display low effort, they appeal to altruistic motivation by changing language from “show what you can do; try your best” to “help us improve our software by trying your best.”
What Do People With Strong Willpower and Self-Control Do?
Vox - 11/24/16

"The students who exerted more self-control were not more successful in accomplishing their goals. It was the students who experienced fewer temptations overall who were more successful when the researchers checked back in at the end of the semester. What’s more, the people who exercised more effortful self-control also reported feeling more depleted. So not only were they not meeting their goals, they were also exhausted from trying.”
Maybe We’ve Gotten Willpower Wrong; Maybe It Doesn’t Deplete
Harvard Business Review - 11/23/16

"Dweck concluded that signs of ego depletion were observed only in test subjects who believed willpower was a limited resource. Those participants who did not see willpower as finite did not show signs of ego depletion… Michael Inzlicht… principal investigator at the Toronto Laboratory for Social Neuroscience, believes willpower is not a finite resource but instead acts like an emotion. Just as we don’t “run out” of joy or anger, willpower ebbs and flows based on what’s happening to us and how we feel. Viewing willpower through this lens has profound implications.”
“The Delivery Room For The Birth Of Ideas”: Libraries’ Past And Future
National Post - 11/21/16

"The Internet, of course, is a marvellous place to find specific facts but it can’t do what a library does. It can’t stimulate the imagination by showing us what an unconquerable ocean of knowledge is available to all of us. Walking through a library, seeing and touching an astonishing number of books on obscure subjects can be a revelation. For many of us it’s our first glimpse of the sea of information available, our first hint of our own bottomless ignorance.”
Understanding The Humanities In An Age Of STEM
Harvard Magazine - 11/21/16

"For Rudenstine, humanistic study is recursive, marked by a passionate recidivism: it sends us back, time and again, to the “humanistic object,” the song or play or poem that begs to be reinterpreted, to be experienced once more. “We look to the humanities to provide us with illuminating works to which we can return passionately in the hope of discovering new insights, new ideas, and new knowledge.” This sense of recurrent contact is at the root of the humanities’ appeal, and their ability to enrich our lives, according to Rudenstine. More than any other sphere of knowledge, they are better at bringing us closer to the “texture and flux” of human experience.”
Analytics Literacy: You Can’t Apply Data If You Don’t Really Understand It.
e-Literate - 11/19/16

"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 distrust our learning analytics because we didn’t understand their assumptions and limitations?”
Students Prefer Hard But Manageable Courses. Here’s What That Means.
Faculty Focus - 11/9/16

"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 harshly, and feedback that was difficult to interpret.”
Creative Peaks Can Come At Any Age; It’s a Matter Of Productivity
New York Times - 11/3/16

"Keeping productivity equal, the scientists were as likely to score a hit at age 50 as at age 25. The distribution was random; choosing the right project to pursue at the right time was a matter of luck.”
Does A Happy School Climate Mean More Successful Students?
NPR - 11/1/16

"A study published in the Review of Educational Research today suggests that school climate is something educators and communities should prioritize — especially as a way to bridge the elusive achievement gap. The authors analyzed more than 15 years of research on schools worldwide, and found that positive school climate had a significant impact on academics.”
The Long, Slow Process Of Turning Hate To Love
Washington Post - 10/15/16

"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 mainstream politics, he felt accountable. “It’s not just that I was wrong. It’s that it caused real damage,” he remembered saying.”
Sherry Turkle Pinpoints The Challenge Of Email/Tech In Education
EdSurge - 10/13/16

"My students don't want to come to office hours anymore. They would prefer to send me an email and have me send them an email back because they have a fantasy that they can send me a perfect email… and that I will send them their exact perfect answer back. This does a few things. I think it reveals the way in which we try to turn conversations into transactions in digital culture … What I'm arguing in the book is that it's not the presence of a laptop in a class that needs to be looked at and needs to be perhaps critiqued, but really the kind of digital culture that we're creating where we're not valuing conversation enough and not valuing relationships enough, and we tend to look at each other as apps in a more transactional way…
Four Ways To Bring Kinesthetic Learning Into Your Classroom
ASCD - 10/13/16

"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.”
Against Irony: An Excellent Video Essay On Sincerity And Optimism
Will Schoder - 10/6/16

“Postmodern thought, with its deconstruction of everything and its emphasis on individual interpretation, leads us down a road of narcissism, cynicism, and detachment. To fix it… to feel less lonely, it’s perhaps this non-ideological pursuit of getting along, of striving to have strong communal integrity, of valuing others for their human dignity, unabashedly enjoying the things we find to be awesome. And as David Foster Wallace would say: making it okay to be unavoidably sentimental and naive and goo-prone and generally pathetic. That might help us find a greater sense of meaning and optimism in our lives.”
Socratic Mentoring: Key To Student Learning?
Aeon - 10/6/16

"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 is powered by critical reflection, discussion and debate. It leads not to final answers but to a greater appreciation of the limits of our knowledge, both of the world around us and of our own mysterious selves.”
Why Teens Learn Faster Than Adults
Pacific Standard - 10/4/16

“Teens… mastered the butterfly game a bit faster than adults—that is, their predictions improved faster than young adults’—apparently because they were less quick to solidify their beliefs about the butterfly’s habits. Participants also had better memories for a series of images they saw after correct choices as opposed to incorrect choices, and that effect was stronger in teens than young adults.”
How Promoting Nonconformity Strengthens Your Organization
Harvard Business Review - 10/1/16

"Of course, not all conformity is bad. But to be successful and evolve, organizations need to strike a balance between adherence to the formal and informal rules that provide necessary structure and the freedom that helps employees do their best work… Let’s look at the three main, and interrelated, reasons why we so often conform at work… Six strategies can help leaders encourage constructive nonconformity in their organizations and themselves.”
Gallup Continues To Share Benefits Of Strengths-Based Development
Gallup - 9/29/16

"After decades of strengths research, Gallup understands how leaders of top strengths-based organizations help their companies achieve the best outcomes. Here are their key strategies…”
Meditation on Technology, Spirituality, And the Modern Attention Span
New York Magazine - 9/18/16

"Since the invention of the printing press, every new revolution in information technology has prompted apocalyptic fears. From the panic that easy access to the vernacular English Bible would destroy Christian orthodoxy all the way to the revulsion, in the 1950s, at the barbaric young medium of television, cultural critics have moaned and wailed at every turn. Each shift represented a further fracturing of attention… And yet society has always managed to adapt and adjust, without obvious damage, and with some more-than-obvious progress. So it’s perhaps too easy to view this new era of mass distraction as something newly dystopian. But it sure does represent a huge leap from even the very recent past. The data bewilder.”
Tips For Teaching The 2016 Election
Harvard Graduate School of Education - 9/14/16

"As the school year takes off and the election draws nearer, rejecting political conversations in the classroom will likely be impossible — and unwise, according to educators we interviewed… Still, the 2016 election, fraught with divisive language and widespread dislike of both candidates, is tricky. For civics educators, talking about the election may require a different approach than they’ve taken in previous years.”
2016 Horizon Report For K-12 Education
New Media Consortium - 9/13/16

"What is on the five-year horizon for K-12 schools worldwide? Which trends and technologies will drive educational change? What are the challenges that we consider solvable or difficult to overcome, and how can we strategize effective solutions? These questions and similar inquiries regarding technology adoption and transforming teaching and learning steered the collaborative research and discussions of a body of 59 experts to produce the …. Horizon Report: 2016 K-12 Edition.”
College Admission Report: Data Visualizations And Downloads [report]
NACACnet - 9/8/16

"Learn more about factors in the admission decision, acceptance rates for college applicants, common recruitment strategies, and the status of college counseling in secondary schools… Explore the latest admission statistics for four-year US colleges and universities including selectivity and yield rate trends.”
What 230 Colleges Say Is Most Important For Admission
EdWeek - 9/8/16

"An annual survey of admissions officers reiterates an important message for high school students who are worried sick about their SAT or ACT scores: The classes you take and the grades you earn are far more important to us than your test scores… In the fall 2014 admissions cycle, 79.2 percent of responding colleges and universities gave "considerable importance" to grades in students' college-prep classes, while 55.7 percent assigned the same importance to admission test scores for entering freshmen.”
A Distillation Of 170+ Cognitive Biases And Rules
Better Humans - 9/1/16

"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.”
Uncertainties In Innovation: Common Mistakes And How To Avoid Them
Stanford Social Innovation Review - 9/1/16

"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.”
American Academy of Pediatrics Statement On Sports Specialization
AAP Publications - 8/29/16

"The new AAP clinical report Sports Specialization and Intensive Training in Young Athletes reviews the background of specialization, discusses concerns with intensive training and answers common questions regarding sports specialization in young athletes. Included in the report is an infographic that can be used as an educational tool for patients, parents and coaches.”
"How To Think Like Shakespeare”: A Delightful Essay On Education
Chronicle of Higher Education - 8/29/16

"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 skilled labor in Renaissance Europe. It required an exacting, collaborative environment, with guidance from people who knew more than you did. When Shakespeare arrived on the London theater scene, he entered a kind of artistic studio, or workshop, or laboratory, in which he was apprenticing himself to experienced playwrights. Note that playwright is not spelled w-r-i-t-e; it’s spelled w-r-i-g-h-t: a maker.”
Nicholas Carr Returns. This Time It’s Technology, Not Just The Internet
Aeon - 8/26/16

"What I want from technology is not a new world. What I want from technology are tools for exploring and enjoying the world that is – the world that comes to us thick with ‘things counter, original, spare, strange’, as Gerard Manley Hopkins once described it. We might all live in Silicon Valley now, but we can still act and think as exiles. We can still aspire to be what Seamus Heaney, in his poem ‘Exposure’, called inner émigrés.”
Greater Empathy? Literary Fiction Readers Read Emotion Better
Guardian - 8/23/16

"What we are saying is that there are different ways of telling a story, and they have different impacts on the way we perceive social reality. Literary fiction, we say, tends to challenge social categories – the characters are category-resistant … Popular fiction, on the other hand, uses types of characters which help us immediately understand what is going on. That’s how we learn about the social world – how we build our national and cultural identities.”
Education In Context: We Are Blind To The Origins Of Our Own Learning
Washington Post - 8/19/16

"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 later. Any Yup’ik elder knows that young children learn better from story than lecture, from hands-on experience than direct instruction. Any Fore parent from Papua New Guinea knows that children sometimes learn best by emulating older children, not by being taught by adults. People all over the world know these things about children and learning, and interestingly, they are as workable for learning how to design software or conduct a scientific experiment or write an elegant essay as they are for learning to hunt caribou or identify medicinal plants in a rainforest. But we don’t know them any more.”
5 Great Articles On The Subject Of Grading
ASCD - 8/11/16

"Too often, grades are the period at the end of any conversation on learning. Turn these numbers and letters into meaningful measures of mastery by looking for ways to amplify formative feedback, treating failures as beneficial to learning, and giving students opportunities to revise their work. Read on for more ways to create a learning-centered approach to assessment.”
George Siemens: Tech Should Make Us Better People, Not Prey On Us
EdSurge - 8/11/16

"“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, he says. Instead, they should drive students to hone their uniquely human traits.”
Higher Ed Invests In Spaces For Creative Work
New York Times - 8/4/16

"The rationales for these buildings are varied: Employers are dissatisfied with graduates’ preparation, students are unhappy with outdated teaching methods, and colleges want to attract students whose eyes are on postgrad venture capital and whose scalable ideas might come in handy on campus. And so universities of all sizes, both public (Wichita State, University of Utah, University of Iowa) and private (Cornell, Northwestern, Stanford), have opened or are planning such facilities.”
Imitation And Innovation As The Source Of Early Learning
New York Times - 7/30/16

"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 of creating something new.”
Portfolios And Presentations Instead Of Tests
Hechinger Report - 7/27/16

"Do presentations, projects and portfolios give a better idea of what a student has learned than a class grade or a score on a standardized exam? And are they particularly valuable for students who have struggled in traditional high school classes? Many advocates believe that adopting such an approach to assessment for all students could spur teaching that aims to encourage thinking and reasoning, rather than just passing a test.”
Experiential Learning: Going Into The Field Changes Kids’ Lives
Orion - 7/24/16

"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 Discovery Channel!” Moments like these are transformational. And this transformation teaches empathy. Students become less absorbed in themselves and start paying attention to the world around them.”
Exercise Is A “Keystone Habit” For Good Living
New York Magazine - 7/22/16

“[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 changes in other areas of life.”
Taking Tests On Different Devices Can Influence Results
EdWeek - 7/20/16

"Some test questions are likely harder to answer on tablets than on laptop and desktop computers, presenting states and districts with a new challenge as they move to widespread online assessments. Analyses by test providers and other organizations have pointed to evidence of small but significant "device effects" for tests administered in some grades and subjects and on certain types of assessment items.”
Tennis As A Model For Ongoing Learning For Teachers
Pacific Standard - 7/16/16

“In tennis, experience is valued, but performance more so, making ongoing improvement a primary focus of professionals. But this focus would not be in place without systems that recognize and reward effective professional learning; sufficient time and energy allocated to the goal of professional growth; and strong coaches and leaders available to support improvement.”
One School's Aggressive Push For Inclusion
NAIS - 7/15/16

"Throughout the board’s extended discussions, several messages resonated. One trustee pointed out that we should not look at a tuition freeze as a cost, but rather as a forgone revenue opportunity, and that we should realize that raising tuition has a cost as well — a more restricted applicant pool.”
“What Great Listeners Actually Do”
Harvard Business Review - 7/14/16

“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.”
Howard Stevenson on How to Talk with Kids after Racial Incidents
University of Pennsylvania - 7/13/16

"Talking about race in America can be scary. People don’t want to be seen as a racist or someone trying to start a conflict. But the less prepared we are to think about race and talk about race, the scarier those conversations are when they occur. And children need tools for how to feel and speak about these issues.”
The Cultural, Cognitive Benefits Of Silence
Nautilus - 7/7/16

"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 deeply puzzling: The total absence of input was having a more pronounced effect than any sort of input tested.”
"Data Mining Reveals the Six Basic Emotional Arcs of Storytelling”
MIT Technology Review - 7/6/16

"The idea behind sentiment analysis is that words have a positive or negative emotional impact. So words can be a measure of the emotional valence of the text and how it changes from moment to moment. So measuring the shape of the story arc is simply a question of assessing the emotional polarity of a story at each instant and how it changes.”
What Works When Teaching Yourself. A Deep Look At The Autodidact.
Psychology Today - 7/5/16

"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. It's debilitating.”"
How (Unpaid) Summer Internships Deepen Inequality
New York Times - 7/5/16

"As the summer internship season gets into full swing, consider, for instance, how a plum internship may alter a young person’s career trajectory. While some students take a summer job in food service to pay the bills, others can afford to accept unpaid jobs at high-profile organizations, setting them on a more lucrative path… The broader implication is privilege multiplied by privilege, a compounding effect prejudiced against students who come from working-class or lower-income circumstances. By shutting out these students from entry-level experiences in certain fields, entire sectors engineer long-term deficits of much-needed talent and perspective. In other words, we’re all paying the price for unpaid internships.”
Iraq War Vet Compares American Violence To Star Wars
New York Times - 7/2/16

“”The myth of regeneration through violence,” …he traces it from the earliest Indian captivity narratives through the golden age of the western, and it’s the same story we often tell ourselves today. It’s a story about how violence makes us American. It’s a story about how violence makes us good. Looking out over Baghdad on the Fourth of July, I saw the truth that story obscured and inverted: I was the faceless storm trooper, and the scrappy rebels were the Iraqis.”
“Resilience Is About How You Recharge, Not How You Endure”
Harvard Business Review - 6/24/16

"We often take a militaristic, “tough” approach to resilience and grit… We believe that longer we tough it out, the tougher we are, and therefore the more successful we will be. However, this entire conception is scientifically inaccurate. The very lack of a recovery period is dramatically holding back our collective ability to be resilient and successful. Research has found that there is a direct correlation between lack of recovery and increased incidence of health and safety problems.”
Atul Gawande: Science, The Individual Mindset, The Collective Gain
Farnam Street - 6/23/16

"It was a way of being—a weird way of being. You are supposed to have skepticism and imagination, but not too much. You are supposed to suspend judgment, yet exercise it. Ultimately, you hope to observe the world with an open mind, gathering facts and testing your predictions and expectations against them. Then you make up your mind and either affirm or reject the ideas at hand. But you also hope to accept that nothing is ever completely settled, that all knowledge is just probable knowledge. A contradictory piece of evidence can always emerge. Hubble said it best when he said, ‘The scientist explains the world by successive approximations.’”
Specializing In 1 Sport “Isn’t Smart, Even For Kids Who Want To Go Pro”
Washington Post - 6/22/16

"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.”
Analyze and Visualize Rhyme and Assonance (via “Hamilton”)
Wall Street Journal - 6/6/16

"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.”
Great Early Summer PD: A Week Of Cognitive Science And UbD
St Paul’s School - 6/1/16

"The conference will start by considering and reviewing the ideas of cognitive development, the neuroscience of education, backwards planning, and recursive learning. The focus will then shift to learner-centered teaching and measuring the effectiveness of learner-centered teaching practices. Two major emphases of the conference are creating material that teachers can use when they leave, and developing the habits of collaboration between teachers.”
Paul Tough: Ok, Resilience Is Important… Here’s How You Teach It
Atlantic - 6/1/16

"For all our talk about noncognitive skills, nobody has yet found a reliable way to teach kids to be grittier or more resilient. And it has become clear, at the same time, that the educators who are best able to engender noncognitive abilities in their students often do so without really “teaching” these capacities the way one might teach math or reading—indeed, they often do so without ever saying a word about them in the classroom. This paradox has raised a pressing question for a new generation of researchers: Is the teaching paradigm the right one to use when it comes to helping young people develop noncognitive capacities?”
Close Achievement Gaps With Simple Interventions For New Students
Stanford - 5/31/16

"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… showed that the interventions narrowed the difference not only in academic achievement in college but also in terms of students’ involvement in campus life and building relationships with classmates, faculty and administrators.”
Identity Politics In Today’s Age Of Student Activism
New Yorker - 5/30/16

"“This is the generation of kids that grew up being told that the nation was basically over race,” Renee Romano, a professor of history at Oberlin, says. When they were eleven or twelve, Barack Obama was elected President, and people hailed this as a national-historic moment that changed everything. “That’s the bill of goods they’ve been sold,” Romano explains. “And, as they get older, they go, ‘This is crap! It’s not true!’ ” They saw the deaths of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice. And, at schools like Oberlin, they noticed that the warm abstractions of liberalism weren’t connecting with the way things operated on the ground.”
Six Questions For A Full Life, From HGSE Dean James Ryan [video]
YouTube/HGSE - 5/29/16

"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 heart of life. If you ask these questions regularly, especially the last one, you will be in a great position to answer the bonus question, which is, at the end of the day, the most important question you’ll ever face.”
Why One Star Student Chose To Ditch College And Go Off The Grid
New York Post - 5/29/16

"Two weeks earlier, I was almost finished with my sophomore year at the Columbia University School of Engineering and Applied Science when I decided to start my new life. I skipped my final exams, changed bank accounts, got a second phone number and deleted my Facebook page. I needed to break from my old life of high pressure and unreasonable expectations.”
“The End Of The Office Dress Code”
New York Times - 5/26/16

"“There’s a strain of thought that says an employee represents a company, and thus dress is not about personal expression, but company expression,” Professor Scafidi said. “But there’s a counterargument that believes because we identify so much with our careers, we should be able to be ourselves at work.” And that has led to all sorts of complications. One person’s “appropriate” can easily be another’s “disgraceful,” and words like “professional,” when used to describe dress requirements, can seem so vague as to be almost meaningless.”
21 Jargon Phrases, And Hilarious Clichés To Replace Them With
Nonprofit With Balls - 5/23/16

“8. Bandwidth. This must come from the tech folks and refers to the speed and ability to process information. “I don’t have the bandwidth to tackle any new projects.” Replace with “Sticky dots.” E.g., “You want all the staff to get CPR training? That would be great, but we don’t have the sticky dots for that right now.” 9. Pick your brain. Gross. Replace with “Siphon your hard-earned knowledge for free.” E.g, “I know you don’t have a lot of sticky dots, but I’d love to get coffee and siphon your hard-earned knowledge for free.”
Scientists Secretly Discuss Synthesizing The Human Genome
New York Times - 5/13/16

"Organizers said the project could have a big scientific payoff and would be a follow-up to the original Human Genome Project, which was aimed at reading the sequence of the three billion chemical letters in the DNA blueprint of human life. The new project, by contrast, would involve not reading, but rather writing the human genome — synthesizing all three billion units from chemicals. But such an attempt would raise numerous ethical issues. Could scientists create humans with certain kinds of traits, perhaps people born and bred to be soldiers? Or might it be possible to make copies of specific people?”
Even Psychologists Find Use Of Badges Helps Their Practice
FiveThirtyEight - 5/12/16

"As silly as they might seem, Nosek said the badges served a well-established purpose, by giving researchers a visible means to communicate information about their identities, beliefs, values and behaviors. People use such signaling all the time… Badges give scientists a way to signal that they care about research transparency, Nosek said. And it appears that psychologists are eager to engage in such signaling… Nosek’s team reports that since Psychological Science adopted the badges, data sharing has risen nearly tenfold in papers it publishes, reaching nearly 40 percent of all papers published in the first half of 2015.”
A Wonderful, Long Read On Patience As Resilience (via Afghanistan)
Aeon - 5/12/16

"Patience recognises suffering in the difficulties of one’s life and that of another. Nowadays, it might conjure up ideas of complacence but, with a long view of time – in which time is understood as abundant – patience becomes a way of bearing sorrows. Unlike resilience, which implies returning to an original shape, patience suggests change and allows the possibility of transformation as a means of overcoming difficulties. It is a simultaneous act of defiance and tenderness, a complex existence that gently breaks barriers. In patience, a person exists at the edge of becoming.”
Another Look At Personalized Learning
e-Literate - 5/12/16

"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 insight, they head further down that path. When they don’t, they try new routes.”
Explore: Interactive Map Of Recent Education Research
Digital Promise - 5/10/16

"The map was built using data from nearly 100,000 articles published between 2005-2014, found in 183 academic journals from the Web of Science database. We analyzed the bibliographic record (title, keywords, author, cited references, and abstract) for each article and created a bibliographic coupling network, to link articles sharing at least two common references.”
What Is Adaptive Learning? EdSurge Goes Deep On The Question
EdSurge - 5/10/16

"“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.”
Brooks: More Important Than Grit Is Intrinsic Motivation
New York Times - 5/10/16

"I don’t know about you, but I’m really bad at being self-disciplined about things I don’t care about. For me, and I suspect for many, hard work and resilience can only happen when there is a strong desire. Grit is thus downstream from longing. People need a powerful why if they are going to be able to endure any how.”
Online TA Turns Out To Be A Computer… Welcome, Our AI Overlords
Wall Street Journal - 5/6/16

"Last year, a team of Georgia Tech researchers began creating Ms. Watson by poring through nearly 40,000 postings on a discussion forum known as “Piazza” and training her to answer related questions based on prior responses. By late March, she began posting responses live.”
What Teachers Need For Excellent PD: Not Compliance, But Agency
Medium - 4/26/16

"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.”
Bringing Only One Diverse Candidate Won’t Help You Diversify
Harvard Business Review - 4/26/16

"Managers need to know that working to get one woman or minority considered for a position might be futile, because the odds are likely slim if they are the lone woman or nonwhite candidate. But if managers can change the status quo of the finalist pool by including two women, then the women have a fighting chance… When there were two minorities or women in the pool of finalists, the status quo changed, resulting in a woman or minority becoming the favored candidate.”
Does Smartphone Use Affect Critical Thinking? The Research Begins…
Daniel Willingham - 4/25/16

"Researchers at University of Waterloo conducted three studies examining the association between self-reported smartphone use and performance on questions like the ball-and-bat problem. They separated respondents into low- medium- and high-smartphone usage groups. They found no difference between the low and medium groups, but the high usage group was less accurate on the analytic problems.”
Hello, Future: Univ. of Florida Students Race Mind-Controlled Drones.
Associated Press - 4/22/16

“The competition — billed as the world's first drone race involving a brain-controlled interface — involved 16 pilots using willpower to drive drones through a 10-yard dash over an indoor basketball court at the University of Florida this past weekend.”
Meditation On How Technology Changes Adolescence (via N. Dakota)
BackChannel - 4/19/16

"Huddled into icy plains of North Dakota, Napoleon is essentially the same place it was 25 years ago. And by most accounts, 50 and 75 years ago. The demographics and economics are static. Most of my high school classmates have taken over their family farms, tilling and planting the land of their parents’ parents’ parents. The same people drive the same block of Main Street to the same three-lane grocery store owned by the same family. The same houses have fresh coats of paint, but the grain elevator still towers over all else… Napoleon would be trapped in the amber of time, in a big glass case, if not for one thing: Access to information.”
On Teaching And Mentoring Students: A Literary Reflection
Literary Hub - 4/14/16

"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 the light behind their eyes that seems to be shielded—pains from growing, pains from first loves and first losses, pains from home, pains from our expectations, and pains from the pressure that they must have this mess called life figured out.”
New To Minecraft? This Is Your In Depth Introduction
New York Times - 4/14/16

"Minecraft is thus an almost perfect game for our current educational moment, in which policy makers are eager to increase kids’ interest in the “STEM” disciplines — science, technology, engineering and math. Schools and governments have spent millions on “let’s get kids coding” initiatives, yet it may well be that Minecraft’s impact will be greater. This is particularly striking given that the game was not designed with any educational purpose in mind.”
A Wordy But Thoughtful Philosophical Reflection On Pace And Time
Huffington Post - 4/7/16

"In essence, this means that if one has no time, one has also lost oneself. Distracted by the obligations of everyday activities, we are no longer aware of ourselves. If we rush from one thing to another and don’t miss a single event scheduled for our free time, we will accumulate many experiences. Yet if we never allow ourselves to calm down but always set out immediately for the next activity, the danger emerges that we will lose ourselves senselessly in a mad rush. In keeping with the philosophical reflections offered above, this means: no time, no self.”
Justin Reich On Connected Learning: The 21st Century Harkness
EdWeek - 4/6/16

"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 purpose of technology is to aggregate what students choose to share.”
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.”
On Boys And Making Masculinity More Expressive
New York Times - 4/4/16

"Despite the emergence of the metrosexual and an increase in stay-at-home dads, tough-guy stereotypes die hard. As men continue to fall behind women in college, while outpacing them four to one in the suicide rate, some colleges are waking up to the fact that men may need to be taught to think beyond their own stereotypes.”
Schmoker: Simplify and Focus. Teachers Should Do Less.
ASCD - 4/3/16

"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.”"
Sports And The Classroom: A Plea To Coaches To Bridge The Gap
Chronicle of Higher Education - 4/1/16

"How ironic it was then to discover that at one of the greatest institutions of learning in the world, coaches built a tacit but impenetrable wall between athletics and the life of the mind… coaches made no attempt to get to know me as a person beyond basketball, except when I decided to leave the team. There were no conversations regarding my academic life, no conversations about my personal background and no discussions about the cultural and social responsibilities that come with being a student-athlete.”
Stanford Admit Rate Reaches Zero Percent, And Other Humor
New York Times - 3/30/16

"With no one admitted to the class of 2020, Stanford is assured that no other school can match its desirability in the near future. “We had exceptional applicants, yes, but not a single student we couldn’t live without,” said a Stanford administrator who requested anonymity. “In the stack of applications that I reviewed, I didn’t see any gold medalists from the last Olympics — Summer or Winter Games — and while there was a 17-year-old who’d performed surgery, it wasn’t open-heart or a transplant or anything like that. She’ll thrive at Yale.”
Substitute Teacher-Collected Video for Observation? (Harvard Report)
Harvard Center for Education Policy Research - 3/25/16

"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”
What Happens When History Is Recorded Digitally?
Washington Post - 3/25/16

"We’re now in the midst of the most far-reaching shift in media ever, as we rush to replace all manner of physical media with digital alternatives. The benefits are compelling. We’ve gained instant access to a seemingly infinite store of information. But there are losses, too. “Digital memory is ubiquitous yet unimaginably fragile,” Rumsey reports, “limitless in scope yet inherently unstable.” All media are subject to decay, of course. Clay cracks, paper crumbles. What’s different now is that our cultural memory is embedded in a complex and ever-shifting system of technologies. Any change in the system can render the record unreadable.”
On The Extraordinary Value Of Shadowing A Student For A Day
KQED - 3/22/16

"Van Haren often uses shadowing as a way to dig into data she may have come across in a different format. For example, she noticed that on the most recent student survey, Asian and Pacific Islander students reported very low levels of belonging to the school community. That concerned her, so for her shadow day she’s accompanying a student from that demographic to see how the school might accidentally be alienating this group.”
Why Are Kids Depressed? Data On Counseling, Reasons For Stress
Quartz - 3/21/16

"Researchers have a raft of explanations for why kids are so stressed out, from a breakdown in family and community relationships, to the rise of technology and increased academic stakes and competition. Inequality is rising and poverty is debilitating. Twenge has observed a notable shift away from internal, or intrinsic goals, which one can control, toward extrinsic ones, which are set by the world, and which are increasingly unforgiving. Gray has another theory: kids aren’t learning critical life-coping skills because they never get to play anymore.”
Alfie Kohn Asks The Right Questions About Tech In Education
EdSurge - 3/16/16

"We can’t answer the question “Is tech useful in schools?” until we’ve grappled with a deeper question: “What kinds of learning should be taking place in those schools?” If we favor an approach by which students actively construct meaning, an interactive process that involves a deep understanding of ideas and emerges from the interests and questions of the learners themselves, well, then we’d be open to the kinds of technology that truly support this kind of inquiry. Show me something that helps kids create, design, produce, construct—and I’m on board.”
“Screenagers” - A Documentary About Kids And Screens
New York Post - 3/12/16

"I learned that you spend on average 6.5 hours a day looking at screens. As a doctor, I decided I needed to learn the impact of all this screen time on kids. And as a mom, I needed to know what to do.”
Lessons From Teaching Entrepreneurship At Stanford
Steve Blank - 3/11/16

"We designed our class to do something different. We wanted the teams to tell the story of their journey, sharing with us their “Lessons Learned from our Customers”. They needed to show what they learned and how they learned it after speaking to 100+customers, using the language of class… The focus of their presentations is on how they gathered evidence and how it impacted the understanding of their business models.”
Support For Later Start Time Grows
Boston Globe - 3/10/16

"Now, several high schools across Massachusetts are exploring whether to follow suit. The push for later start times is emerging in such districts as Belmont, Boston, Masconomet, Mashpee, Newton, and Wayland. The state Legislature is considering a bill to study the issue statewide.”
Students Recommend 25 NYT Articles For Women’s History Month
New York Times - 3/3/16

"In honor of Women’s History Month, we asked our spring Student Council — 25 teenagers from all over the United States, as well as from China, South Korea, England and Canada — to search the Times and find the most interesting pieces they could on the broad topic of gender… They unearthed everything from a 1911 report on the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire and a 1972 Times review of “Free to Be … You and Me” to current articles, videos and essays on Hillary Clinton, campus rape debates, gender pronouns, abortion, Title IX, parenting, and the struggles of the transgender community.”
James Baldwin’s Talk To Teachers In 1963 Is Remarkably Relevant
Zinn Education Project - 3/1/16

"Let’s begin by saying that we are living through a very dangerous time. Everyone in this room is in one way or another aware of that. We are in a revolutionary situation, no matter how unpopular that word has become in this country. The society in which we live is desperately menaced, not by Khrushchev, but from within.”
On The Explosive Growth Of Extra-Curricular (And Joyous) Math
Atlantic - 3/1/16

"Many of these programs—especially the camps, competitions, and math circles—create a unique culture and a strong sense of belonging for students who have a zest for the subject but all the awkwardness and uneven development of the typical adolescent.”
A History Of Leadership [Remarkably Similar To A History Of Teaching]
New Yorker - 2/29/16

"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 of leadership softened. Leaders, it was said, weren’t dictators or tyrants; instead of ordering us around, they influenced, motivated, and inspired us. A distinction began to emerge between leadership, which was said to be inspirational, and management, which was seen as more punitive.”
Don't Talk About Privilege: Get To Know Different People
Atlantic - 2/27/16

"These kids almost certainly don't need to spend any more time talking to classmates about what sets them apart from the world around them. They need to have as many experiences as possible outside the privileged halls of their schools… They need to discover not just what makes them different, but what they share in common, and what they can learn from individuals who've taken different paths through life.”
On The Sudden State Of Digital Dependency
New York Review of Books - 2/25/16

"Our transformation into device people has happened with unprecedented suddenness. The first touchscreen-operated iPhones went on sale in June 2007, followed by the first Android-powered phones the following year. Smartphones went from 10 percent to 40 percent market penetration faster than any other consumer technology in history. In the United States, adoption hit 50 percent only three years ago. Yet today, not carrying a smartphone indicates eccentricity, social marginalization, or old age.”
3 Ways To Turn Bad Stress Into Good Stress
KQED - 2/24/16

"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 students to have a “challenge response” to stress, which includes the realization that they have the resources to handle the situation, the stress can actually energize students to do better.”
Florida Senate Approves Coding Classes For Foreign Language Req
Miami Herald - 2/24/16

“If it becomes law, the computer-coding measure — which would take effect in the 2018-19 school year — would be the first of its kind in the country… But critics of the proposal worry it could dilute students’ cultural education and place a burden on public schools that already lack adequate technology resources.”
“StudyPool” And The Cheating Economy: An Uber For Homework
Medium - 2/24/16

"Browsing through the bids posted on Studypool is revealing — it’s not uncommon to see students expecting to have their assignments fully completed in exchange for money. Everything from high school math quizzes to college-level essays. Negative reviews for tutors indicate that the work they did for the student got a bad grade or was flagged as suspicious.”
The Humanities As Gateway To—Necessity For—A Life Well Lived
New York Times - 2/23/16

"The regime of information may well sport its specific truths, but it is locked out of the associations — subjective but also moral and philosophical — that bathe all literature… Art not only brings us news from the “interior,” but it points to future knowledge. A humanistic education is not about memorizing poems or knowing when X wrote Y, and what Z had to say about it. It is, instead, about the human record that is available to us in libraries and museums and theaters and, yes, online. But that record lives and breathes; it is not calculable or teachable via numbers or bullet points. Instead, it requires something that we never fail to do before buying clothes: Trying the garment on.”
Surprise: Maybe Feedback Is Better When It’s Delayed…!
EdSurge - 2/16/16

"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 students who received delayed feedback scored higher on the exam than those who received immediate feedback.”
Teens Today Are Safer Than When You Were A Teen. Here’s Data.
Vox - 2/12/16

"Most of the survey questions show that today’s teenagers are among the best-behaved on record. They smoke less, drink less, and have sex less than the previous generation. They are, comparatively, a mild-mannered bunch who will probably shoo away from your lawn quite respectfully (and probably wouldn’t dare set foot on your lawn to begin with!). This is different from what adults typically expect.”
Where Resilience Comes From: Positive Framing & Locus Of Control
New Yorker - 2/11/16

“From a young age, resilient children tended to “meet the world on their own terms.” They were autonomous and independent, would seek out new experiences, and had a “positive social orientation.” “Though not especially gifted, these children used whatever skills they had effectively,” Werner wrote. Perhaps most importantly, the resilient children had what psychologists call an “internal locus of control”: they believed that they, and not their circumstances, affected their achievements. The resilient children saw themselves as the orchestrators of their own fates. In fact, on a scale that measured locus of control, they scored more than two standard deviations away from the standardization group.”
Stress Is Fear, And Relationships Make It Go Away
Fast Company - 2/8/16

"The point is that relationships among employees can help disperse fear across an organization, rather than forcing individuals to carry those burdens alone. The encouragement and goodwill alone that those connections generate can improve employees' mental, emotional, and even physical health. What's more, the know-how and resources that come from associating with capable people help teams develop collaborative skills for dealing with fear-inducing episodes.”
SAT and ACT Become Federal Standards Exams… Wait, What?
EdSurge - 2/8/16

"Already, the U.S. Department of Education has approved three states—Connecticut, Maine, and New Hampshire—to use the SAT as a high school assessment for federal accountability purposes… With the transition time and resources that ESSA provides, educators have an optimal moment to consider whether college prep tests can play the role of a national testing standard—or there should be a national testing standard at all. In fact, Tony Wagner brings it back to what the students, teachers, and districts want. “I think the whole area of testing is ripe for a radical redesign,” he says.
A Wonderful Summary Of What’s Known About How To Be Happy
Scientific American - 2/7/16

"What does it take to be an optimal human being? For Aristotle, the highest human good was eudaimonia. For Carl Rogers, it was the "fully functioning person". For Abraham Maslow, it was "self-actualization". For Erik Erickson, it was wisdom and integrity. For Erich Fromm, it was about having a "being" orientation (in which you value personal growth and love) instead of a "doing" orientation ( in which you value material possessions and status). But are these theories right? Over the past 30 years or so, a number of contemporary psychologists have experimentally tested various aspects of these theories, and we are starting to get a clearer picture of those who seem to be well-integrated, thriving human beings.”
7 Lessons From Working With Micro-Credentials/Badges
EdSurge - 1/30/16

"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 Challenge Of Being An Introverted Teacher
Atlantic - 1/25/16

"A few studies suggest that introverted teachers—especially those who may have falsely envisioned teaching as a career involving calm lectures, one-on-one interactions, and grading papers quietly with a cup of tea—are at risk of burning out. And when these teachers leave for alternate careers, it comes at a cost to individual children and school districts at large.”
Protecting Some Students From Stereotype Threat Benefits All
Stanford - 1/25/16

"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."
“Turning The Tide”: The Great Effort To Change College Admissions
Harvard Graduate School of Education - 1/20/16

"Turning the Tide: Inspiring Concern for Others and the Common Good through College Admissions, represents the first time that a broad coalition of colleges and universities have joined forces in a unified effort calling for widespread change in the admissions process. The report includes concrete recommendations to reshape the admissions process and promote greater ethical engagement among aspiring students, reduce excessive achievement pressure, and level the playing field for economically disadvantaged students. It is the first step in a two-year campaign that seeks to substantially reshape the existing admissions process.”
Is The College Admissions Process About To Radically Change?
New York Times - 1/19/16

"Over recent years there’s been a steady escalation of concern about the admissions process at the most revered, selective American colleges. And little by little, those colleges have made tweaks. But I get the thrilling sense that something bigger is about to give. The best evidence is a report to be released on Wednesday. I received an advance copy. …Scores of educators — including the presidents and deans of admission at many of the country’s elite institutions of higher education — contributed to or endorsed it. Top administrators from Yale, M.I.T. and the University of Michigan are scheduled to participate in a news conference at which it’s unveiled.”
The Onion’s 13 Best Articles About Higher Ed
Chronicle of Higher Education - 1/15/16

“Nobel Fever Grips Research Community As Prize Swells To $190 Million… College Unveils New Media Center Every Month…”
Does Carol Dweck Think We’re Overdoing Growth Mindset Praise?
Quartz - 1/12/16

"Effort itself has become praise-worthy without the goal it was meant to unleash: learning. Parents tell her that they have a growth mindset, but then they react with anxiety or false affect to a child’s struggle or setback. “They need a learning reaction – ‘what did you do?’, ‘what can we do next?’” Dweck says.”
School Leaders Agree On Three Measures Of Successful Schooling
Gallup - 1/6/16

"More than eight in 10 of the nation's chief K-12 education leaders say that student engagement with classwork, their hope for the future and the percentage of them who graduate from high school are "very important" measures of a public school's effectiveness… Superintendents are less likely to highly prioritize the paths students take after high school as a measure of a school's effectiveness.”
Teachers Illustrate The Process Of Planning For Class
Planning Process Illustrated - 1/1/16

"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 encourage you to try this with your colleagues.”
A Literary (Not Social Science) Look At The Effect Of Mobile Tech
Times Literary Supplement - 12/23/15

"While I like FaceTime and Skype, I prefer the faceless phone for important, emotional discussions, and Scott showed me why I feel that phone calls are more intimate. A phone silence, he observes, ‘is a thick rope tying two speakers together in the private void of their suspended conversation. This binding may be unpleasant and to be avoided, but it isn’t as estranging as its visual counterpart . . . silence can’t cross the membrane of the computer screen as it can uncoil down phone lines’.”
A History Of The Purported Decline Of The Humanities
Aeon - 12/17/15

"By the early 1970s, the significance of these non-economic returns to higher education was recognised across the OECD, highlighting the futility of ‘manpower planning’. As the OECD put it, students had their own ideas of what to study. This student demand was a natural expression of contemporary ideas of democratisation, widening participation, and the emerging value structure of the new student generation, comprising goals such as ‘self-fulfillment’, ‘quality of life’ and ‘individual development’.”
Distractions And The Dangers Of Pseudo-Depth
Cal Newport - 12/12/15

"Switching your attention — even if only for a minute or two — can significantly impede your cognitive function for a long time to follow. More bluntly: context switches gunk up your brain. This effect has been validated from many angles in academic psychology and related fields.”
Bruni: Diversifying School Campuses Must Be Only The First Step
New York Times - 12/12/15

"A given [school] may be a heterogeneous archipelago. But most of its students spend the bulk of their time on one of many homogeneous islands. That’s consistent with the splintered state of America today, but it’s a betrayal of education’s mission to challenge ingrained assumptions, disrupt entrenched thinking, broaden the frame of reference.”
Diversity Leads To Better Decision Making In Groups
New York Times - 12/9/15

"When surrounded by others of the same ethnicity or race, participants were more likely to copy others, in the wrong direction. Mistakes spread as participants seemingly put undue trust in others’ answers, mindlessly imitating them. In the diverse groups, across ethnicities and locales, participants were more likely to distinguish between wrong and accurate answers. Diversity brought cognitive friction that enhanced deliberation.”
5-Part Conversation Between Riverdale and AltSchool
Medium - 12/5/15

"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 trying to mold children into a certain ideal mix of intellectual and personal capacities. More and more, I find this binary both idiotic and not very helpful.”
How Can Technology Solutions Help Those Who Need Them Most?
EdTechResearcher - 12/4/15

"In most of the research on this topic, affluent students use technology for more creative purposes with more adult supervision, while less affluent students use technology for repetitive drill and practice without the same level of guidance… It doesn’t have to be this way.”
Coding Is Compulsory In The UK. Is This The Right Approach?
Guardian - 12/3/15

"Last year, Britain became the first G7 country to introduce compulsory computer science on the school curriculum for all children aged five to 16. By the age of seven, all children will now be expected to be capable of writing and debugging a simple program… Coding lessons in school will not turn every child into a programmer. But the idea behind the new government initiatives is that new generations of children will not have to struggle through bootcamps in midlife, because those with an aptitude for coding will have discovered it at an early stage. And those who are less talented, it is thought, will at least gain an understanding of the digital world in which they now live.”
Who Will Save Math? Dan Meyer, Not Sal Khan.
New Republic - 12/1/15

"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 best live classrooms—and those are the sorts of skills that we cherish and reward in modern working life.”
On Addiction To Digital Distraction
New York Times - 11/29/15

"The brain’s craving for novelty, constant stimulation and immediate gratification creates something called a “compulsion loop.” Like lab rats and drug addicts, we need more and more to get the same effect.”
Data On Changing Popularity Of Youth Sports
Boston Globe - 11/27/15

"Football has seen the steepest decline, but participation has also fallen in baseball, softball, soccer, and basketball. Meanwhile, more kids are playing racquetball, ice hockey, lacrosse, Ultimate Frisbee, and squash.”
Doing Character Right: David Brooks Profiles A School
New York Times - 11/27/15

"All over the country there are schools and organizations trying to come up with new ways to cultivate character. The ones I’ve seen that do it best, so far, are those that cultivate intense, thick community. Most of the time character is not an individual accomplishment. It emerges through joined hearts and souls, and in groups.”
EdWeek Releases Report “Understanding Formative Assessment”
Education Week - 11/9/15

"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.”
Five Skills Underlying Tech/CompSci Education For Kids
Forbes - 10/31/15

“I think about [my kids’] digital futures in precisely the same way that I believe all schools should think about educating our children: equip young people with technological agency; make sure they know how to apply their critical thinking, entrepreneurial, creative, and social skills by wielding digital tools. To do so, all kids will need an introduction to coding—not so that they are able to code, but rather so that they are capable of truly grasping these five fundamentals…”
Four Learning Goals: Knowledge, Skills, Character, Meta-Learning
Center for Curriculum Redesign - 10/29/15

“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 and actionable first-of-its-kind organizing framework of competencies needed for this century.”
Rebuttal: The Lecture Doesn’t Hold Up Against Active Learning
Josh Eyler - 10/20/15

"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 derision. As a result, she ignores decades worth of research and relies almost exclusively on anecdote. It’s hard to build a case that way. In what follows, I want to get to the bottom of all of the assumptions that underpin Worthen’s piece by closely reading passages from the essay itself, which I’ve placed in bold font.”
In Defense Of The Lecture: A Pedagogical, Historical, Mindful View
New York Times - 10/17/15

"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.”
David Brooks: Balancing Old School With “Most Likely To Succeed”
New York Times - 10/16/15

"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 is the proper response to a high-tech economy. I’d say it’s at best a partial response.”
On The Ascent Of The Data Scientist, Descent Of The Statistician
Priceonomics - 10/13/15

"Statistics was primarily developed to help people deal with pre-computer data problems like testing the impact of fertilizer in agriculture, or figuring out the accuracy of an estimate from a small sample. Data science emphasizes the data problems of the 21st Century, like accessing information from large databases, writing code to manipulate data, and visualizing data.”
A Detailed, Referenced Synopsis Of The Cognitive Science of Learning
Deans for Impact - 10/12/15

"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 best scientific understanding of how learning takes place. This document identifies six key questions about learning that should be relevant to nearly every educator. Deans for Impact believes that, as part of their preparation, every teacher-candidate should grapple with — and be able to answer — the questions in The Science of Learning.”
Checking In On The State Of The Maker Movement
Bright - 10/12/15

"Many educators who work in this field seem to understand at a visceral level that students are constructing meaningful and long-term knowledge with their tinkering. But the formal proof to back this theory is still being mined. The National Science Foundation is currently researching an evidence-based understanding of the design and development of STEM learning opportunities.”
Results From Pew’s Teens, Technology, And Romance Focus Groups
Pew Internet - 10/11/15

“Many teens in our focus groups described flirting with a crush by liking their photos or posting a comment on their social media profile. These interactions have their own unwritten – but widely understood – rules. Everything from one’s choice of emoji to the spelling of the word “hey” can carry a deeper meaning.”
Stress, Relationships, And Health: How They Can Feed Each Other
Brain Pickings - 10/7/15

"Thus a person, sitting by herself in a room, may appear to others to be quite alone; but that person, if embedded, will have a world of relationships mapped inside her mind — a map that will lead to those who can be called on for nurture and support in time of need. But others, the Gatsbys among us, might be among a crowd of dozens and yet feel very much alone.”
Why Inmates Upset Harvard In Debate: Preparation and Persistence
Washington Post - 10/7/15

"If debate is equal parts rhetorical flourish and strategy, it’s worth asking whether circumstance forced the prisoners to devise an approach — in which limited resources demanded sharper focus and more rigorous planning — that resulted in superior lines of argumentation.”
The Salutary Effects—And Medicalization—of Nature
Atlantic - 10/1/15

“Zarr is part of a small but growing group of health-care professionals who are essentially medicalizing nature… Park prescriptions are a low-risk, low-cost intervention that, in Zarr’s experience, people are quick to accept… Researchers in the United Kingdom found that when people did physical activities in natural settings instead of ‘synthetic environments,’ they experienced less anger, fatigue, and sadness.”
The Best Research/Editorial Yet On How Phones Have Changed Us
New York Times - 9/27/15

"Studies of conversation both in the laboratory and in natural settings show that when two people are talking, the mere presence of a phone on a table between them or in the periphery of their vision changes both what they talk about and the degree of connection they feel. People keep the conversation on topics where they won’t mind being interrupted. They don’t feel as invested in each other. Even a silent phone disconnects us… We face a significant choice. It is not about giving up our phones but about using them with greater intention. Conversation is there for us to reclaim. For the failing connections of our digital world, it is the talking cure.”
“1 in 4 Women Experience Sex Assault On Campus”
New York Times - 9/21/15

"27.2 percent of female college seniors reported that, since entering college, they had experienced some kind of unwanted sexual contact — anything from touching to rape — carried out by incapacitation, usually due to alcohol or drugs, or by force.”
Universities Are Spinning Internal Tech Into Commercial Products
e-Literate - 9/18/15

"Are these efforts paving the way for universities who know their own business to create profitable ed tech and services offerings based on unique insights into how schools really work, or are they vehicles for star-struck administrators seeing glory and easy revenues? Or both? Only time will tell, but I would expect to see more announcements of a similar nature over the next year or two.”
OECD Report On Whether Tech Helps Learning. (Yikes.)
Hack Education - 9/17/15

"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 accounting for social background and student demographics.”
A Sociological Deep Dive Into Microaggressions and Victimhood
Atlantic - 9/11/15

"The sociologists offer structural explanations for why college students are addressing conflicts within the framework of “microaggressions.” Victimhood culture “arose because of the rise of social conditions conducive to it,” they argue, “and if it prevails it will be because those conditions have prevailed.” Those social conditions include the following…”
Technophile Rejects Today’s Ed Tech, But Still Has Hope
ELearnSpace - 9/9/15

“Both Udacity and Knewton require the human, the learner, to become a technology, to become a component within their well-architected software system. Sit and click. Sit and click. So much of learning involves decision making, developing meta-cognitive skills, exploring, finding passion, taking peripheral paths. Automation treats the person as an object to which things are done. There is no reason to think, no reason to go through the valuable confusion process of learning, no need to be a human. Simply consume. Simply consume. Click and be knowledgeable.”
Continuous Improvement: Rethinking School Development
EdExcellence - 9/9/15

"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 with a series of small pilots instead of leaping into large-scale implementation. Guided by “improvement science” pioneered in the medical field, Learning to Improve shows how education could finally stop its reform churn.”
APA Provides 20 Research-Backed Principles Of Learning
American Psychological Association - 9/1/15

"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, and emotional well-being important to student learning? The next two principles (16–17) relate to how context can affect learning and address the question: How can the classroom best be managed? Finally, the last three principles (18–20) examine the question: How can teachers assess student progress?”
World Economic Forum Surveys Tipping Points In Global Tech
World Economic Forum - 9/1/15

"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 – one aimed at trying to capture some of the deep shifts occurring in society as a result of software and services, and to encourage everyone to think about the impact of these changes on our society and how to prepare for the changes ahead.
A Deep Look At Where Mindfulness Fits In Schools
Atlantic - 8/31/15

“the body of scientific research illustrating the positive effects of mindfulness training on mental health and well-being—at the level of the brain as well as at the level of behavior—grows steadily more well-established: It improves attention, reduces stress, and results in better emotional regulation and an improved capacity for compassion and empathy.”
A Rich Exploration Of What Makes Expert Teachers
Bright - 8/27/15

"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).”
The Importance Of Keeping A Critical Lens With Edtech
Hack Education - 8/15/15

“Why are schools now buying new hardware and software? Try again if your answer is “because the tech is so good.” A technocentric response points our attention to the technology itself – new tools, data, devices, apps, broadband, the cloud – as though these are context-free. Computer criticism, as outlined by Papert, demands we look more closely instead at policies, profits, politics, practices, power.”
Learning Multiple Sports Helps You Improve In Any One Sport
Stadion - 8/12/15

"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.”
A Cognitive Argument For Focusing On Both Content And Skills
Atlantic - 8/12/15

"If the benefit of schooling comes from the content learned, then it’s important to get a better understanding of what content will be most valuable to students later on in their lives. The answers may seem intuitive, but they’re also subjective and complex. A student may not use plane geometry, solid geometry, or trigonometry, but studying them may improve her ability to mentally visualize spatial relationships among objects, and that may prove useful for decades in a variety of tasks.”
“88 College Taglines, Arranged As A Poem” [Humor?]
Chronicle of Higher Education - 8/4/15

"Are You In? What Will You Do? Who Will You Be? It’s All About You.”
Results From Data Crunching 15,000 Successful College Essays
Fast Company - 8/3/15

"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 tackle experiences with failure. Meanwhile, Cornell and the University of Pennsylvania tend to accept students who write about their career aspirations.”
Blended Learning 2.0: After the Honeymoon
EdSurge - 8/3/15

"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 learnings to iterate on existing school designs or create new ones.”
Five Exercises To Prompt Reflection On One’s Education
New York Times - 8/2/15

"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.”
An Essential Overview Of Current Models Of New Schools
SSATB - 7/30/15

"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 Rigorous Schools, Deeper Learning Schools, Personalized Learning Schools, Online Schools.
Liberal Arts Colleges Begin Developing In-House Startup Incubators
Forbes - 7/29/15

"With annual symposiums, mentorship programs and funding competitions, Middlebury is one of many small liberal arts colleges reinventing themselves as modern-day startup incubators–geared toward for-profit enterprises and nonprofits alike. Driven by market demand and the idea of teaching practical skills that would create larger impacts outside of traditional liberal arts classrooms, these colleges are encouraging students to pursue entrepreneurship–in particular, social entrepreneurship.”
What If Teaching Got The Same Coverage As Sports? [Humor/Despair]
YouTube/Comedy Central - 7/28/15

“All right let’s take a look at yesterday’s high school teacher draft from Radio City Music Hall, where Central Rapids High, recipient of the worst test scores last semester made the first pick, that was no surprise to anyone. ‘For the first pick, Central Rapids High takes calculus teacher Mike Yoast from Tulsa Teachers College!’ And just like that, you’re a millionaire!”
Code Schools Continue To Explode—And Place Graduates
New York Times - 7/28/15

"The graduating classes of these coding schools support the trend. They will graduate about 16,000 students this year, more than double the 6,740 graduates last year, according to a survey published by Course Report in June. The 2015 total would be about one-third of the estimated number of computer science graduates from American universities.”
Picbreeder: Brilliant Insight Into Conditions For Creative Work
FiveThirtyEight - 7/23/15

"Although this openness to new ideas might sound like just waiting around for serendipity to strike, it’s a more deliberate process… Simonton’s research has similarly shown that the best predictor of creative achievement is an openness to experience and cognitive exploration.”
3D Printing Reaches “Tipping Point” In Industry
Harvard Business Review - 7/21/15

"Surveys indicate that more than 30 percent of the top 300 largest global brands are now using or evaluating 3D printing (often with printing technology in-house) whether for prototyping and other innovation projects or in actual production of what they sell. Over 200 universities and colleges already offer 3D coursework in their curricula – covering aspects of not only 3D printing but also 3D scanning and design.”
Meditation On Handwriting In The Age Of the Stylus
Penguin Random House - 7/6/15

"Maybe handwriting is neither an obsolete art nor a fundamentally human mode, now lost; in the symbol of a hybrid digital writing, perhaps there is some useful alchemy left in the way language, the body, and our sense of identity are so intimately intertwined.”
Yes, Helicopter Parenting Is Bad For Kids. Here Are The Studies.
Slate - 7/5/15

"The data emerging about the mental health of our kids only confirms the harm done by asking so little of them when it comes to life skills yet so much of them when it comes to adhering to the academic plans we’ve made for them.”
MLK: 6 Pillars Of Nonviolent Resistance, And The Greek Sense Of “Agape”
Brain Pickings - 7/1/15

"Nonviolence … does not seek to defeat or humiliate the opponent, but to win his friendship and understanding. The nonviolent resister must often express his protest through noncooperation or boycotts, but he realizes that these are not ends themselves; they are merely means to awaken a sense of moral shame in the opponent. The end is redemption and reconciliation.”
Does Privilege Influence Post-College Well-Being?
Gallup - 7/1/15

"What we do know is that regardless of minority status, socioeconomic class and first-generation college student status, how you take advantage of college is more important than where you go. For example, graduates who had mentoring relationships, internships and jobs where they applied their learning, as well as long-term projects lasting more than a semester, doubled their odds of being engaged in work and thriving in their well-being later in life. It may be the case that those who value college most take more advantage of the opportunity.”
A Great Long Read On Hunches vs Data (via singing, hiring…)
More Intelligent Life - 7/1/15

"Hunches make people over-confident. But if the hunch runs in the opposite direction to everyone else’s certainties, then over-confidence can be a strength… It’s not as if data solve the over-confidence problem, anyway. Indeed, they can exacerbate it, especially when people get hooked on the wrong measures… The hunch and the data can educate one another. We need human judgment to correct for cardinal bias—the tendency to place more importance on what can be quantified than what cannot.”
The Importance Of Athletics For Building Character
KQED - 7/1/15

"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, was how much feelings of hopefulness among the young people also increased.”
Even Business Schools Are Affirming the Importance Of Humanities
Harvard Business School - 6/24/15

“We cannot march boldly into the future without demanding rapid advancement, too, in the faculties required to preserve our human dignity in a world of [artificial superintelligence]. Our capacities for ethical decision-making, compassion, and creativity must also grow, along with our intellectual capabilities to deepen our understanding of the human need for connection, accomplishment, and meaning.”
Hattie’s Call For Collaborative Teacher Efficacy And Growth
Pearson - 6/16/15

"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 is also a role for the system: to provide the support, time and resources for this to happen. Putting all three of these (teachers, leaders, system) together gets at the heart of collaborative expertise.”
The New Generations: Selfie-Absorbed, But Perhaps Not Selfish
Atlantic - 6/10/15

"An older generation may have spoken loftily about morality and virtue and nobility. But many of them could be callous, cruel, and selfish in the way that they treated so many of their fellow human beings… The young today are perhaps less articulate. They search for morality and the meaning of life in more incremental and practical ways. They seek truth and justice, but through avenues quieter than the showy ones of the past. They try to combine their great urges with a good life."
ASU: What Are The Four Things Mentors Need To Know?
Medium - 6/9/15

"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 different stages of their development process.”
What Do Students Think Of Higher Ed Priorities?
Higher Education Policy Institute - 6/4/15

"The Student Academic Experience Survey was established in 2006 and is now in its tenth year. It has been continuously improved and this year’s survey includes new questions on how students rate the importance of training for those who teach in higher education, on information provided to students and on possible spending cuts.”
"Why Technology Alone Won’t Fix Schools”
Atlantic - 6/3/15

“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.”
What Happens When Students Identify And Solve School Problems
ASCD - 6/1/15

"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 with a solution… He invited the students to share their plan with the rest of the staff, who were equally complimentary. Everyone acknowledged that the students had come up with a plan that was more detailed and thoughtful than any plan the adults might have proposed and that it was more likely to succeed because it came from the students themselves.”
The New York Times Uses Great Math Pedagogy
Dy/dan - 6/1/15

“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.”
What Determines Whether Teachers Stay, Improve, and Succeed?
Shanker Institute - 5/28/15

"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 difficult to observe and measure seem to be most influential, including the quality of relationships and collaboration among staff, the responsiveness of school administrators, and the academic and behavioral expectations for students.”
SNHU’s Paul LeBlanc On Competency-Based Learning (and More)
Chronicle of Higher Education - 5/27/15

“The credit hour is very good at telling us how long people have sat, not so good at telling us what they've actually learned. And in that model, time is pretty fixed… What they learn is variable… You flip that in a competency-based model. What happens is that learning becomes fixed and non-negotiable, and time becomes the variable.”
5 Tips For Being A Creative Organization (From Xerox PARC Founder)
Fast Company - 5/26/15

“4. Stay small, avoid hype, and pick a boring name… The shortest lived group at Xerox PARC was "Office of the Future," because Xerox executives would not leave them alone. I chose the most innocuous name for my own group, the Learning Research Group. Nobody knew what it meant, so they left us alone to invent-object oriented programming and the GUI.”
“Forest Mondays”: School Takes Kids Outside All Day Every Monday
NPR - 5/26/15

"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 that U.S. schools have become too focused on academics and test scores and not enough on "noncognitive" skills such as persistence and self-control. There is growing attention on the importance of these skills, but Minnucci doesn't think traditional school is set up to teach them very well.”
Should Wealthy Schools Educate the Least Wealthy Students?
Inside Higher Ed - 5/21/15

"Selective institutions should do more to enroll low-income students, and that it would be fair for the government to expect institutions that receive a large amount of federal aid to also enroll higher numbers of low-income students.”
Survey: What Causes Teachers Stress
EdSurge - 5/19/15

"Amongst major factors contributing to teacher stress, the survey results cite the adoption of new initiatives without proper PD (71%) and the negative portrayal of educators in the media (55%) as the two biggest factors. The survey results also identified the top three ‘everyday stressors in the classroom’ as mandated curriculum, large class size, and standardized testing.”
How Might You Reorganize Your School As A Team of Teams?
Fast Company - 5/12/15

“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.”
3 Researchers: First Steps For Improving Education
Stanford - 5/8/15

"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 professional autonomy to make judgments about the work… [But] the more we distrust the capacity of people in schools, the more we're pressed toward scripted curriculum and micromanaging that work."
Stress Can Be A Good Thing. It’s About Mindset.
Stanford - 5/7/15

"Stress is most likely to be harmful when the following conditions are present: it feels against your will, out of your control and utterly devoid of meaning. If you can change any of these conditions – by finding some meaning in it – you can reduce the harmful effects of stress.”
Reconsidering “Innovation” and “Progress”
Aeon - 5/3/15

"Somewhere between the tiny vision of innovation and the arrogance of grand progress lies a vision of collective destiny and confidence that with the right investments, a strong consensus, and patience we can generate a more just and stable world. We passed right by that point in the rush from the 20th to the 21st centuries. We must reclaim it.”
Frank Bruni: Reach For Your Interests, Not For Excellence
New York Times - 5/2/15

“He’s concerned, as I am, that too many anxious parents and their addled children believe in, and insist on, an exacting, unforgiving script for success and (supposedly) happiness. Go to this venerable college. Pursue that sensible course of study. Tailor your exertions to the looming job market. They put too much faith in plotting, too little in serendipity. And it can leach joy and imagination from their pursuits.”
Continual Improvement Is Better Than Focusing On Best Practices
Educational Leadership - 5/1/15

“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 and one unit at a time.”
Existential Emails Explaining Class Absence [Humor]
Synapse - 4/27/15

"Can’t make it. Sorry this is last-minute. Every minute is the last. — Pamela”
Researcher Goes To Japan, Finds Chalkboards, Is Shocked
Larry Cuban - 4/26/15

"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. As stated in a recent Japanese publication from the Future Schools Project, ‘Traditional education will be valued while those parts of it that should be extended, broadened, or deepened will evolve significantly.’”
I Gave A TEDx Talk: Why Pausing Makes Us More Of Who We Are
TEDx / YouTube - 4/20/15

“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.”
On How Best To Help Teachers Get Better
EdWeek - 4/15/15

“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?”
“Distraction Is A Kind Of Obesity Of The Mind”
Guardian - 4/12/15

"We need a kind of “attentional commons”: a regulation of noise and distraction in public space, and government intervention in areas like gambling, where some people are being manipulated beyond their reasonable ability to cope. More importantly, though, Crawford advocates skilled practices as a way of engaging with the world in a more satisfying way. He gives the examples of a cook, an ice-hockey player and a motorbike racer as people whose roles force them to deal with material reality. No representation can replicate the feel of the puck on ice or gravel under your tyres at high speed. Each relies on good judgment of a complicated subject and the ability to manage the presence of others in the same space.”
A Deep Dive Into The First-Generation College Experience
New York Times - 4/12/15

"Freshmen were assigned to attend one of two hourlong orientation sessions. In one, panelists gave advice about the transition to college and challenges like choosing classes. In the other, the same panelists wove their backgrounds into advice… Typically, first-generation freshman G.P.A.s lag behind their peers’ by 0.3 points. The gap was eliminated for students in the session where panelists shared their backgrounds; they also reported being happier, less stressed out and more willing to seek help than the control group.”
The Library As Facilitator Of Classroom Innovation
Chronicle of Higher Education - 4/10/15

"The added value is using these spaces for other purposes: workshops, seminars, symposiums, exhibits, showcases, media labs, meeting rooms, study rooms, group work rooms, tutoring rooms, and other activities. So there is a functional layer. We can teach more. We can teach differently. Other people can also teach more and differently as well. We can partner more with them on instruction and other projects. When the rooms are not “classrooms” they can serve a multitude of other needs.”
The Perils and Promise of 1st Generation College Kids (at Ivies)
Boston Globe - 4/9/15

"I feel like here I’m moving up the socioeconomic ladder. But when I graduate, will I slip back down?”
Documentary Theater: Bridging The Public-Private Divide
KQED - 4/3/15

"The worlds of Richmond High School and Marin Academy are only one bridge away from each other, but they rarely collide. That was until a theater project asked students from both schools to interview each other, and perform each other’s lives on stage… You have to learn to move the way that person moves, and follow the exact words that person said — even the ums, the ahs, the likes. So each student met with a student from the other school, and they basically ripped their hearts out, knowing full well that these interviews would end up on stage for everyone to see, performed by the student that interviewed them.”
Understanding Loneliness In A Digital Age
Guardian - 4/1/15

"Hidden behind a computer screen, the lonely person has control. They can search for company without the danger of being revealed or found wanting. They can reach out or they can hide; they can lurk and they can show themselves, safe from the humiliation of face-to-face rejection… But now a problem arises, for the contact this produces is not the same thing as intimacy. Curating a perfected self might win followers or Facebook friends, but it will not necessarily cure loneliness, since the cure for loneliness is not being looked at, but being seen and accepted as a whole person – ugly, unhappy and awkward, as well as radiant and selfie-ready.”
Perceptual Learning: A New/Necessary Skill In An Information Age
New York Times - 3/27/15

"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 identify abnormalities. Such modules are equally applicable in any field of study or expertise that involves making subtle distinctions.”
The Importance of Movement to Learning
KQED - 3/26/15

"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 brain that also control basic body functions. Increasingly, this work is helping to illuminate neurological connections between the human body, its environment and the process of learning.”
What is Resilience? How Do We Build It?
Harvard Graduate School of Education - 3/23/15

"As a growing body of research is showing, the developing brain relies upon the consistent ‘serve and return’ interactions that happen between a young child and a primary caregiver… When these interactions occur regularly, they provide the scaffolding that helps build ‘key capacities — such as the ability to plan, monitor, and regulate behavior, and adapt to changing circumstances — that enable children to respond to adversity and to thrive.’”
John Seely Brown’s Essay On Digital Age Entrepreneurial Learning
John Seely Brown - 3/22/15

"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.”
Students of Color Are A Majority In Pomona College’s Admitted Class
Pomona - 3/20/15

"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.”
David Brooks Explores The Unmeasurable Skills We Need Today
New York Times - 3/17/15

"As the economy changes, the skills required to thrive in it change, too, and it takes a while before these new skills are defined and acknowledged. For example, in today’s loosely networked world, people with social courage have amazing value. Everyone goes to conferences and meets people, but some people invite six people to lunch afterward and follow up with four carefully tended friendships forevermore. Then they spend their lives connecting people across networks… Similarly, people who can capture amorphous trends with a clarifying label also have enormous worth.”
Public v. Private School: the Opportunity Gap [podcast]
This American Life - 3/13/15

"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.”
An Ode to Writing
New Yorker - 3/11/15

"Despite every advancement, language remains the defining nexus of our humanity; it is where our knowledge and hope lie. It is the precondition of human tenderness, mightier than the sword but also infinitely more subtle and ultimately more urgent. Remember that writing things down makes them real; that it is nearly impossible to hate anyone whose story you know; and, most of all, that even in our post-postmodern era, writing has a moral purpose.”
On Girls’ Growing Dominance In School And University
Economist - 3/7/15

“Until the 1960s boys spent longer and went further in school than girls, and were more likely to graduate from university. Now, across the rich world and in a growing number of poor countries, the balance has tilted the other way. Policymakers who once fretted about girls’ lack of confidence in science now spend their time dangling copies of “Harry Potter” before surly boys. Sweden has commissioned research into its “boy crisis”. Australia has devised a reading programme called “Boys, Blokes, Books & Bytes”. In just a couple of generations, one gender gap has closed, only for another to open up.”
7 Skills Worth Testing: Reinventing What And How We Assess
Boston Globe - 2/26/15

"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, the forces that govern our moral choices, and the thought processes that underlie unconscious stereotyping.”
What The American Public Thinks Are The Most Important Skills
Pew Research - 2/19/15

"Across the board, more respondents said communication skills were most important, followed by reading, math, teamwork, writing and logic. Science fell somewhere in the middle, with more than half of Americans saying it was important. [See article for further breakdown]”
We Don’t Need More STEM. We Need More STEM + Liberal Arts.
Washington Post - 2/18/15

"Many in government and business publicly question the value of [a liberal arts] education. Yet employers in every sector continue to scoop up my students because of their ability to apply cross-disciplinary thinking to an incredibly complex world. They like my chemistry grads because not only can they find their way around a laboratory, but they’re also nimble thinkers who know to consider chemistry’s impact on society and the environment.“
Three Purposes of Education, And Some Skills To Achieve Them
Washington Post - 2/12/15

"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.”
“Meet The Single Point Rubric”
Cult of Pedagogy - 2/4/15

“The practice of using single point rubrics is slowly but surely catching on. The simplicity of these rubrics — with just a single column of criteria, rather than a full menu of performance levels — offers a whole host of benefits.”
Journaling: Good For Your Brain, And For Your Health
Fast Company - 1/29/15

"The practice has very real physical health benefits for the people who do it. According to Dr. James Pennebaker, a psychologist and leading expert in the field of Expressive Writing… journaling strengthens immune cells called T-lymphocytes and has been shown to be associated with drops in depression, anxiety, and increases in positive mood, social engagement, and quality of close relationships.”
Attention, Technology, and Fear Of Missing Out
Pacific Standard - 1/29/15

"Reading a book is like carrying on a prolonged conversation with one individual writer, but the temptation on the other side of the screen is an ongoing conversation with everyone at once, as if all of your friends were hanging out in the same room in which you’re trying to peacefully read the latest dense Great American Novel.”
Engineering Teacher Offers Critique Of Maker Culture
Atlantic - 1/23/15

“I want to see us recognize the work of the educators, those that analyze and characterize and critique, everyone who fixes things, all the other people who do valuable work with and for others—above all, the caregivers—whose work isn’t about something you can put in a box and sell.”
Ways to Incorporate Movement Into Classes
Washington Post - 1/19/15

"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.”
Can You Overcome Fear Of Failure By Pursuing Rejection?
NPR - 1/16/15

"Jason kept on seeking out rejection. And as he did, he found that people were actually more receptive to him, and he was more receptive to people, too. ‘I was able to approach people, because what are you gonna do, reject me? Great!’"
Measurement vs. Love
New York Times - 1/16/15

"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.”
On Integrating Arts Into The Curriculum
KQED - 1/13/15

"Art is not a second thought at the Integrated Arts Academy (IAA). Instead, artistic learning goals are held up as equals to academic standards and teachers work hard to design lessons that highlight content through art. “If you pick a subject area like science, social studies, math or literacy and you integrate it with an art form, what you do is connect the two and find ways to really integrate the two so they lean on each other,” said Judy Klima, an integrated arts coach at IAA.”
Inside Lego’s Renaissance: How They Keep The Creativity Coming
Fast Company - 1/8/15

“[Growth] required figuring out what a modern Lego should even be, which Knudstorp accomplished in part by investing in a kind of research the company had never done before—deep ethnographic studies of how kids around the world really play. Today, Lego may know as much about that subject as any organization on earth.”
We Are Disrupted. (It’s True.) But Humanism Is Not Obsolete.
New York Times - 1/7/15

"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 even more urgent after digitalization, because we will need help in navigating the unprecedented welter… Patterns that are revealed by searches will not identify their own causes and reasons. The new order will not relieve us of the old burdens, and the old pleasures, of erudition and interpretation.”
In Support Of The Gap Year
New York Times - 1/4/15

"Attendance at “gap fairs” more than doubled in the United States between 2010 and 2013, and enrollment in gap-year programs grew 27 percent from 2012 to 2013 alone, according to Ethan Knight, executive director of the American Gap Association. Many college websites, including Harvard’s and Yale’s, now encourage prospective freshman to consider a gap year; Middlebury even provides links to specific programs.”
Defining Open-Mindedness: Preparing Ourselves To Be Surprised
Slate - 1/2/15

“Researchers have demonstrated that our perception of a speaker depends on whether we’ve been told ahead of time that he’s confident or shy. Our judgment of a child’s academic skill depends on whether we’ve been led to believe that she’s from a rich family or a poor one. When we serve on a jury, we quickly form an impression about whether the defendant is guilty, and then disproportionately interpret new evidence as supporting that impression. In other words, we need to actively look for signs that our assumptions are wrong, because we won’t do so unprompted. One such sign, scientists have suggested, is the feeling of surprise.”
A Literature Review Of Maker-Centered Learning
Harvard - 1/1/15

"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 key concepts and resources that have emerged from our work… The most salient benefits of maker-centered learning for young people have to do with developing a sense of self and a sense of community.”
Ed-Tech Enthusiasts Re-Examine What Works
Hack Education - 12/29/14

“My rules have crumbled, as has my interest – or hell, even belief – in ed-tech startups. Despite the mythology of “disruptive innovation,” the most innovative initiatives in education technology aren’t coming from startups. They aren’t incubated in Silicon Valley. They don’t emerge from the tech industry. In fact, many of the ed-tech startup ideas that are developed there are at best laughable, at worst horrifying.”
Deresiewicz Returns: The Evolution Of The Artist-Now-Entrepreneur
Atlantic - 12/28/14

“What we see in the new paradigm—in both the artist’s external relationships and her internal creative capacity—is what we see throughout the culture: the displacement of depth by breadth. Is that a good thing or a bad thing? No doubt some of both, in a ratio that’s yet to be revealed. What seems more clear is that the new paradigm is going to reshape the way that artists are trained."
Astronaut On Space Station Needs A Wrench, So He Prints One
IFL Science - 12/19/14

“‘The socket wrench we just manufactured is the first object we designed on the ground and sent digitally to space, on the fly,’ he adds. It’s a lot faster to send data wirelessly on demand than to wait for a physical object to arrive via rockets, which can take months or even years.“
Teachers Are Among The Biggest Consumers of MOOCs
MIT Technology Review - 12/15/14

“Indeed, for all the focus on the role of MOOCs in higher education, they might have a significant role to play in high schools and below. Teachers are already a big audience (a study of 11 MOOCs offered by MIT last spring found that nearly 28 percent of enrollees were former or active teachers).”
2014 Year in Review: (How) Should We Teach (Coding) Skills?
Hack Education - 12/13/14

“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 is to this massive industry that furthers a story that you must have a degree and now, increasingly, that you must have “skills.” Best prepared to deliver “skills” are not those old liberal arts colleges. It’s the giant for-profit higher education sector."
Gates Foundation Report On Professional Development: What Works
Gates Foundation - 12/5/14

"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 with the professional development they are now offered by their school or district and the areas where district leaders think they should focus more professional learning time.”
A Look at Teacher Training, Nation-Wide [Paywall]
New York Review of Books - 12/4/14

“What is the matter with teacher preparation and how can we make it better? ...Green’s thesis is simple: most teachers are never actually taught how to teach. After encountering a very thin introduction to the theory and practice of teaching at education schools, they’re sent into classrooms to learn on the job. What should be encouraging is that we now have a strong body of knowledge about how good teaching happens and--even more--about how to help people do it.”
Finally, A Study About The Importance Of Experiencing The Arts
EdWeek - 12/3/14

“The results across our two experiments were remarkably consistent: These cultural experiences improve students'... desire to become cultural consumers in the future. Exposure to the arts also affects the values of young people, making them more tolerant and empathetic... Arts experiences boost critical thinking, teaching students to take the time to be more careful and thorough in how they observe the world. Noticing details in paintings during a school tour, for example, helps train students to consider details in the future.”
Lena Dunham Talks About Being Creative
Slate - 12/3/14

“My parents taught me that you can have a creative approach to thinking that is almost scientific... You don’t have to be at the mercy of the muse. You need your own internalized thinking process that you can perform again and again... Everything that I do comes out of writing. It’s the genesis point... You go within yourself, wrestle with your demons, scribble some stuff up and come out with a vision of what the world is like. It is closer to being a painter."
Reading Aloud In Class Might Not Help Learning. Some Alternatives:
Edutopia - 12/1/14

“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 to students becoming better readers, either in terms of their fluency or comprehension.’ ...Silent/independent reading should occur far more frequently as students advance into the later grades.”
Understanding Pace: Time, Attention, And Boundaries
N+1 - 12/1/14

"If in classical modernity people could imagine their lives in intergenerational terms… in late capitalism, turnover is so accelerated that it becomes hard to imagine one’s life course even within a few years, let alone a few generations. This in turn drives a sense of the acceleration of the 'pace of life,' the psychological feeling of always being out of breath — which in turn drives the desire for more labor-saving technology, and technical change."
Andrew Stanton (Pixar) On What Makes Good Stories
Farnam Street - 11/30/14

“Storytelling … [is] knowing your punchline, your ending, knowing that everything you’re saying, from the first sentence to the last, is leading to a singular goal, and ideally confirming some truth that deepens our understandings of who we are as human beings.”
Are We Losing Sight of the Ideas That Shaped the Humanities?
Chronicle of Higher Education - 11/21/14

“We have shifted our focus from the meaning of ideas to the means by which they’re produced. The same questions that always intrigued us—What is justice? What is the good life? What is morally valid? What is free will?—take a back seat to the biases embedded in our neural circuitry. Instead of grappling with the gods, we seem to be more interested in the topography of Mt. Olympus.”
Playing Music Causes (Not Correlates With) Cognitive Improvement
NPR - 11/20/14

“Playing a musical instrument engages practically every area of the brain at once, especially the visual, auditory, and motor cortices… Several randomized studies of participants, who showed the same levels of cognitive function and neural processing at the start, found that those who were exposed to a period of music learning showed enhancement in multiple brain areas, compared to the others.”
Chinese Test Success ≠ Educational Success
New York Review of Books - 11/20/14

“China has the best education system because it can produce the highest test scores. But... it has the worst education system in the world because those test scores are purchased by sacrificing creativity, divergent thinking, originality, and individualism.”
Word Problems: Teach Them First. They Aid Understanding.
EdWeek - 11/19/14

“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.”
Does “Teacher as Performer” Contradict Student-Centered Learning?
KQED - 11/19/14

“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 Teaching and Learning. Lue is a big fan of honing a teacher’s performance gene. He insists the absolute best active learning teachers have it too.”
Several Principles from Pixar for Nurturing Good Work
Farnam Street - 11/17/14

“When someone hatches an original idea, it may be ungainly and poorly defined, but it is also the opposite of established and entrenched—and that is precisely what is most exciting about it. If, while in this vulnerable state, it is exposed to naysayers who fail to see its potential or lack the patience to see it evolve, it could be destroyed. Part of our job is to protect the new from people who don’t understand that in order for greatness to emerge, there must be phases of not-so-greatness."
A Checklist Of Conditions For Successfully Implementing Change
KnowledgeWorks - 11/6/14

“Vision… Culture… Transparency… System-wide alignment.”
The Rise of the AP Art Portfolio
New York Times - 10/31/14

“Students are tested not by their mastery of the material but by their skill, a far more subjective area of evaluation. “Readers” must make judgments about competence and inventiveness as they work their way through some 48,000 portfolios of student artwork. That’s more than double the number submitted a decade earlier… But the growth does not necessarily signal artistic aspirations. According to a 2007 survey by the College Board, only about 13 percent of the students major in art. So why take A.P. studio? To try to impress a admissions office, of course, or perhaps to make a rest stop along the academic autobahn or, maybe, art really is a labor of love.”
Does ADHD Require A Fix? A New Take on Natural Solutions
New York Times - 10/31/14

“From the standpoint of teachers, parents and the world at large, the problem with people with A.D.H.D. looks like a lack of focus and attention and impulsive behavior. But if you have the “illness,” the real problem is that, to your brain, the world that you live in essentially feels not very interesting.”
Some Big Ten Schools Begin Offering Competency-Based Degrees
Inside Higher Ed - 10/28/14

“A common thread with the three institutions’ experiments is that they seek to focus more on what students know and can do rather than how much time they spend in class. 'They will emerge with proven competencies,' Mitch Daniels, Purdue’s president, said last month.. 'Businesses will not have to guess whether these students really are ready for the market, ready for their business, ready for the world.'"
How Science Is Made: Curiosity, Wonder, Ignorance, and Serendipity
New York Review of Books - 10/23/14

“How could the public be better educated about the nature of scientific inquiry? Three recent books... lay bare the provisionality of science and may, paradoxically, actually help us find a way to address rampant denialism. Rather than focus single-mindedly on the technical aspects of science or the need to improve basic skills, they focus our attention on the psychology of science—the drives that inspire us to inquire into nature, and the limits that our minds necessarily impose on our knowledge.”
Should We Be Increasing Our Focus on Vocational Prep?
Marketplace - 10/23/14

“For years, vocational high schools have been seen as a lesser form of schooling – tracking some kids off to work while others were encouraged to go on to college and pursue higher income professions. But things are changing. At one of those schools - Minuteman Regional High School in Lexington, Massachusetts - students can learn traditional trades like carpentry, plumbing and welding. They can also learn high tech fields such as video game design, engineering, and biotechnology."
Isaac Asimov on How to Be Creative in a Group
MIT Technology Review - 10/20/14

“There must be ease, relaxation, and a general sense of permissiveness… If a single individual present is unsympathetic to the foolishness that would be bound to go on at such a session, the others would freeze. The unsympathetic individual may be a gold mine of information, but the harm he does will more than compensate for that. It seems necessary to me, then, that all people at a session be willing to sound foolish and listen to others sound foolish."
$10K for Teachers to Experiment with Teaching Character
Character Lab - 10/17/14

“7 teachers will receive a $10,000 stipend, support from Character Lab, and additional funding to test their ideas for cultivating character strengths and skills in schools. Application deadline is November 2nd.”
Understanding Sexting
Atlantic - 10/14/14

“Nighttime is the only time teens get to have intimate conversations and freely navigate their social world… that means checking up on the latest drama on Twitter—“Anyone still awake?” is a common post-midnight tweet—and filling up their Instagram accounts, or asking a girl for a pic.”
Do We Need to Teach Algebra?
NPR - 10/9/14

“The material covered in the courses, which do include some algebraic topics, was vetted independently by the Mathematical Association of America, the American Statistical Association and other groups… [and] a report released in July showed that Pathways students, when given the same final exam as other college-level math and statistics students, scored as well or better.”
Mentoring and Deep Learning Lead to Future Work-Life Engagement
Gallup - 10/7/14

“Six critical elements during college jumped off the pages of our research as being strongly linked to long-term success in work and life after graduation. Three of these elements relate to experiential and deep learning... But the three most potent elements linked to long-term success for college grads relate to emotional support... If graduates strongly agree with these three things, it doubles the odds that they are engaged in their work and thriving in their overall well-being.”
Over 350 Institutions Credit Competency-Based Work. Do You?
NPR - 10/7/14

“In a traditional college degree program, assessments and course requirements are typically decided by individual professors or within a department. Which can lead to wide variations in expectations, workload and grading... Freed of the credit-hour constraint, competency-based programs need to be a lot more rigorous and transparent about designing assessments. Otherwise, they risk turning into diploma mills.”
3 Tips for Efficiency and Innovation in Organizations
Harvard Business Review - 10/3/14

“To be nimble and innovative, part of the key is pushing decision authority as low as possible (but not lower). What’s as low as possible? That’s going to change from situation to situation. But the key is acknowledging that the more senior you make your decision makers, the more waste you’ll require of those looking to experiment... the only thing that will happen is your execs will end up drowning in a sea of meetings and nothing will ever get done.”
"How Diversity Makes Us Smarter”
Scientific American - 10/1/14

"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. Simply interacting with individuals who are different forces group members to prepare better, to anticipate alternative viewpoints and to expect that reaching consensus will take effort.”
Bard College Is Innovating In Ways We Should All Pay Attention To
New Yorker - 9/29/14

“Freshmen arrive on campus three weeks before the fall semester starts, not to river-raft or play getting-to-know-you games, but to study philosophy, literature, and religious texts for five hours a day. In January, they are required to stay on campus and work in science labs... Bard... saw a thirty-per-cent increase in applications this year.”
Evaluating Teacher Evaluations
NPR - 9/26/14

“Here we examine student course evaluations from a statistical perspective. We argue that averages of rating scores should not even be calculated, much less compared across instructors, courses, or departments. Instead, frequency tables should be used to summarize scores. It is crucial to report survey response rates, not merely the number of respondents. Finally, we recommend complementary sources of evidence that can be combined with student teaching evaluations to provide more meaningful and reliable formative and summative assessments of teaching.”
High Schools Are Offering Credit for MOOCs. Is Yours?
EdWeek - 9/23/14

“Last school year, 13 juniors and seniors in the 6000-student Andover, Mass., school system enrolled in edX courses and received extracurricular credit—but no grades—upon completion of a pass-fail class. The district's goal was to provide its students with a more rigorous and extensive list of course offerings... All but two students at Andover High completed and passed their edX courses, an accomplishment she attributed in part to the school's guidance counselors' making sure students were prepared for the higher-level coursework before they enrolled."
What Technology Will and Won’t Do To Schools
NAIS - 9/18/14

“As educators, we increasingly recognize that our institutions are not immune to the technological forces that have influenced almost every other industry that serves us... we are more likely to think that technology means the end of our schools and all the characteristics of them that we hold dear. This will likely not be the case.”
Collaboration Improves Motivation, Persistence, Energy...
Stanford - 9/15/14

“When people were treated as though they were working together they: persisted 48 to 64 percent longer on a challenging task, reported more interest in the task, became less tired by having to persist on the task... became more engrossed in the task and performed better on it, and finally, when people were encouraged to reflect on how their interest in the puzzle was relevant to their personal values and identity, people chose to do 53 percent more related tasks in a separate setting one to two weeks later.“
The Way To Teach Self-Control (Grit) Is Through Emotions
Pacific Standard - 9/15/14

“Cultivate the right emotions, the prosocial ones, in daily life. These emotions— gratitude, compassion, authentic pride, and even guilt—work from the bottom up, without requiring cognitive effort on our part, to shape decisions that favor the long-term.”
3 Lessons Learned from the History of Ed Tech
EdWeek - 9/14/14

“Second, when innovative practices do emerge, they are much more likely to emerge in places serving affluent students. Low income students are much more likely to experience technology as a tool for drill and remediation, and wealthier students are more likely to experience technology as a tool for creation and innovation.”
For More Girls in STEM: Change the Feel of STEM Classrooms
Brilliant Blog - 9/10/14

“Preliminary results suggest that female students learn better when they are surrounded by female classmates—even virtual ones—and the more women in the room, the better. Perone’s and Friend’s findings suggest that the reason behind the success of the Online School for Girls may not be its stated emphasis on teaching girls differently, but simply the fact that its students know that their classmates are girls like them.”
How Young Americans Use the Library Today
Pew Research - 9/10/14

“This report pulls together several years of research into the role of libraries in the lives of Americans and their communities with a special focus on Millennials, a key stakeholder group affecting the future of communities, libraries, book publishers and media makers of all kinds, as well as the tone of the broader culture.”
Professional Insight Comes from Mixing Perspectives
Misc Magazine - 9/10/14

“Seeing the problem through another discipline’s lenses gives one the permission to think outside the norms and boundaries of one’s own... In most large organizations, this is a fundamental challenge. Coming out of your functional silo to roll up your sleeves with colleagues from another one is often an exercise in defensive posturing, rather than constructive conflict... Organizations that cannot breach the silo walls when necessary are ill-equipped to achieve breakthroughs of any kind whatsoever.”
3 Factors For Using Tech Successfully in Schools
Stanford - 9/10/14

“‘When given access to appropriate technology used in thoughtful ways, all students—regardless of their respective backgrounds—can make substantial gains in learning and technological readiness,’ said Darling-Hammond.”
Friedman on Mentoring and Employer-Driven Education
New York Times - 9/9/14

"Graduates who... had a professor or professors ‘who cared about them as a person — or had a mentor who encouraged their goals and dreams and/or had an internship where they applied what they were learning — were twice as likely to be engaged with their work and thriving in their overall well-being.'"
Four Characteristics of Great Teachers
Wall Street Journal - 9/4/14

"Clearly, great teachers begin by loving children. But beyond that, a growing body of research points to some basic tenets of top-notch instruction—including these four actions and mind-sets parents can look and listen for when they visit a classroom, meet an educator or review their children's schoolwork."
Walking (Especially In Nature) Help Us Think
New Yorker - 9/3/14

"The way we move our bodies further changes the nature of our thoughts, and vice versa. Psychologists who specialize in exercise music have quantified what many of us already know: listening to songs with high tempos motivates us to run faster, and the swifter we move, the quicker we prefer our music. Likewise, when drivers hear loud, fast music, they unconsciously step a bit harder on the gas pedal. Walking at our own pace creates an unadulterated feedback loop between the rhythm of our bodies and our mental state that we cannot experience as easily when we’re jogging at the gym, steering a car, biking, or during any other kind of locomotion.”
What Character Is, and How to Teach It. Duckworth Aggregates It All.
Character Lab - 9/1/14

“Character is a person’s disposition to think, feel, and act in ways that help oneself and others... Research tells us that we can develop and practice these skills [curiosity, gratitude, grit, optimism, self-control, social intelligence, zest], just like we can with traditional subjects.”
The Ivies, Deresiewicz, and the Soul of Higher Education
New Yorker - 9/1/14

“Even in the era of fast tracks and credentialism, the psychic mechanisms of an education are mysterious. Let teachers like Deresiewicz believe. For a couple of hours every week, students are theirs in the classroom to challenge and entrance. Then the clock strikes, and the kids flock back into the madness of their lives. Did the new material reach them? Will the lesson be washed from their minds? Who knows. They heard it. Life will take care of the rest.”
Is Verbal Ability the Greatest Indicator of Teacher Success?
Forbes - 8/31/14

“Several decades after the Equality of Education Opportunity Study (a.k.a. the Coleman Study) revealed teacher verbal competence to be a strong predictor of student outcomes, an Abell Foundation study on teacher certification found that ‘the teacher attribute found consistently to be most related to raising student achievement is verbal ability.’”
Professor Bans Emails... And Receives Better Reviews from Students
Inside Higher Ed - 8/27/14

“You should only use email as a tool to set up a one-on-one meeting with me if office hours conflict with your schedule. Use the subject line ‘Meeting request.’ Emails sent for any other reason will not be considered or acknowledged. I strongly encourage you to ask questions about the syllabus and assignments during class time... Our conversations should take place in person or over the phone rather than via email, thus allowing us to get to know each other better and fostering a more collegial learning atmosphere.”
How Technology in Schools Interacts with our Cognitive Profiles
Brilliant Blog - 8/20/14

"Although we tend to think and talk about “technology” and “media” as undifferentiated monoliths, Greenfield’s work reminds us that each medium has its strengths and weaknesses in conveying information. Each medium, in turn, exercises and develops different faculties in us, its users."
What is Unschooling? And What Can We Learn From It?
Films for Action - 8/18/14

“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 teach our son anything was the moment he started really learning.”
Gates Learns About Reshaping Professional Development
EdSurge - 8/18/14

“We’ve known for a long time that most students won’t learn if you just stick them in a classroom and make them listen to a lecture. They have to put the learning to use and make it relevant to their own lives. And yet most teachers still get their professional development at seminars and conferences, where they sit listening to lectures. ‘We would never do that with kids,’ Katie said, ‘but we still do it with teachers.’”
(What) Can Business Teach Education?
New York Times - 8/16/14

“While these reformers talk a lot about markets and competition, the essence of a good education — bringing together talented teachers, engaged students and a challenging curriculum — goes undiscussed. Business does have something to teach educators, but it’s neither the saving power of competition nor flashy ideas like disruptive innovation. Instead, what works are time-tested strategies.”
The Student-Athlete, Seen Through Plato and Homer
New York Times - 8/15/14

“The training of the body is directly related to the development of a fundamental aspect of the human psyche: what Plato, that pre-eminent teacher of teaching, called thymos. In English we don’t have a word for this concept, but it encompasses both bravery and the urge for glory. Perhaps the closest we have is “spiritedness,” as in “a spirited competitor.” Plato knew that thymos is a marvelous quality that needs to be developed and strengthened, especially in those who represent the community as soldiers."
Book: “Building Better Teachers.” (Answer: Collaboration and Time)
Atlantic - 8/13/14

“The PISA results are not ambiguous. Every single country that outperforms us has significantly smaller teacher workloads. Indeed, on the scale of time devoted by teachers to in-class instruction annually, the United States is off the charts.”
Bloom and the 2-Sigma Problem
EdSurge - 8/10/14

“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?”
The New Republic/Ivies Flap Isn’t Really About Ivies
New Yorker - 8/5/14

“In the background of an essay like “Don’t Send Your Kid to the Ivy League”—and of essays like “No Time to Think” or “The ‘Busy’ Trap,” both published in the Times—is the looming presence of the arrhythmic, unreassuring modern world, which seems always to be speeding things up in a senseless way. Modernity is the sort of problem that’s both very old and very new.”
Study Identifies Six Stressors for Teens Regarding Digital Life
Harvard - 8/1/14

“Researchers sorted the stresses into two groups: Type 1 stressors include experiences such as receiving a barrage of personal attacks, being impersonated, or being outed, shamed, or humiliated publicly. Type 2 stressors involve a controlling boyfriend, girlfriend, or friend constantly breaking into one’s social-media accounts to read digital communications with others; feeling smothered by the quantity of digital communications from friends; and feeling pressure to reveal private information.”
On Teaching Math in the US (and How Teachers Get Better)
New York Times - 7/23/14

“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 but also about math and the shape of students’ thoughts and how to mold them.”
San Jose Students Petition and Crowdfund for CompSci Classes
San Jose Mercury News - 7/21/14

“Students aren't waiting for the system to catch up. At Walnut Creek's Northgate, students not only petitioned for a coding class, but also formed a science-technology-math-engineering club, then built a pipeline of future coders by engaging elementary and special education classes in fun projects.”
Eating Together = Healthier and Better Adjusted People
Atlantic - 7/18/14

“Children who do eat dinner with their parents five or more days a week have less trouble with drugs and alcohol, eat healthier, show better academic performance, and report being closer with their parents than children who eat dinner with their parents less often, according to a study conducted by the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University.”
Lehigh Creates a No-Credit, No-Curriculum, No-Grade Program
New York Times - 7/18/14

“A summer program with no course credit, no set curriculum to cover, no competing class schedule and no penalty for failure frees students to experiment, said Alan J. Snyder, a vice president and associate provost at Lehigh. Eventually, the university plans to offer the program year-round, with many more students involved.”
Scientists Discover Bacteria That Feeds on Pure Electrons
New Scientist - 7/16/14

“Experiments growing bacteria on battery electrodes demonstrate that these novel, mind-boggling forms of life are essentially eating and excreting electricity.”
What Happens When Students Design Their Own Semester, Entirely.
KQED - 7/14/14

“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 from highly selective colleges, such as Oxford and Williams, that have accepted graduates.”
Creative Circles: Keep Yourself Creative By Having a Team
99u - 7/14/14

“Relationships are some of our most valuable creative resources. One way to enrich them is through creative circles – a small meetup of people who want to share inspiration and be accountable for their work.”
Even the CIA Has a Style Guide
Quartz - 7/8/14

“Good intelligence depends in large measure on clear, concise writing. The information CIA gathers and the analysis it produces mean little if we cannot convey them effectively... This guide is designed to be helpful and convenient, sensible in organization, and logical in content. It contains, among other changes, a revised list of accepted acronyms and new tips on word usage. The world is not static. Nor is the language we employ to assess it.”
A Writer Handwrote Every Email and Tweet For a Week. Lessons?
Seattle Times - 7/5/14

“Every email and every tweet, every text, status update and comment I scribbled on one of our neglected small notebooks, photographed with my phone and shipped off as an image to its intended audience. ... I did it to hack my brain. To make it slow down and notice the flurry of digital mutterings it writes and sends so easily, they barely register as mutterings at all.”
Darling-Hammond Parses PISA: Why Teacher PD Matters Most.
Huffington Post - 6/30/14

“OECD studies show that higher-performing countries intentionally focus on creating teacher collaboration that results in more skillful teaching and strong student achievement. U.S. researchers have also found that school achievement is much stronger where teachers work in collaborative teams that plan and learn together. Teachers repeatedly confirm that opportunities to work with their colleagues often determine where they are willing to work.”
College Offers 45 Scholarships for Video Gaming
NPR - 6/23/14

“In addition to the scholarships, which are worth about $19,000 each, the school will also be looking to hire a video game coach... The move marks yet another step in the mainstreaming of video games, which in this context are also called e-sports, within education. There's already a Collegiate Star League dedicated to video gaming, with teams at 100 universities including MIT and the University of California, Berkeley.”
The Challenge of Teaching WWI (and History) in Modern Times
LA Times - 6/21/14

“I doubt that understanding the Great War will help young people "compete in the global economy." In fact, insight into that war's causes might lead kids to rethink entirely international competition as an educational goal. Yet I believe that wrestling with that war's complexity will make for better citizens: thoughtful, cautious about letting a president take us to war, concerned with the "collateral damage" inherent to modern conflict, and able to consign Nazis to their proper historical place.”
Why Play (Instead of Structure) Means Better Skills
Atlantic - 6/20/14

“The more time children spend in structured, parent-guided activities, the worse their ability to work productively towards self-directed goals.”
Should Students Have Laptops in Class?
Slate - 6/15/14

“Students who lack the self-discipline (or handwriting ability) to look away from the screen and take paper notes will not learn as much, or as well, in college. But that’s their responsibility. What’s going to happen when (if) all these laptop-policed students get jobs?”
Coding: The Best Article Yet on Computational Thinking in Schools
Mother Jones - 6/1/14

"It was little more than a century ago that literacy became universal in Western Europe and the United States. If computational skills are on the same trajectory, how much are we hurting our economy—and our democracy—by not moving faster to make them universal?”
Can This Organization Solve the Issue of Pace?
New York Times - 6/1/14

“Employees are vastly more satisfied and productive, it turns out, when four of their core needs are met: physical, through opportunities to regularly renew and recharge at work; emotional, by feeling valued and appreciated for their contributions; mental, when they have the opportunity to focus in an absorbed way on their most important tasks and define when and where they get their work done; and spiritual, by doing more of what they do best and enjoy most, and by feeling connected to a higher purpose at work.”
Why Talking About Race Can Be Awkward. How To Fix It.
NAIS - 6/1/14

"At the very least, schools that believe in equity and justice and want their students to be future leaders need to help students — especially white students — understand the history of race and racism and how both play out in contemporary society. This racial content knowledge constitutes a basic social literacy that all students should have.”
Books at Home = Smarter Kids: Now the Research is Global
Pacific Standard - 5/27/14

“They enhance the academic performance of children from families at all educational and occupation levels.”
A History of Race, A Definition of Racism, And How to Write History
Five Books - 5/20/14

“Racism is a prejudice... coupled with discriminatory action. It’s a very simple definition, it took me a long time to arrive at it, but it is composed of these two parts. You need to have prejudices concerning a certain group of human beings — to whom you attribute mental and physical features reproduced from generation to generation — coupled with discriminatory action. If you have only prejudices, you don’t have racism.”
Stanford Prof Explains--and Champions--the Pedagogy of Games
Stanford - 5/14/14

“If you see how well students learn the next thing after these discovery experiences, it turns out that they prepare students for future learning.”
Wesleyan President: Critical Thinking Is Over-Emphasized
New York Times - 5/10/14

“Critical reflection is fundamental to teaching and scholarship, but fetishizing disbelief as a sign of intelligence has contributed to depleting our cultural resources. Creative work, in whatever field, depends upon commitment, the energy of participation and the ability to become absorbed in works of literature, art and science.”
Do Buildings or Culture Affect Student Achievement More?
Forbes - 5/9/14

“It has long been known that various aspects of the built environment impact on people in buildings, but this is the first time a holistic assessment has been made that successfully links the overall impact directly to learning rates in schools”
Head of School Tells Parents to “Back Off”
Huffington Post - 5/7/14

“Bring the kids to the fields or courts or gym, tell them to make the rules and referee themselves, and then go walk a long way off.”
What Actually Helps Students “Thrive” Later in Life?
NPR - 5/6/14

“Graduates who said they had a "mentor who encouraged my hopes and dreams," "professors who cared about me" and at least one prof who "made me excited about learning" are three times more likely to be thriving and twice as likely to be engaged at work.”
Are Adults Ruining Youth (Including High School) Sports?
Boston Globe - 5/4/14

"Three out of four American families with school-aged children have at least one playing an organized sport — a total of about 45 million kids. By age 15, as many as 80 percent of these youngsters have quit, according to the Open Access Journal of Sports Medicine. One reason is the gap between the child’s desire to have fun and the misguided notion among some adults that their kids’ games are a miniature version of grown-up competitions, where the goal is to win. In 20 years of coaching youth and high school sports, I can say unequivocally that adult expectations are the number one problem.”
Alfie Kohn Pushes Back Against the New Culture of Failure
New York Times - 5/3/14

“No one ever explains the mechanism by which the silence of a long drive home without a trophy is supposed to teach resilience. Nor are we told whether there’s any support for this theory of inoculation by immersion [without assistance from 'overprotective' adults].”
For Groundbreaking Creativity, Exorcise Fear of Failure (via Pixar)
Brain Pickings - 5/2/14

“Mistakes aren’t a necessary evil. They aren’t evil at all. They are an inevitable consequence of doing something new (and, as such, should be seen as valuable; without them, we’d have no originality).”
On Building a War Room (Why Every Leader Needs White Boards)
Fast Company - 5/1/14

“[They] help your team work better together. When you capture every decision and put it on the wall, you don’t have to wonder if everyone is on the same page. The room is the page. The more you put on the walls, the more shared understanding you build.”
What Makes Good Observations: Teacher-Driven, Not Top-Down
Educational Leadership - 5/1/14

“Existing approaches to observation generally serve the observer. Teacher-driven observation flips this approach, placing the observed teacher as leader and primary learner in the observation process.”
How Teachers Get Better: Small, Connected Groups
Educational Leadership - 5/1/14

“When peer coaching (as happens in small, reciprocal groups) was added, an estimated 95 percent of teachers transferred the new knowledge to their classrooms.”
There’s Good Stress and Bad Stress: Here’s the Difference
Stanford Magazine - 5/1/14

“...the key to maximizing the benefits of stress while minimizing any negative effects is interspersing "regular hits" of acute stress with periods of low or no stress… he advises harnessing the daily aggravations that life already throws at you. And exercising more, but maybe not for the reason you think.”
A Fresh Take on the Gates Foundation Survey of 3,000 Teachers
Forbes - 4/22/14

"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..."
The Emotional Consequences of Parents Using Smartphones
NPR - 4/21/14

“Steiner-Adair interviewed 1,000 children between the ages of 4 and 18, asking them about their parents' use of mobile devices. The language that came up over and over and over again, she says, was "sad, mad, angry and lonely."”
Oopah. It Turns Out the SAT *Does* Predict College Success?
Slate - 4/14/14

“Contrary to popular belief, it’s not just first-year college GPA that SAT scores predict. In a four-year study... [researchers] found that test score (SAT or ACT—whichever the student took) correlated strongly with cumulative GPA at the end of the fourth year.”
Should Academic Advisors Be Faculty or Professionals?
New York Times - 4/11/14

“To Dr. Jones, Temple’s plethora of professional advisers is not indicative of administrative bloat but essential in “making sure students don’t drop out when they don’t have to.””
A New Look at Service Learning... or Rather: Learning Service
Stanford Social Innovation Review - 4/8/14

“The reality is that designing an intervention whereby young and inexperienced volunteers effectively and sustainably “help” a community overseas—one that speaks a different language and has different cultural assumptions—is extremely difficult.”
Research Finds Screen-Reading Diminishes Comprehension
Washington Post - 4/6/14

"With so much information, hyperlinked text, videos alongside words and interactivity everywhere, our brains form shortcuts to deal with it all — scanning, searching for key words, scrolling up and down quickly. This is nonlinear reading, and it has been documented in academic studies. Some researchers believe that for many people, this style of reading is beginning to invade when dealing with other mediums as well."
What Skills Will We Need for Future Employment?
Farnam Street - 4/1/14

“1. Human-computer teams are the best teams. 2. The person working the smart machine doesn’t have to be an expert in the task at hand. 3. Below some critical level of skill, adding a man to the machine will make the team less effective than the machine working alone. 4. Knowing one’s limits is more important than it used to be.”
How to Innovate Within An Existing Organization
Steve Blank - 3/31/14

“Paradoxically, in spite of the seemingly endless resources, innovation inside of an existing company is much harder than inside a startup. That’s because existing companies face a conundrum: Every policy and procedure that makes them efficient execution machines stifles innovation.”
Academic and Non-Academic Effects of Excess Homework
Brilliant Blog - 3/22/14

“Students who did more hours of homework experienced greater behavioral engagement in school. But there were many negative effects of heavy homework loads, too, as enumerated in a Stanford University press release about the study.”
How Helping Kids With Homework Doesn’t Always Help Kids
Atlantic - 3/19/14

“Most measurable forms of parental involvement seem to yield few academic dividends for kids, or even to backfire—regardless of a parent’s race, class, or level of education.”
A Short History of Shakespeare’s Prominence in America
New York Times - 3/19/14

“You have John Quincy Adams on Desdemona having sex with Othello, Lincoln reading ‘Macbeth,’ and another president, Grant, rehearsing the role of Desdemona at a military camp. You couldn’t make this stuff up. This is how central a preoccupation Shakespeare was at the time.”
How to Teach Experiential Entrepreneurship in High School
Steve Blank - 3/12/14

“Because these were high school kids with, for the first time, a real business relying on them, this portion of the class shook them so badly they couldn’t move from their seats--literally.... Feeling the pressure, after 3 wasted days, one student on one team finally convinced her team they needed to get out of the building.”
Researchers Zero In on the Right Amount of Homework
Stanford - 3/10/14

“Pope and her colleagues found that too much homework can diminish its effectiveness and even be counterproductive. They cite prior research indicating that homework benefits plateau at about two hours per night, and that 90 minutes to two and a half hours is optimal for high school.”
How Was SXSWedu? EdSurge Debriefs.
EdSurge - 3/10/14

“This year’s gathering drew over 6,500 entrepreneurs, educators, investors, researchers, policymakers, and just about anyone interested in the booming education industry. The 300-plus panels, workshops and presentations were chosen out of 700 proposals that were evaluated by the SXSWedu advisory panel, event staff, and the public.
Does the EdTech Push Really Help Teach English?
New York Times - 3/3/14

“Being able to poke at words on screen and have them spin out videos for us could be compelling in the short term.... but I’m not sure it’s intellectually fruitful.”
Let’s Teach Calculus In Kindergarten
Atlantic - 3/3/14

“The current sequence [of math] is merely an entrenched historical accident that strips much of the fun out of what she describes as the ‘playful universe’ of mathematics... Mathematics is fundamentally about patterns and structures, rather than ‘little manipulations of numbers.’”
Digital Adolescence Means Kids Avoid Adults More Than Ever
Financial Times - 2/28/14

“Young people have slowly been deprived of agency, spare time, and the ability to socialize in public spaces that is crucial to coming of age. Against this backdrop, social media is not so much a drip-feed of digital narcotic as a release valve for circumscribed lives.”
When Google Hires, It’s Looking for “Learning Ability” Not Degrees
Quartz - 2/24/14

“When you look at people who don’t go to school and make their way in the world, those are exceptional human beings. And we should do everything we can to find those people.”
Struggling Is Better For Learning Than Scaffolded Understanding
Brilliant Blog - 2/24/14

“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.”
Harvard Designs New Spaces to Promote Innovation, Interaction
Harvard Magazine - 2/19/14

“The report begins with a series of stage-setting adjectives, meant to capture SEAS faculty members’ aspirations for their new campus: ‘Open. Connected. Active. Transparent. Livable. Sunlit. Social. Flexible.’”
Stimulants Show No Effect On Long-Term Academic Performance?
Nature - 2/12/14

“For academic achievement, only the group receiving medication and behaviour therapy combined outperformed [others]. By three years in, the four groups had become indistinguishable on every measure. Treatment conferred no lasting benefit in terms of grades, test scores, or social adjustment.”
Do More Through the Disciplined Pursuit of Doing Less
Stanford Graduate School of Business - 2/10/14

“When people really get a chance to think, to have the space... they can quite easily discern between the things that are essential to them and those that are not. The problem is not our ability to discern, it’s that we don’t have the space to take the time to discern.”
How To Teach Resilience
Brilliant Blog - 2/10/14

“Lastly, the drill sergeants in Seligman’s program are taught two capacities that might seem at odds with mental toughness: gratitude and generosity.”
For Insight and Creativity, Maximize Your “Idea Flow”
Wired - 2/7/14

“When the flow of ideas incorporates a constant stream of outside ideas as well, then the individuals in the community make better decisions than they could on their own.”
6 Principles for Designing the Ideal School
KQED - 2/5/14

“[Three teachers] traveled across the country documenting noteworthy teaching practices at district public schools, charter, private, and parochial schools."
Should We Build our Curricula Around What Computers Can’t Do?
New York Times - 2/3/14

“The role of the human is not to be dispassionate, depersonalized or neutral. It is precisely the emotive traits that are rewarded: the voracious lust for understanding, the enthusiasm for work, the ability to grasp the gist, the empathetic sensitivity to what will attract and linger in the mind.”
Smart (and Dumb) Tech: Calculators That Makes You Guess, et al.
Brilliant Blog - 1/27/14

“You use [the QAMA calculator] just like a regular calculator, plugging in the numbers of the problem you want to solve - but QAMA won’t give you the answer until you provide an accurate estimate of what that answer will be.”
What Happens When Athletes Are Recruited in Middle School?
New York Times - 1/26/14

“For girls and boys, the trend is gaining steam despite the unhappiness of many of the coaches and parents who are most heavily involved, many of whom worry about the psychological and physical toll it is taking on youngsters.”
How Do You Increase Productivity and Lower Stress? Stop Emailing.
New York Times - 1/19/14

“Ms Mark’s research has found that people who stopped using email at work felt less stress and were more focused and productive.”
How Do You Increase Productivity and Lower Stress? Stop Emailing.
New York Times - 1/19/14

“Ms Mark’s research has found that people who stopped using email at work felt less stress and were more focused and productive.”
Explaining Art With Science Butchers Both.
New Republic - 1/18/14

“Physics can explain chemistry, which can explain biology, which can explain psychology, and psychology might someday tell us, at least in the most general terms, how we create art and why we respond to it. But it will never account for the texture, the particularities, of individual works, or tell us what they mean. Art is experiential. It doesn’t just speak of experience; it needs to be experienced itself.
Evolution of Education Will Come From Blending Old and New
Chronicle of Higher Education - 1/13/14

“High-impact practices like service learning, research with faculty members, and capstone projects that are a cornerstone of residential learning and have been shown to improve student learning, none of those practices are incorporated into MOOCs right now. To transform higher education for the next generation, we need to better blend game-changing innovations with one another, and with traditional methods.”
Three Roles Teachers Must Play in the Coming Years
WBUR - 1/9/14

“In the Khan Academy era, content expertise can be outsourced to machines, but moral leadership cannot.”
We Shouldn’t Complain About Losing the Great Books
Slate - 1/7/14

“Not everybody likes Chaucer enough to spend 15 weeks on him, and that’s OK.”
What an Evolving Humanities Program Might Look Like
Works Cited - 1/4/14

“Humanities research constantly crosses in and out of the academy, and it’s so much a part of everyday life that most of the time we don’t even bother to think of it as ‘humanities.’”
We Are Losing Our Connection To Great Books
Wall Street Journal - 1/3/14

“This constant, sophisticated dialogue between past and present would become a defining feature of Western Civilization.”
3 Broad Tips For Promoting Meaningful, Creative Work
Fast Company - 12/21/13

"Prospecting and mining the past to gain a deep understanding of where things come from and why they exist is hugely important to creating meaningful new things.”
What’s the best Professional Development? (It’s social and self-driven.)
EdSurge - 12/16/13

“What we need are new (and constantly evolving) technologies built specifically to allow educators to curate, create, share, and collaborate on the things that matter to them personally.”
Fish: Chomsky and a Paean to Academia, Scholarship and Intellect
New York Times - 12/9/13

“Yes, I said to myself, this is what we do; we think about problems and puzzles and try to advance the understanding of them.”
Love and Math: Reinventing a Discipline
New York Review of Books - 12/5/13

“Mathematical proofs, for all their rigorous logic, came to look more like narratives...”
Beyond MOOCs? Harvard, MIT Share EdX Reflections and Data
Harvard Magazine - 12/5/13

“Modular, unbundled learning suggests much-expanded flexibility in the curriculum.”
Slowing Down: Teaching Patience as a Strategy
Harvard Magazine - 11/30/13

“Now that, generally, one need not wait for things, patience becomes an active and positive cognitive state.”
An American In Finland: What Lessons Were Learned?
EdWeek - 11/26/13

“I’ve already identified three big shifts I’d make right away...”
EdX and MIT’s Bold New Vision for the Future of College
Inside Higher Ed - 11/25/13

“Agarwal said he expects MIT will move away from the traditional four-year-on-campus experience.”
What Low Cost, Scalable Education Looks LIke
Wired - 11/12/13

“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.”
MIT Makes 3D Touchscreens. Hello, Tool of the Future!
Fast Company - 11/12/13

“Whatever it ends up looking like, the UI of the future won’t be made of just pixels.”
Why We’re Seeing An (Affluent) Adolescent Mental Health Implosion
Psychology Today - 11/5/13

“The high rate of maladjustment among affluent adolescents is strikingly counterintuitive. There is a tacit assumption—even among those most affected—that education and money procure well-being, and that if children falter, they will swiftly get the appropriate services. Education and money may once have served as buffers against distress, but that is no longer the case. Something fundamental has changed: The evidence suggests that the privileged young are much more vulnerable today than in previous generations.”
Why Teachers Quit, and Why They Stay
Atlantic - 10/18/13

“Teachers who have even just two small initiatives in place (working with a mentor and having regular supportive communication with an administrator) are more likely to stay in the classroom.”
On Letting Kids Teach Themselves
Wired - 10/15/13

“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 conventional multiple-choice test.”
Surprise: Stress Is Healthy For You. It’s All In How You See It.
TED / YouTube - 9/13/13

“How you think and how you act can transform your experience of stress. Chasing meaning is better for your health than avoiding discomfort.”
A Tribute To Reading: Finding the Time, Why We Read, And More
Farnam Street - 9/2/13

“Odds are that no matter what you’re working on, someone somewhere, who is smarter than you, has probably thought about your problem and put it into a book.”
What Makes Good Teaching: Small Tips Can Have An Outsize Effect
Guardian - 9/2/13

“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 other.”
“Life Stress Impairs Self-Control In Early Adolescence”
Frontiers In Psychology - 1/11/13

“In three prospective, longitudinal studies, negative life events reported by the mother (in Study 1) or child (in Studies 2 and 3) predicted rank-order decreases in self-control over time.”
Lit Review: The Effects Of Values And Self-Affirmations On Performance
Social And Personality Psychology Compass - 1/1/13

“The purpose of the present review is to (i) summarize self-affirmation theory; (ii) review major new discoveries in affirmation research with an emphasis on how affirmations affect defensiveness, stress, and academic performance under identity threat; and (iii) present a general theoretical account of how these effects occur.”
Why Storytelling Has Such A Powerful Effect On Our Brain
Lifehacker - 12/5/12

“If we listen to a powerpoint presentation with boring bullet points, a certain part in the brain gets activated. Scientists call this Broca's area and Wernicke's area. Overall, it hits our language processing parts in the brain, where we decode words into meaning. And that's it, nothing else happens. When we are being told a story, things change dramatically. Not only are the language processing parts in our brain activated, but any other area in our brain that we would use when experiencing the events of the story are too. If someone tells us about how delicious certain foods were, our sensory cortex lights up. If it's about motion, our motor cortex gets active.”
Advice On Deliberate Practice, From A Performance Pianist
Cal Newport - 12/23/11

“Avoid Flow. Do What Does Not Come Easy. “The mistake most weak pianists make is playing, not practicing. If you walk into a music hall at a local university, you’ll hear people ‘playing’ by running through their pieces. This is a huge mistake. Strong pianists drill the most difficult parts of their music, rarely, if ever playing through their pieces in entirety.”
How To Address Bigotry Without Alienating The Listener
University of Toronto - 12/20/11

"According to the study, people who feel pressured into changing prejudiced views will actually become more prejudiced. On the other hand, methods that persuade people that giving up prejudice is good for its own sake are more effective… Autonomy-primed students read statements like, “I enjoy relating to people of different groups,” and “It’s fun to meet people from other cultures.” The controlling primed subjects read things like “It is socially unacceptable to discriminate based on cultural background,” and “Prejudiced people are not well liked.””
“The Case Against Grades”
Alfie Kohn - 11/1/11

“By now enough has been written about academic assessment to fill a library, but when you stop to think about it, the whole enterprise really amounts to a straightforward two-step dance. We need to collect information about how students are doing, and then we need to share that information (along with our judgments, perhaps) with the students and their parents. Gather and report — that’s pretty much it.”
“The Right Way To Come Back From A Vacation”
Harvard Business Review - 9/6/11

“First, let your last night before work still be vacation, or at least your personal time. Don’t open your email or check your voicemail. Unpack, do laundry, make your kids’ lunches if you have kids and they need lunches — but don’t get back to work until you’re back at work.”
Social-Psychological Interventions In Education: They’re Not Magic
CSUN - 1/6/11

“Recent randomized experiments have found that seemingly “small” socialpsychological interventions in education—that is, brief exercises that target students’ thoughts, feelings, and beliefs in and about school—can lead to large gains in student achievement and sharply reduce achievement gaps even months and years later. These interventions do not teach students academic content but instead target students’ psychology, such as their beliefs that they have the potential to improve their intelligence or that they belong and are valued in school. “
Professional Learning Communities (PLCs) Improve Teaching (Lit Review)
Science Direct - 1/1/08

"All eight studies that examined the relationship between teachers’ participation in PLCs and student achievement found that student learning improved.”
Are Good Taste And Good Design Personal Or Universal?
Paul Graham - 2/1/02

“If you mention taste nowadays, a lot of people will tell you that "taste is subjective.” …Most of us are encouraged, as children, to leave this tangle unexamined… Like many of the half-truths adults tell us, this one contradicts other things they tell us. After dinning into you that taste is merely a matter of personal preference, they take you to the museum and tell you that you should pay attention because Leonardo is a great artist… Once you start to examine the question, it's surprising how much different fields' ideas of beauty have in common. The same principles of good design crop up again and again.”
The Case Against Credentials and Professionalization… from 1985
Atlantic - 12/1/85

"The charge against credential requirements is that they are simultaneously too restrictive and too lax. They are too restrictive in giving a huge advantage to those who booked early passage on the IQ train and too lax in their sloppy relation to the skills that truly make for competence… If sports were run like the meritocracy, the Miami Dolphins would choose their starting lineup on the basis of high-school times in the forty-yard dash and analyses of the players' muscle tissues to see who had the highest proportion of “quick-twitch” fibers. If the Dolphins actually did this, they'd face a long losing season: the coach cares about speed but finally chooses the players who have proved they can catch the ball or stop the run.”

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