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Rigor Without Support Misses The Needs Of Today’s Students
New York Times
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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.”
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“What Mrs. Bailey Taught Me In A.P. History Changed My Life”
New York Times
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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.”
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“How To Argue Well.” - On Debate And Polarization
New York Times
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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.””
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On Civil Discussion In The Classroom
Chronicle of Higher Education
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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.”
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“How To Hold A Better Class Discussion” - A Deep Dive
Chronicle of Higher Education
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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.”
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On Good Teaching: Can We Have Both High Achievement And High Engagement?
Hechinger Report
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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.”
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“What Do Teachers Know About How Colleagues Teach: Part 2”
Larry Cuban
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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.”
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“What Do Teachers Know About How Colleagues Teach: Part 1”
Larry Cuban
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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.”
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8 Characteristics Of Effective Online Education
McKinsey
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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.”
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“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.”
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Flipped Learning: A Meta-Analysis Of When And Why It Works
Brookings
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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.”
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A Handbook For Giving Excellent Feedback
Tang Institute
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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.”
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“Six Elements Of A Feedback Ecosystem”
Global Online Academy
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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.”
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“I Teach Math, And I Didn’t Give A Single Test Last Year. Here’s What I Learned.”
Blick Bytes
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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.”
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“20 Teacher Questions To Ask Over The Summer”
Ditch That Textbook
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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.”
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What Does “Rigor” Mean?
NAIS
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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.”
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Can Teachers Measure Student Engagement? Here Is An Excellent Summary.
Middle Web
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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.”
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“How Some Mistakes Can Be Generative”
KQED
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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.”
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AP Courses With Project Based Learning Outperform Traditional Courses
Edutopia
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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.”
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Google Jamboard: Excellent For Online Collaboration And Whiteboard
History Tech
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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.”
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David Brooks: “Nine Nonobvious Ways To Have Deeper Conversations”
New York Times
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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.”
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How To Teach When Only Half Your Class Is In The Room
Cult of Pedagogy
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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.”
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Sal Khan On What Makes Good Online Learning
New York Times
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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.”
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Chris Emdin: “Reality Pedagogy” Is Meeting Kids Where They Are
Atlantic
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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.”
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“9 Ways Online Teaching Should Be Different From Face-To-Face”
Cult of Pedagogy
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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.”
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“Relationships Are The Foundation Of Online Learning Design.”
Global Online Academy
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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?”
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“I’m 13 Years Old. I’m Learning More With Distance Learning.”
New York Times
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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.”
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Deep, Neuroscience-Based Look At Meaning-Making As The Heart Of Effective Pedagogy
ASCD
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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!”
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“Why Are Lecturing And Questioning Still Around?”
Larry Cuban
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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.”
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A King’s Academy Teacher’s Guide To Transitioning From Onsite To Online Learning
King's Academy
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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.”
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“The Best Distance Learning Is Reading A Book”
Austin Kleon
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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.”
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COVID-19: “I Will Survive” - COVID-19 Version For Teachers Going Online
YouTube
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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.”
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"How To Create A Project Based Learning Lesson”
Cult of Pedagogy
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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”
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Dan Meyer: How Tech Can Help Math Instruction
EdSurge
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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.”
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When You Are Grading, Keep A List Of Common Errors
Middle Web
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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.”
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SEL And The Importance Of Teachers Being “Emotion Scientists”
KQED
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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.””
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High School Math Teacher Removes Homework, Sees Improvement
Channell 3000
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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.”
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“How Art Can Help Center a Student’s Learning Experience”
KQED
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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.”
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“Measuring Actual Learning Versus Feeling Of Learning”
Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences
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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.”
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“Retakes Vs. Test Corrections Vs. Neither”
Henri’s Math Ed Blog
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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. “
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“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.”
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On Deeper Learning, And The Value Of Extra-Curriculars
Strategy-Business
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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.”
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Core Knowledge: On The Role Of Knowledge In Learning
Larry Cuban
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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.”
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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.”
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Does Teaching Design Thinking Strategies Durably Improve Performance?
Stanford
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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.”
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Movement Aids Learning. Here Are Ways To Teach Kinesthetically.
Cult of Pedagogy
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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.”
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It’s The Quality Of Homework, Not The Quantity That Matters
Atlantic
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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.”
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Drawing Helps Students Process And Retain Learning
Edutopia
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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.”
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Is Teaching Growth Mindsets Effective? A Lengthy Exploration.
Aeon
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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.”
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Excellent, Fine-Grain Suggestions For Choosing Words When Giving Feedback
Cult of Pedagogy
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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.”
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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.”
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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?”
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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.”
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“How Learning Goals Can Stifle Deeper Learning”
Lustre Education
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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.”
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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.”
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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?”
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Another Deep Report On Competency Based Learning
iNACOL
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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.”
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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.”
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Should You Have Honors Classes? A History Of Tracking
Larry Cuban
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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.”
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Why We Should All Be Drawing
Quartz
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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.”
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“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.”
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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.”
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A Really Good Summary Of The Research Regarding Note-Taking
Cult of Pedagogy
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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.”
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“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?”
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“What To Do In Week One” — A Helpful List
ASCD
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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?”
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Here Are Some Learning-Science Proven Practices You’re Already Using
EdSurge
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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.”
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Daniel Willingham Affirms, Updates The Argument Against Learning Styles
AFT
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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.”
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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.”
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How To Have Better Arguments
The Better Arguments Project
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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.”
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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.”
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“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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
-
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.”
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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.””
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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.”
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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?”
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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.”
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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.”
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“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.’”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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?”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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"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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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“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.”
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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.”"
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”"
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
-
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.”
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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.”
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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.”
-
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).”
-
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.”
-
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.
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"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.”
-
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.”
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“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.”
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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.’”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
-
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.”
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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.”
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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.”
-
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.”
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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."
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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?”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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Stanford Prof Explains--and Champions--the Pedagogy of Games
Stanford
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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.”
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A Fresh Take on the Gates Foundation Survey of 3,000 Teachers
Forbes
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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..."
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Struggling Is Better For Learning Than Scaffolded Understanding
Brilliant Blog
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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.”
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6 Principles for Designing the Ideal School
KQED
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2/5/14
“[Three teachers] traveled across the country documenting noteworthy teaching practices at district public schools, charter, private, and parochial schools."
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Slowing Down: Teaching Patience as a Strategy
Harvard Magazine
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11/30/13
“Now that, generally, one need not wait for things, patience becomes an active and positive cognitive state.”
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What Low Cost, Scalable Education Looks LIke
Wired
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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.”
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On Letting Kids Teach Themselves
Wired
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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.”
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What Makes Good Teaching: Small Tips Can Have An Outsize Effect
Guardian
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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.”