“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?”
“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.”
“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.”
“Nearly one in five full-time freshmen drop out. Conditional admission gives universities a line on applicants ready to start as sophomores, filling the resulting empty seats and beds and keeping tuition coming in.”
“JÜV Consulting is staffed entirely by young people who range in age from 14 to 22. “I was honestly quite skeptical when I found out they were teenagers,” Mr. DeLeo admitted. “After the first call, they blew me away. They could walk into a regular business setting with people in their 30s and 40s and be completely comfortable. They are living the demographic we were targeting.””
“The idea of “talent transfer” — that a sprinter could become a bobsledder or a gymnast could become a diver — is not new. But in the “Olympic Hopeful” model, the athletes don’t come from professional sports backgrounds. Most are full-time students or hold full-time jobs. Not everyone thought it would work, until Josh Williamson, then a 20-year-old lacrosse player, emerged as a winner in 2017. Within months, Mr. Williamson transformed into a world-class bobsledder, winning five international medals. He is expected to compete at the 2022 Winter Olympics.”
“This week, the journal Pediatrics featured a clarion call to encourage play as a way to reduce stress, promote social skills, and to embolden cognitive growth in young children.”
Routine practice and drilling—especially when coupled with corrective feedback and ambitious but attainable goal-setting—should help students learn better. Such distributed practice is “necessary if not sufficient for acquiring expertise.” Procedural fluency and conceptual understanding influence each other bidirectionally over time.”
“Survey studies provide evidence suggesting that receiving retrospective awards may demotivate the behavior being awarded by inadvertently signaling (a) that recipients have performed the behavior more than their peers have; and (b) that recipients have performed the behavior to a greater degree than was organizationally expected. A school leaders survey shows that awards for attendance are common, and that the organizational leaders who offer these awards are unaware of their potential demotivating impact.”
“No matter how smart, educated, and well-resourced you are, when it comes to problem-solving, nothing can replace the power of lived experience.”
“I want them to do all the things: read against the grain, interrogate their own assumptions, and the biggie: think critically about what they read. In the end, however, Eliot’s “sea-girls” must speak for themselves even if it means they’re whispering one thing into the ears of my male students while beckoning the women to follow them out of the fog and into the “chambers of the sea.””
“As the rest of the media has lost its power as something like a neutral arbiter of reality, Wikipedia’s grip on that center has tightened. In the current conspiracy-obsessed world, where real structural divisions, technological change, and racial, ethnic, and religious conflicts have created deep polarization, Wikipedia’s importance is recognized by (basically) all.”
“Almost since the start of the smartphone era, film and TV producers have been trying to figure out how to capitalize on our new habit of jumping from one screen to the next. At first, many of these efforts felt like tricks. With “skam,” the multi-platform approach feels organic—after all, the characters themselves are constantly shuttling among YouTube and Instagram and Facebook Messenger.”
The purpose is to get students thinking about how to frame an argument and defend their position using facts. As part of the unit, students work in teams and must write rationales for their case theories.”
“A Vermont company that provides social media monitoring to schools and other organizations, described business as “definitely booming”… Desmond Patton, a professor at Columbia, believes social media monitoring can work if managed correctly. “I think there’s an opportunity for schools to use this as a way to support people but I would do so with extreme caution.””
Shouldn’t school safety drills take into consideration the children’s developmental levels and weigh the consequences of frightening them to the point of traumatizing them?”
Soon-to-come literature includes digital renderings of Franz Kafka’s 1915 novella The Metamorphosis, and 1892 short story The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman.”
“One example was the introduction, in the late 17th century, of scholarly journals that included book reviews, helpfully filtering and summarising (and in some cases excerpting) notable titles… And the centuries-old practice of prefacing longer works with a “list of headings” was refined and developed in two directions [table of contents and indexes] to help readers find passages of interest within individual books.”
“At General Motors, employees are not allowed to walk around on their phones. That’s pretty standard behavior for warehouses and manufacturing facilities, but this rule extends to the office. That means no looking at a phone on the way to a meeting. No taking calls while en route to the bathroom. No checking email while you’re going to the kitchen to get a coffee.”
“I don’t see independent schools going anywhere anytime soon,” Slangen said. “But what can we do with what we have now and how might we be able to make an impact, a difference? To be a little bit more equitable, a little bit more accessible, a little bit more of the solution.””
“More than 7 million people viewed teacher Flossie Lewis's Brief but Spectacular take on growing old in 2016. When it aired, her former students contacted us by the dozen, many to express appreciation for the profound impact she had on their lives. Flossie, now 94, returns in this special installment for an inspirational class discussion with some of her biggest fans.”
Copyright
Every week I send out articles I encounter from around the web. Subject matter ranges from hard knowledge about teaching to research about creativity and cognitive science to stories from other industries that, by analogy, inform what we do as educators. This breadth helps us see our work in new ways.
Readers include teachers, school leaders, university overseers, conference organizers, think tank workers, startup founders, nonprofit leaders, and people who are simply interested in what’s happening in education. They say it helps them keep tabs on what matters most in the conversation surrounding schools, teaching, learning, and more.
– Peter Nilsson