“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.”
“We know what you did during lockdown.”
“When we fail, we tune out. To avoid feeling bad about ourselves, we stop paying attention. As a result, we don’t learn from the experience. We do learn when failure is less personal. In our research, participants who struggled to learn from their own failures were able to learn from the failures of others. It can be hard to focus on our own failings, but the mistakes, recoveries, and hard-won lessons of friends and colleagues? Those are some teachable moments. Don’t magnify mistakes… Do spotlight success.”
“No matter what you make, if you produce a lot every day, you need some sort of system for going back and figuring out what you have.”
“How can a humanities curriculum better serve students? First, teach grammar, logic, and rhetoric but not philosophy, literature, or other humanities courses to freshmen. Many freshmen are smart, ambitious, and motivated, but they do not yet have the intellectual capacities or the life experiences that they will bring into their junior and senior years.”
“In reality, the bills many Republicans have proposed do not directly address critical race theory. Instead, many ban the teaching of concepts that educators say they don't teach anyway. A bill signed into law by Oklahoma governor Kevin Stitt bans lessons that include the concept that one race or sex is inherently superior to another race or sex, that a person's moral character is inherently determined by his or her race or sex, or that someone should feel discomfort, guilt or distress on account of their race or sex. Nonetheless, educators say the newly adopted and proposed laws are already forcing teachers to second guess whether they can lead students in conversations about race and structural racism that many feel are critical at a time the nation is navigating an important reckoning on those issues.”
“How do you self-identify? You probably have many aspects to yourself and would resist being reduced to or stereotyped as any one of them.”
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