“Traditionally, teachers use discussion as a means to an end – a learning activity that achieves content objectives, like untangling the events leading up to a world war or tracking character growth through a novel. But in today’s world, discussion skills need to be a learning objective. Conversation Labs would approach Discussion as a Discipline: a set of skills that students can name, practice, and use in school and for life.”
“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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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