“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.”
“Every discipline has a key role to play for development of Competency expertise and transfer. If all disciplines focus on teaching their top Competencies, benefits will exist at the curricular, course, and learner level. Curricula will be integrated with relevant Competencies which will in turn increase content relevance and depth of understanding of what it means to proactively practice and contribute to each field. At the same time, teachers will feel less pressure to cover all the Competencies beyond their content area, by either addressing one cursorily or otherwise cognitively overloading learners.”
“In the fall, the college plans to consider some students who haven’t actually applied for admission at all. They will be students who have created profiles through Sage Scholars, which has offered a service since 1995 to help students afford college. This year, in addition to presenting students whom colleges might want to recruit to apply, Sage will also offer some of its several hundred members the chance to look at the profiles (which will contain the interests, grades and test scores of students who have them) and admit students directly… By creating a profile, “you are just saying ‘I’m interested in college.’”
“These findings suggest that, in addition to being dispersed, motor memories are highly redundant. The researchers say that as we repeat learned skills, we are continually reinforcing the motor engrams by building new connections — refining the skill. It’s what is meant by the term muscle memory — a refined, highly redundant network of motor engrams used so frequently that the associated skill seems automatic.”
“Direct-to-student, computer-delivered growth mindset interventions have shown promise as a way to improve achievement for those at risk of failing in school; however, these interventions only benefit students who happen to be in classrooms that support growth mindset beliefs.”
“I was present as the students’ teacher, Marina White, demonstrated the power of investing and compound interest. “This one decision, to give up a couple Starbucks every weekend and each morning you walk in here, can make you a millionaire by the time you retire,” she says. Many of White’s students are “in shock” when they learn that their behavior and choices can so strongly influence their financial future.”
“Not all students feel they can bring their whole selves into the classroom. Even the most well-meaning teachers can unwittingly do more harm than good. Many bicultural and bilingual children report experiencing a sense of loss when they acquire their second language (Casesa, 2013) and it’s not by coincidence that their educational setting plays a part in this.”
“If your goal is simply to mitigate the harmful impact loneliness can have on your health, what matters most is having at least one important person in your life — whether that’s a partner, a parent, a friend or someone else, said Jeffrey Hall, a professor of communication studies at the University of Kansas. “Going from zero to one is where we get the most bang for your buck, so to speak,” Dr. Hall said. “But if you want to have the most meaningful life, one where you feel bonded and connected to others, more friends are better.””
“Interestingly, the finding was specific to literary fiction as a genre. In fact, the authors found that “early-life reading of narrative fiction that presents more standardized plots and characters, such as romance novels, predict holding a less complex worldview.” …The key to a complex worldview, the authors argue, is not exactly about empathy, as other studies would have it, but about internalizing the concept of difference.”
“Uncommon as it may be, encouraging teachers to collaborate by observing one another lets these solo practitioners to learn from one another through comparing and contrasting their ways of teaching lessons. Doing so reduces teacher isolation and insulation baked into the age-graded structure of one teacher with one group of students in classrooms arrayed along hallways plowing through a packed daily schedule. From solo practitioner to collaborative practitioner, then, becomes more than a dream. Such a return on investment may far outstrip the time costs.”
“Surely, observing a fellow teacher elsewhere in the school or the district for a few lessons followed up with a discussion–without making judgments of a “good” or “bad” lesson—offers a splendid opportunity to learn new and, perhaps, better ways to carry off a reading, math, or science lesson while interacting with students. Teachers learning from teachers is an under-used resource in “professional development,” the jargony term for teacher improvement.”
“The project helped convince him that image-generating AI will lead to an explosion of creativity that permanently changes humanity’s visual environment. “Anything that can have a visual will have one,” he says, potentially upending people’s intuition for judging how much time or effort was expended on a project. “Suddenly we have this tool that makes what was hard to imagine and visualize easy to make exist.” It's too early to know how such a transformative technology will ultimately affect illustrators, photographers, and other creatives. But at this point, the idea that artistic AI tools will displace workers from creative jobs—in the way that people sometimes describe robots replacing factory workers—appears to be an oversimplification.”
“A survey by the communication platform Loom of more than 3,000 office workers found that 91% have had digital messages misunderstood or misinterpreted at work, and for 20%, the misinterpretation has caused them to get reprimanded, demoted, or even fired… In contrast, face-to-face conversations or video calls allow for more layers of meaning to be conveyed between and among parties. “Aspects of a message such as emotion, tone, sense of urgency, or sarcasm can be more easily conveyed in these communication-rich channels,” says Dalton.”
““It’s not a magic bullet, but it does seem to have a positive effect,” Wedenoja said. “I think it also says something larger about the fact that relationships between teachers and students are important.””
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