“To help educators explain the conflict and guide students in how to talk about emotionally charged, violent events like this in measured, respectful ways, Education Week has collected several resources. Those resources are intended to help students understand historical context, process current events, and use media literacy skills to analyze news coverage and social media responses and misinformation about the conflict.”
“I’ve gathered some of the most common efforts among teachers everywhere that aren’t met with the same amount of effort and success from their students, and for each one, I offer a small tweak that can make big improvements. Sometimes the tweak is a shift in semantics, other times it might be a slight change in how information is presented, and in some cases, it focuses on how teachers react when students lean on them to “help” instead of doing the heavy lifting themselves. The instructional methods are sorted into six categories: grouping structures, giving directions, assigning roles, support during student collaboration, the teacher’s primary role, and the learning tasks.”
“More than the economics, the key factor can only be what happened to us at the start of this century: first, the plunge through our screens into an infinity of information; soon after, our submission to algorithmic recommendation engines and the surveillance that powers them. The digital tools we embraced were heralded as catalysts of cultural progress, but they produced such chronological confusion that progress itself made no sense. “It’s still one Earth,” the novelist Stacey D’Erasmo wrote in 2014, “but it is now subtended by a layer of highly elastic non-time, wild time, that is akin to a global collective unconscious wherein past, present and future occupy one unmediated plane.” In this dark wood, today and yesterday become hard to distinguish. The years are only time stamps. Objects lose their dimensions. Everything is recorded, nothing is remembered; culture is a thing to nibble at, to graze on.”
“These test takers were high school freshmen when the coronavirus pandemic interrupted their educations, sending many of them into months of online learning. The achievement declines on the ACT are broadly in line with pandemic-era trends from other national exams… And yet, it is difficult to interpret the scores because of sweeping changes in college admissions, and state high school requirements that may bring down scores.”
“Just passing students on without ensuring that they’ve learned what they need to learn is obviously not just demoralizing for teachers, but potentially has devastating consequences for our society.”
“What the science of embodied cognition shows is that the more we can sort of externalize our thoughts and our thinking processes, get them out of our head and express them through our bodies or learn through our bodies and our senses, the better our learning will be. So I think we need to bring some of that early education spirit of having the body be part of learning into middle school, high school, college, all of that, because we are embodied creatures. We can't be anything but embodied creatures, even as adults. And so embodied cognition suggests that this head-first or brain-bound approach to learning is really misguided.”
“We found causal evidence of a negativity bias, where evaluators lower their scores by more points after seeing scores more critical than their own rather than raise them after seeing more favorable scores.”
“As an academic with expertise in the history of science, I am struck by just how much overlap there is between social justice parenting’s fixation on phenotypes and that found in 19th- and early-20th-century race science, lending credence to John McWhorter’s observation that antiracism might be better understood as a kind of “neoracism” that peddles new forms of race essentialism under the guise of liberation.”
“What we know – from both research and practice – is that polarization in educational spaces keeps people from really engaging with topics that are meaningful and issues that are contentious in an even, open-minded, and informed way. It hinders their ability to develop fully informed and nuanced opinions and consider other people’s perspectives… We can’t learn in that kind of environment. Nobody can. CDI was founded to create programming that helps students, faculty, and staff think about how to create the kind of space that allows learning to occur and where students can really engage with these issues.”
“While this data is important and may be intimidating, we want to emphasize that active shooter events in schools are still extremely rare. There are many layers to keeping schools secure and students and staff safe. Active shooter response should only be part of your campus safety plan — not all of it. Additionally, this data includes all incidents where a firearm was discharged — not just mass shootings.”
“The new guidelines will be designed to allow pupils to bring their phones to school so they can be used on the journeys there and back, but they will not be allowed to use them during the school day.”
“These disparate findings leave some questions unanswered. “How on earth can you get a more than 30 point spread between them?” Mr. Bloom asked. “It all comes down to how workers are managed. If you set up fully remote with good management and incentives, and people are meeting in person, it can work. What doesn’t seem to work is sending people home with no face-time at all.””
““Though we’ve never had an official dress code, the events over the past week have made us all feel as though formalizing one is the right path forward,” Mr. Schumer said on Thursday from the Senate floor, where he sported a navy jacket and a buffalo silhouette pattern tie, adhering to the newly official dress code while also supporting his favorite football team.”
“He shared with me how Chat GPT had become an integral part of his daily life. “Dad,” he began, “Chat GPT is like my co-pilot. I always have it open and I use it whenever I have any doubts about something I am working on.” As our conversation flowed, he shared anecdotes of how Chat GPT had helped him prepare for job interviews, understand complex topics for his work, and even engage in debates with peers. “Chat GPT never judges me and never thinks I am asking a stupid question. It is endlessly patient and doesn’t get tired, and I have access to it whenever I want.” He went on to explain how his use of AI has given him newfound confidence to take on much more challenging tasks.”
“The authors… interviewed leaders at some 40 organizations around the world that are investing in large-scale reskilling programs. In synthesizing what they learned, they became aware of five paradigm shifts that are emerging in reskilling: (1) Reskilling is a strategic imperative. (2) It is the responsibility of every leader and manager. (3) It is a change-management initiative. (4) Employees want to reskill—when it makes sense. (5) It takes a village. The authors argue that companies will need to understand and embrace these shifts if they hope to succeed in adapting dynamically to the rapidly evolving new era of automation and AI.”
“So I think the challenge for the next century is going to be what we don't do rather than what we do. And in the history of our species so far, progress has been a function of what we do. Progress has never been a function of what we say no to. And now the strange reality is that we actually need to learn when and how to say no, collectively.”
“The most valuable skills are no longer the ability to memorise reams of knowledge, historical facts, or scientific formulae. Instead, they consist of learning where to find this knowledge and how to use it; becoming more sceptical and vigilant for hallucinating AI, misinformed humans, or obsolete paradigms; or simply how to focus in a distracting world.”
“To help you explore some of the ways students can use this disruptive new technology to improve their learning—while making your job easier and more effective—we’ve written a series of articles that examine the following student use cases: 1) AI as feedback generator 2) AI as personal tutor 3) AI as team coach 4) AI as learner
“Team processes will need to be managed effectively and this will have to be done by a human. For humans to align the strengths and weaknesses of man and machine, they will need to be educated to understand how AI works, what it can be used for and decide — by means of the judgment abilities of their authentic intelligence — how it can be used best to foster performance serving human interests.”
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