Only one leadership personality, the architect, delivers sustained improvement—by balancing all four roles. In the words of the researchers, they're insightful, humble, visionary leaders who believe schools fail because they're poorly designed, so they work with teachers to develop a collaborative school vision and engage directly in professional learning, coaching, mentoring, and peer collaboration.”
“The premise is simple: A teacher wears an earpiece during a lesson, which is being livestreamed for an instructional coach who is somewhere else. Throughout the lesson, the coach delivers in-the-moment feedback to the teacher, who can add something or switch gears based on what she's hearing in her ear. Typically, the coach and the teacher will meet to debrief after the lesson.”
In the middle school of the American collective imagination, packs of filthy-minded boys stalk the halls, snapping bras and howling at the cliff’s edge of puberty. The sex-obsessed adolescent girl is a rarer breed. More often girls are positioned as victims of raging male hormones, or else they are styled as preternaturally mature, rising above the boys and their juvenile misadventures. Now — in “PEN15,” the film “Eighth Grade” and the Netflix animated comedy “Big Mouth” — the lustful adolescent girl is having her moment.”
From one institution to 35-plus in three years is fairly rapid growth in the world of higher education. What has happened in the 18 months since I wrote that blog post? There are now over 115 colleges and universities offering scholarships. Several of these colleges actively market esports scholarship opportunities to high school students and recruit high skill, high school esports players directly from tournaments.”
“Christakis and his colleagues mapped out the face-to-face interactions of about 5,000 people living in one town over the course of 32 years. Their emotional ups and downs were documented with periodic surveys. We were able to show that as one person became happy or sad, it rippled through the network, Christakis says.”
“I would not accept someone else’s curriculum for a new course now. It is only through the development of the pedagogy that I can be fully prepared to teach the new course. I expect my first time through a new course there will be shortcomings, but this is how learning works. We cannot expect to human-proof a human process. We shouldn’t want to.”
““The four-year undergraduate experience is often out of reach for large segments of our population… the idea of getting that one degree and you’re set for life doesn’t really hold water anymore. Then the question becomes, ‘how do we make it easier for working adults and people who need to pick up new kinds of tools and technologies?’”
Wexler said when he told his students in 2015 about how many civil rights cold cases had gone unsolved and how many of those files remained redacted, they were upset. The bill the students wrote creates an independent review board of experts to analyze and release government files on civil rights cold cases… Their teacher, Stuart Wexler, said as far as he can tell from extensive research, this is the first high school class ever to draft a federal bill that became law.”
I'm not prescient enough to know the best why for instructional principles and practices in our schools, but here are a few possibilities1 that I believe would take us in a markedly more compelling direction as we answer the question, Why do we instruct young people?”
“Read, read, read, read, read. Those who read own the world; those who immerse themselves in the Internet or watch too much television lose it… Our civilization is suffering profound wounds because of the wholesale abandonment of reading by contemporary society.”
The system’s scheduling fails on every possible level. If the goal is productivity, the fractured nature of the tasks undermines efficient product. So much time is spent in transition that very little is accomplished before there is a demand to move on. If the goal is maximum content conveyed, then the system works marginally well, in that students are pretty much bombarded with detail throughout their school day. However, that breadth of content comes at the cost of depth of understanding. The fractured nature of the work, the short amount of time provided, and the speed of change all undermine learning beyond the superficial. It’s shocking, really, that students learn as much as they do.”
“Two of the most intriguing pieces of data collected during student surveys related to class period length and homework. When we asked students about an optimal length of class, they came back with 60 to 65 minutes. When students were asked about a realistic amount of homework time that should be expected of them, we expected to receive most answers declaring “none,” but instead, students saw the value of about 90-minutes of quality homework.”
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