There will be times when scrapping what happened altogether may be the best plan and just starting over or moving on and then circling back at another time, but more often then not, it’s worth it to just pause and reflect. These moments can yield a great deal of learning for everyone, including us.
When schools try to innovate, they often take a traditional top-down approach: devise a strategy, roll it out to teachers and support a high-fidelity implementation. The end result is often one that lacks teacher support or genuine enthusiasm — initiatives putter along and change is sporadic or modest.In education and beyond, innovation is usually the…
So knowing your audience is extremely important to you? That’s the only way you know you’re communicating. Otherwise you’re just giving a lecture, you’re facing the board and talking to the board, and people in the classroom behind you have to meet you at the board. The educator who says ‘Oh, these people just don’t…
When you think about a traditional school workflow, it’s not unlike that of a business: paper is generated and moved in a systematic way between the children and the teacher. Just as cloud computing has transformed workflows in business to make them more collaborative and mobile, that same type of change has been coming to…
Although adults can beat children at most cognitive tasks, new research shows that children’s limitations can sometimes be their strength. In two studies, researchers found that adults were very good at remembering information they were told to focus on, and ignoring the rest. In contrast, 4- to 5-year-olds tended to pay attention to all the…
In most ways, teachers that use technology in the classroom aren’t much different than those that don’t. Any teacher worth their salt assesses, and then revises planned instruction based on data from those assessments.They manage their classroom in a way that works for them, create a positive learning environment, and (great teachers especially) collaborate with…
The Minotaur King has a grip on the hero, Master Heebs, who refuses to divulge where he has hidden a rare and precious gem. Tasked with liberating their master and reclaiming their resource-rich land are 22 eighth graders armed with tablets and a mini whiteboard. They will defeat the Minotaur King with a series of…
