Once a month, this column will examine the insights that science offers about the way people learn, and how such findings could influence schools. Most of us can remember a moment like this from our school years: the teacher poses a question – maybe it’s math, maybe history. You raise your hand, you give your […]
Source: To err is human – and a powerful prelude to learning – The Hechinger Report
Making mistakes turns out to be a powerful way to learn.
For many middle– and high-school students, giving an in-class presentation was a rite of passage. Teachers would call up students, one by one, to present their work in front of the class and, though it was often nerve-racking, many people claim it helped turn them into more confident public speakers. “Coming from somebody with severe anxiety,…
Using technology for learning makes sense. Technology creates access, transparency, and opportunity. Any smartphone or tablet is media incarnate–video, animation, eBooks, essays, blog posts, messages, music, games. The modalities of light, color, and sound all arranged just so to communicate a message or create an experience. But there is a difference, claims this graphic from teachbytes,…
Few middle schoolers are as clued in to their mathematical strengths and weakness as Moheeb Kaied. Now a seventh grader at Brooklyn’s Middle School 442, he can easily rattle off his computational profile. “Let’s see,” he said one morning this spring. “I can find the area and perimeter of a polygon. I can solve mathematical…
10 Google Apps Tricks to learn for 2017. Increase your digital literacy with these Google Apps tricks: Docs, Sheets, Slides, Drive Source: 10 Google Apps Tricks to Learn for 2017 – Teacher Tech One skill I’d add to this list is to learn how to bookmark individual files and folders in your browser toolbar for…
Lately I’ve been noticing that more and more authors seem to be adapting their adult nonfiction books for younger readers (typically for the middle grade set, ages 8-12). The young readers editions are shorter and often contain more illustrations, photos, graphs, and charts than their adult counterparts, distilling the story and information down into what…
In a PBL classroom, students do things. But what about the teacher? What do we need to be doing while the students are doing things? What does it look like when the teacher is a coach? Are we still doing things, and if so, what are they? In Making Space for Thinking, we made the…