Failure is all the rage in education circles these days—but not in the ways you might assume. Today’s failure conversation is less about academic grades or the achievement gap and more about how children react to personal letdowns, lapses, and losses.
While this emphasis on the emotional aspect of learning is well intentioned, it misses the mark when it comes to equipping students with true growth mindset. In fact, Carol Dweck found it necessary to dispel common misconceptions and misapplications of growth mindset, a term she coined. As she explained, growth mindset is a thoroughly researched, proven educational tool—but only when employed correctly.
But in April this story dropped. Folks had begun a mild-tomedium freakout because the East Asian PISA math superpowers (South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, etc), the people whose program everyone else was trying to imitate, had seen their scores start to drop. But now Andreas Schleicher, the official in charge of Pisa, has said…
He finds that math scores went up by 0.20 standard deviations and English scores by 0.18 standard deviations, and the results hold up even when you control for “detailed student demographics, including residential ZIP Code fixed effects that help control for a student’s exposure to pollution at home.” Source: Air filters create huge educational gains…
Teachers in Littleton, Colorado — like teachers in many places — are increasingly asking students to read and write online. Free tools like Google Docs have made it easy for students to work on the same piece of writing at home and at school, and have allowed teachers to explore collaborative writing assignments and synchronous…
The past five years have witnessed a preCambrian-like explosion of thousands of edtech products, many of which are “free,” and all of which have been designed for teachers, schools and students. Teachers, particularly those with students for whom school is an achingly bad fit, became early adopters. These educators are desperate to find ways to…
But what about math? Deborah Stipek, a professor at Stanford and the former dean of the school of education, says math is just as important—if not more—to laying the foundations for educational success. But we are not nearly as focused on planting the seeds for a future love of math as we are for reading….
In The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream, Tyler Cowen argues that more Americans are living comfortably and contently with what life has handed them. By sheltering ourselves from the new and different, it’s hard to see what is lost by standing still. But if you look at the data, we’re seeing…
