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 result of iteration rather than central planning. In schools that succeed in implementing real instructional improvements, teachers figure out how to improve teaching and learning by journeying through multiple passes of a cycle of experiment, reflection and adjustment.
Number one on their list is, what I feel, an important and overlooked aspect of education. Research and development is all too often replaced with, “the research says we should be doing this, so let’s implement this across the building or district, without doing any R&D”.
“Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.” Yoda may be talking about the dark side of the force here, but his Jedi wisdom is just as applicable to the dark side of social media and technology. Like the force, these tools provide…
Hours after her son returned to school, April McElrath of Smyrna, Delaware, posted to a Facebook group she’d joined for help and support. “He tried to start a game before school!!!” McElrath wrote, posting a picture of her sheepishly smiling son Marcus, 11, to the group for parents of children obsessed with the video…
Teachers wishing to offer lessons in nature may hold back for fear of leaving students keyed up and unable to concentrate in subsequent, indoor lessons. This study tested the hypothesis that lessons in nature have positive—not negative—aftereffects on subsequent classroom engagement. Using carefully matched pairs of lessons (one in a relatively natural outdoor setting and…
At Microsoft, we’re passionate about our vision to empower everyone to achieve more. Every day our teams are striving to help educators expand their passion for teaching by using technology that can transform their classrooms and help their students achieve more. And, just as important, we’re committed to celebrating educators and schools that are raising…
Findings showed that using video instead of other teaching methods resulted in small improvements in student learning, whereas using video in addition to other teaching methods resulted in larger improvements. Source: Study: Pre-Recorded Videos Prove More Effective for Student Learning Than In-Person Instruction – Higher Education The article discusses the various advantages to using pre-recorded…
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…