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”.
Rather than filling garages with flashy cars, the data show, today’s rich devote their budgets to less visible but more valuable ends. Chief among them is education for their children: the top 10% now allocate almost four times as much of their spending to school and university as they did in 1996, whereas for other…
Google is making a play to capture the family market. Today it announced its new Family Link app, which lets parents create a Google account for their kids. This account is completely controlled by parents, so that means they can manage the apps their kids use, monitor how long they’re staring at their device, and…
At first I thought it was a teacher thing. I would ask how someone was doing and they would say, “I’m really busy.” This was often followed by a description of how little sleep they had gotten and how much grading they had done. Teachers weren’t whining. It wasn’t a “poor me” attitude. It was…
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…
Toe-curling public addresses, frosty receptions and baying crowds have been filling our screens on what feels like a daily basis – and we can only expect more of the same. It might not be on the world stage, but every day people at work face tough crowds and awkward addresses of their own – be…
Overcome the evil twin of the learning curve. Source: A mathematical model of the “forgetting curve” proves learning is hard Reviewing information is not enough to remember, time has to pass to reinforce the memorization of the informaiton.
