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”.
Eager to keep up with the pace of change, some Silicon Valley researchers are embracing a grade-school technique to enhance their cognition and memory. Michael Nielsen, a research fellow at Y Combinator Research, a division of Silicon Valley’s top startup accelerator, took to Twitter last week to explain his approach: flashcards. To comprehend fast changing fields such as…
Two years ago, I was practically begging a student to read a novel in my high-school English class. This isn’t an unusual problem. The girl, who’s a relatively bright, college-bound athlete, told me that she “just gets too distracted after five minutes” of reading. When she promised that she would listen to the audiobook of…
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…
Successful people don’t grow by accident, they grow by design. When you schedule personal development time on purpose, you are making time to design the life you want. You are essentially who you create yourself to be. Once you embrace the “growth” habit, you will improve your way of life. Source: Scheduling Just 15 Minutes…
I popped my head into one session: there were only two people in the room — talking about Mentoring New Principals. Initially, I was saddened at the small turnout in this particular session. Until I realized the these two people would not have met and had a professional discussion about a topic both cared about if it wasn’t…
Researchers at the University of California San Diego have developed a test that uses children’s ability to assemble LEGO pieces to assess their spatial visualization ability. Spatial visualization is the ability to visualize 3D shapes in one’s mind, which is tied to increased GPAs and graduation rates in STEM college students. Source: Using LEGO to…
