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 more of a sense of pride. As teachers, we often wear “busy” like a badge of honor, advertising to the world how out of control our careers have become.
Learn to access the right data: the why (why do your students not get it?) and the how (how can you reteach content to stick?). Source: 7 Steps to Becoming a Data-Driven School I prefer the term data informed. No matter what the data tells you, sometimes you have to go with your gut reaction. There…
Today’s digest revisits the idea of inquiry methods. Why? Because a quick Google search resulted in the very clear impression that many instructors still believe (or at least blog about) the idea that students learn more when they discover new knowledge on their own, without being explicitly taught. Given this apparent pervasive belief, we share here a…
We spoke with teachers and administrators at Cicero Public School District 99 in Illinois and Chagrin Falls Exempted Village Schools in Ohio about how they designed technology professional development programs to engage teachers for the long term. Here we share three lessons learned from their experiences building programs that impact educators and students alike. Source: Creating a professional growth culture:…
The more time we spend on our phones, the more text messaging seems like a natural artistic medium, a modern outgrowth of the epistolary novel. You can see it in the fake text messageweb fiction genre, in games like Sarah is Missing… and in the silly quasi-interactive thriller that a smartphone writing app has somehow seduced me into creating….
Much of the public enthusiasm for STEM education rests on the assumption that these fields are rich in job opportunity. Some are, some aren’t. STEM is an expansive category, spanning many disciplines and occupations, from software engineers and data scientists to geologists, astronomers and physicists. What recent studies have made increasingly apparent is that the…
Step into any college lecture hall and you are likely to find a sea of students typing away at open, glowing laptops as the professor speaks. But you won’t see that when I’m teaching. Though I make a few exceptions, I generally ban electronics, including laptops, in my classes and research seminars. That may seem…
