During a 3 month, online professional development opportunity exploring making learning visible (1), I learned how to move students beyond collaboration into collective knowledge building (2). I noted dramatic improvements in my students’ skills in communicating, socially interacting…
Quick math time! What’s -2 - 4?
As a first-year teacher, that was a question most of my eighth-grade students struggled with during the first week of school. We spent a full week going over various strategies to help …
Of course we love reading and think that blogs are great. But, we also love podcasts! Podcasts are a great way to digest information on the go. It can also be nice to take a break from screens, step outside and get moving while listening to a podcast. We have our own, The Learning Scientists Podcast, and …
Every so often articles like this pop up claiming that critical thinking is a soft skill and is surely not being taught in schools, despite its importance in the workplace and everyday life.
I have recently published a paper (with co-author Paul Gardner) on the effects of temporary mark withholding on academic performance and feedback views in university students (1). Temporary mark withholding is a feedback strategy whereby on assignments students are provided with the feedback first without their marks…
In a perfect world, the curriculum we teach our students just clicks, there’s that ‘lightbulb’ moment where they not only understand the objective but they’ve applied it to other subjects as well. This is the interdisciplinary dream that we strive for, but if we want this to be a norm, teachers may need to add one more title to their ever growing list of professions: philosopher.
