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According to Code.org, 90 percent of U.S. schools are not teaching any computer science. Eyebrows have been raised this year as the U.K. passed a plan to educate every child how to code (3).

This idea of applying gaming mechanics to non-game situations is known as gamification. What defines a game is having a goal or objective

What we learn from games is that adding narrative, storyline, a theme, or fun graphics to our lessons and activities can help students be more engaged.

A backchannel (3) -- a digital conversation that runs concurrently with a face-to-face activity -- provides students with an outlet to engage in conversation.

TodaysMeet (4) would have let teachers create private chat rooms so that students could ask questions or leave comments during class. A Padlet (5) wall might have fueled students to share their ideas as text, images, videos, and links posted to a digital bulletin board. The open response questions available in a student response system like Socrative (6) or InfuseLearning (7) could have become discussion prompts to give each student an opportunity to share his or her ideas before engaging in class discussion.

They create a blended environment where teachers and students engage in both physical and online conversations so that learning is no longer confined to a single means of communication or even an arbitrary class period. Backchannels don't replace class discussions -- they extend them.

With each unit of study, I made sure to incorporate an active simulation, ranging from mock press conferences and trials to murder mysteries and dinner parties, from spy dilemmas to mock Survivor games.

When a student adopted that character's thinking and point of view in one of the simulations, passion and purpose soared.

Even the quietest, most introverted student, given the opportunity to play a personality from history, can step up and into the opportunity to speak from that person's perspective

Are you able to stay up with your son or daughter until he or she finishes those assignments? If the answer is no, then too much homework is being assigned, and you both need more of the sleep that, according to Daniel T. Willingham (3), is crucial to memory consolidation.

we see moderate advantages of no more than two hours of homework for high school students. For younger students, the correlation is even smaller. Homework does teach other important, non-cognitive skills such as time management, sustained attention, and rule following, but let us not mask that as learning the content and skills that most assignments are supposed to teach

A scientific approach to tackling their homework can actually lead to deepened learning in less time.

Too much change stretches teachers thin and leads to burnout

Include teachers in conversations about changes, and make changes transparent

It's OK if teaching is your life as long as you have a life outside of your classroom

Note that I'm using the term "facilitator" to mean the person who plans and designs agendas as well as who guides a team through processes outlined on an agenda

a variety of structures or protocols to meet the desired outcomes.

The purpose of the meeting and desired outcomes are articulated and connected to the school's vision, mission, and big goals

It can be very, very, painfully slow to build trust in a group of adults -- but it can be done, and you as the facilitator have to believe it can be done.

As a facilitator, it's our job to clarify purpose and raise it, integrate it, and reference it all the time.

When we do things together that are new and challenging (but within our zone of proximal development), our brains actually produce hormones that make us feel good and feel closer to each other.

John Irving, the author of The Cider House Rules, begins with his last sentence: I write the last line, and then I write the line before that. I find myself writing backwards for a while, until I have a solid sense of how that ending sounds and feels. You have to know what your voice sounds like at the end of the story, because it tells you how to sound when you begin.

That is the crux of lesson planning right there -- endings and beginnings. If we fail to engage students at the start, we may never get them back. If we don't know the end result, we risk moving haphazardly from one activity to the next. Every moment in a lesson plan should tell.

The eight minutes that matter most are the beginning and endings. If a lesson does not start off strong by activating prior knowledge, creating anticipation, or establishing goals, student interest wanes, and you have to do some heavy lifting to get them back. If it fails to check for understanding, you will never know if the lesson's goal was attained.