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Educators, Perkins says, need to embrace these same insights. They need to start asking themselves what he considers to be one of the most important questions in education: What's worth learning in school?

These days, he says we teach a lot that isn’t going to matter, in a significant way, in students’ lives. There’s also much we aren’t teaching that would be a better return on investment. As a result, as educators, “we have a somewhat quiet crisis of content,” Perkins writes, “quiet not for utter lack of voices but because other concerns in education tend to muffle them.” These other concerns are what he calls rival learning agendas: information, achievement, and expertise.

The information in textbooks is not necessarily what you need or would like to have at your fingertips.” Instead, even though most people would say that education should prepare you for life, much of what is offered in schools doesn’t work in that direction, Perkins says. Educators are “fixated” on building up students’ reservoirs of knowledge, often because we default to what has always been done.

Mornings are for “Integrated Learning Time”; no rigid boundaries of subject, time, or space.  The pod teachers decide when and how the students will move, and the teams focus relentlessly on how students will learn content through big, cross-disciplinary themes.  The afternoons are split between “Deep Dives”, physical activity-based “Minds in Motion”, “Exploration” opportunities for students to follow their passions,  and some dedicated time for mathematics in the upper grade levels.  Within each of these broad areas, the teachers are expected to amplify the process of inquiry and to embed the skills of design thinking.

How might we further dissolve rigidity by allowing students to re-arrange classroom furniture on a very frequent (more than daily) basis to meet the learning objectives of the moment? How often can we get students up to the writing walls to collaborate on work rather than taking individual notes or keying into their individual devices? How might we constantly defuse the “teacher-centrism” of the room?  If the teacher is not using a fixed projector or other device that requires a “front of the room”, why set the podium there, or stand there? How might we empower students to ask the questions that guide discussion? How might we allow students to find the best ways to interact within learning teams, rather than giving them a strict methodology to follow?  When have we given them enough instruction on how to learn, and when is it best for them to find this out for themselves and with their peers?

A growth mindset is the belief that you can develop your talents and abilities through hard work, good strategies, and help from others. It stands in opposition to a fixed mindset, which is the belief that talents and abilities are unalterable traits, ones that can never be improved.

We typically teach students a growth mindset through online programs that demonstrate how the brain changes with learning (how the neurons grow stronger connections when students work on hard things and stick with them) and how to apply this to their schoolwork.

"Great effort" became the consolation prize for children who weren't learning. So the very students who most needed to learn about developing their abilities were instead receiving praise for their ineffective effort.

Teachers at the school often say they’re “teaching kids to teach themselves” and rarely answer questions directly; instead they ask students to consider other sources of information first.

mixing age groups accelerates learning.

“When you get kids collaborating together, they become more resourceful and they see themselves as experts,”

Emotion is where learning begins, or, as is often the case, where it ends. Put simply, “It is literally neurobiologically impossible to think deeply about things that you don’t care about,” she said.

Great teachers understand that the best, most durable learning happens when content sparks interest, when it is relevant to a child’s life, and when the students form an emotional bond with either the subject at hand or the teacher in front of them. Meaningful learning happens when teachers are able to create an emotional connection to what might otherwise remain abstract concepts, ideas or skills.

When teachers take the time to learn about their students’ likes, dislikes and personal interests, whether it’s racial issues brewing at their school, their after-school job, or their dreams and goals, learning improves.

Differentiating content includes using various delivery formats such as video, readings, lectures, or audio. Content may be chunked, shared through graphic organizers, addressed through jigsaw groups, or used to provide different techniques for solving equations.

Process is how students make sense of the content. They need time to reflect and digest the learning activities before moving on to the next segment of a lesson.

Processing helps students assess what they do and don't understand. It's also a formative assessment opportunity for teachers to monitor students' progress.

Recent results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, for example, show that 43 percent of white students and 61 percent of Asian students score at the proficient level in eighth-grade math, compared to 19 percent of Hispanic students and 13 percent of black students. Eighth-grade students with disabilities and students eligible for free or reduced-price lunch scored nearly 30 points below their peers in science and mathematics; English learners scored nearly 40 and 50 points below their peers in these two subjects.

I was once asked by a group of educational state representatives if the flipped classroom would allow them to hire less teachers.  

They had the misguided notion that teaching is the pouring out of information from one person (the teacher) into another (the student).

teaching is a social interaction between teacher and students and students and students.  Our students need us more than they need a video made by someone they don’t know teaching them something they may or may not want to learn about.

It’s an open secret in the education community. As we go about integrating technology into our schools, we are increasing the risk and potential for plagiarism in our tradition-minded classrooms.

But when does collaboration cross the line into plagiarism, out in the digital frontier of education?

At the same time, many of us want to put up barriers and halt any collaboration at other times (during assessments, for example). When collaboration takes place during assessment, we deem it plagiarism or cheating, and technology is often identified as the instrument that tempts students into such behavior.

To name a few, the national curriculum now includes coding, schools should now be teaching character, or ‘grit’ alongside subjects,

social learning - the use of peer review through social-media like sites where students can learn from and help each other through peer-review.

Find, Filter, Apply – Students no longer need to know everything, just how to find it, how to filter to get the most relevant info, and to apply it.

Technology is tempting to embed in the classroom en masse. It piques kids’ interests and it is fun to explore. But does it lead to achievement and help students grow as learners? We need to ask ourselves these types of questions if we want to realize the impact that connected education can have on students

Sherry Turkle, a scientist from MIT, found that empathy can be reduced by up to 40% in college students when they prioritize online relationships over in person conversations (Turkle, 2015).

Reasons include more distractions on a screen, such as multimedia enhancements and advertisements, and the “difficulty to see any one passage in the context of the entire text” (Jabr, 2013). These factors can lead to decreased comprehension and understanding.

I find that students really benefit from being given guidelines and then making something within those guidelines.

Find a way to have students reflect on what they’ve created and document it.

I recently created a design process worksheet that I’ve started using with my students.  They write a few brief sentences or draw some sketches for each step of the design process.

Though we had changed many of our pedagogical practices, our schedule was still outdated. We wondered whether we could leverage research in educational neuroscience to transform it.

students saw the value of about 90-minutes of quality homework that was assigned for one of three reasons: retrieval practice, to connect or extend prior learning or to be prepared for the next class period.

Launching something imperfect when you already have something that is comfortable can be challenging, but it gave us an opportunity to model what we were already messaging to our students about “failing forward.”

Use pretests.  Break the pretest up into subcategories that align with what you’ll be teaching in this unit.  Any student who gets 90% or higher in a subcategory does not need to complete the regular assignments on that topic and instead goes right to challenge work when you are focusing on that material.

Many online games are easy to differentiate, as they offer a variety of levels of gameplay.  You can assign the proper level to your students or once again allow the students to find their level of best fit.

If you need more problems for your top students, check out the fun  competitions at www.onlinemathleague.com, work on differentiated basic fact practice at www.themathfacts.com, or allow students to work on specific levels on www.ixl.com. Whatever you do, do something to ensure that all of your students are working on something they don’t already have mastered.

In a disturbing number of cases, aggressive boys harass girls (Berger & Rodkin, 2009; Rodkin & Berger, 2008; Veenstra et al., 2007). Sixty percent of 5th to 7th grade girls whom Olweus (1993) reported as being harassed said that they were bullied by boys

A colleague and I have referred to socially connected bullies as "hidden in plain sight" (Rodkin & Karimpour, 2008) because they are more socially prominent than marginalized bullies, yet less likely to be recognized as bullies or at risk. Because socially connected bullies affiliate with a wide variety of peers, there is an unhealthy potential for widespread acceptance of bullying in some classrooms and schools. This is what Debra Pepler and colleagues call the theater of bullying (Pepler, Craig, & O'Connell, 2010), which encompasses not only the bully-victim dyad, but also children who encourage and reinforce bullies (or become bullies themselves); others who silently witness harassment and abuse; and still others who intervene to support children being harassed (see also Salmivalli et al., 2010).

One good friend can make a crucial difference to children who are harassed. Victims who are friends with a nonvictimized peer are less likely to internalize problems as a result of the victimization—for example, being sad, depressed, or anxious

too much praise can convey a sense of low expectation and, as a result, can be demotivating.

Teenagers care a lot about what their peers think of them. Constructive feedback given in front of others, even if it is well-intended, can be read as a public attack on them and their ability. This can lead to students developing a fear of failure and putting up a front.

This is similar to the technique he calls the whisper correction – the feedback technically takes place in public, but the pitch and tone of voice is designed to be heard only by the individual receiving it.

Working through guided projects can help students to develop the skills that they need to further explore creatively.  It’s true that some students can just figure it out, but most need that gentle push to get them started.

Following patterns to the letter when I first got started helped me to learn the skills that I needed to be creative in my knitting.

The problem comes when all we ever do are guided projects.  Sylvia Martinez and Gary Stager warn against the “20 identical birdhouses” style class projects, where there is zero creativity involved.  It’s very easy to fall into the trap of focusing too much on standards, rubrics and guided projects and zapping all the fun and creativity out, turning a makerspace into nothing more than another classroom.  It’s tempting for many educators to just print out a list of instructions, sit students down in front of a “maker kit” and check their e-mail while students work through the steps one by one.  This is obviously not what we want in our makerspaces.

What were the bright spots of the project? Have you asked students for feedback? What will they remember most about their learning experience? What seemed hardest for them? Were they engaged all the way through? If not, can you pinpoint when and why their interest waned? Were you able to scaffold the experience so that all learners could be successful? What would you change if you were to do this project again?

What's the right line between teacher direction and student freedom? Is it OK for students to swerve toward new questions -- unanticipated by the teacher -- that grab their curiosity? How open is too open?

This formula -- the introduction of a thinking routine to stimulate observations and questions at the beginning of each new topic, the formulation of an inquiry-based investigation from those observations and questions, and the subsequent rounds of writing, critique, and rewriting -- essentially became the working formula for the rest of the school year.

In terms of test scores, the U.S. has certainly improved, but so have other countries. So the gap between U.S. students and East Asian students remain as large as 20 years ago

As test scores went up, students’ confidence and attitude toward math came down.

But the U.S. still has more students reporting confidence in math and valuing math than East Asian students.