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Cooperative learning creates what Daniel Goleman calls "cognitive empathy," a mind-to-mind sense of how another person's thinking works.

The better we understand others, the better we know them -- pointing toward (among other virtues) greater trust, appreciation and generosity.

Dispatching students into "groups" with the hopes they'll become more empathetic carries the same potential for success as trying to hit a dartboard while blindfolded

o harness the power of cooperative learning as a tool for building empathy, teachers need a specific strategy, a best practice that works

Created in 1971 by psychologist Elliot Aronson (1) to defuse his volatile fifth grade classroom, the jigsaw method (2) has a long track record of successfully reducing classroom conflict and increasing positive educational outcomes. As an empathy builder, it also opens doors of opportunity.

The fluid movement, flexible groupings and redistribution of responsibility force kids to be more actively engaged in what and how they learn.

jigsaw learning flows freely between group members. Familiar roles change, too.

Teachers re-outfit themselves as sideline reporters, monitoring, questioning and analyzing the action, while the quickest and slowest students suddenly discover themselves in supporting and leading roles they never quite imagined.

Creating points of contact between students who would otherwise not interact delivers a humbling but elevating awareness of the "other."

the hard currency is active listening, or the art of thinking about what the other person is saying.

And because each student has a purpose (a teaching role) and something valuable (new and necessary information), every learner is regarded as an asset, not a liability

“Teachers in schools do not call the shots. They have very little say. They’re told what to do; it’s a very disempowered line of work.”

if you want to have a family, or you want to have some leisure time, you know, how do you sustain that?”

many young teachers soon realize they must do overwhelming amounts of after-hours work. They pour out emotional energy into their work, which breeds quick exhaustion. And they experience the frustrating uphill battle that comes along with teaching—particularly in low-performing schools.

What people are asked to do is only the kind of thing that somebody can do for two or three years; you couldn’t sustain that level of intensity throughout a career,” said Thomas Smith, a professor at Vanderbilt University’s education school.

Many of them cited “personal reasons,” ranging from individual stress levels to work-life balance struggles.

“What many of them working in high-need schools told me, however, was that being successful at school directly conflicted with being successful husbands and fathers. While this is certainly true of any occupation, most occupations don't leave your children asking you, ‘Why do you go to more basketball games of the kids at school than mine?’"

Higher pay doesn’t necessarily lead to a better retention rate, though.

Most teachers sounded simply frustrated, overworked and underpaid—sentiments that are certainly echoed in the research. 

“Those schools that do a far better job of managing and coping with and responding to student behavioral issues have far better teacher retention,”

“Respected, well-paid lines of work do not have shortages,”

If the overall attractiveness of teaching as a profession gets better, the best teachers will enter the profession, stay, and help increase the effectiveness of schools.

The ability to concentrate was the strongest predictor of success.

He advocates for a “digital sabbath” everyday, some time when kids aren’t being distracted by devices at all. He’d also like to see schools building exercises that strengthen attention, like mindfulness practices, into the curriculum.

Perhaps the most well known study on concentration is a longitudinal study conducted with over 1,000 children in New Zealand by Terrie Moffitt and Avshalom Caspi, psychology and neuroscience professors at Duke University.

“The attentional circuitry needs to have the experience of sustained episodes of concentration — reading the text, understanding and listening to what the teacher is saying — in order to build the mental models that create someone who is well educated,” Goleman said.

“This ability is more important than IQ or the socio economic status of the family you grew up in for determining career success, financial success and health,” Goleman said.

These are signs that educators may need to start paying attention to the act of attention itself. Digital natives may need help cultivating what was once an innate part of growing up.

“There’s a need now to teach kids concentration abilities as part of the school curriculum,” Goleman said. “The more children and teens are natural focusers, the better able they’ll be to use the digital tool for what they have to get done and then to use it in ways that they enjoy.”

the idea of multitasking is a myth, Goleman said. When people say they’re  “multitasking,” what they are really doing is something called “continuous partial attention,” where the brain switches back and forth quickly between tasks.

“I don’t think the enemy is digital devices,” Goleman said. “What we need to do is be sure that the current generation of children has the attentional capacities that other generations had naturally before the distractions of digital devices. It’s about using the devices smartly but having the capacity to concentrate as you need to, when you want to.”

If people can’t see their culture, they will not be able to change it.

Directly telling educators that their school culture/climate needs to change is probably the best way of insuring that it won’t.

Chances are that many teachers and students imitate the leader’s way of getting things done

If students believe they won’t be caught (the great majority of the time they won’t), they don’t worry about consequences. If students impulsively bully students in retaliation for being bullied, they aren’t thinking beyond the moment anyway.

Rather than simply telling people what NOT to do, bullying prevention “reframed” can invite and inspire all members of the school community to work together to create the type of school that they want and need.

he more students are involved in the process of shaping the school culture and climate, the more they will feel a sense of ownership for their school.

he best way for staff to influence student behavior is to model the change they want to see

To have value beyond a teacher's blog or Twitter feed, digital badges need to have both rigor and market worth.

A system filled with "junk" badges will have far less integrity than one filled with micro-credentials awarded by reputable organizations.

Research shows that teachers who earn a Master's degree don't necessarily see an increase in student achievement (3), and yet current salary structures and professional development models are often tied directly to those macro-credentials.

Building micro-credentials that have rigor and market worth could be the first step toward updating our current paradigm of how we credential learning. If we truly want to build school-wide cultures that empower learners to grow as individuals, we need to provide personalized learning opportunities for all of our learners -- including our teachers.

Step 4: Evaluate Your Goal

Step 5: Find the Habits to Achieve Your Goal

Step 6: Assess Time Needed for Specific Habits

Step 7: Calendar Your New Habits

7a. Schedule Large Habits

7b. Aggregate Smaller Key Habits

Step 8: Set Up Visual Cues and Trigger Environments

Step 9: Enlist a Support Group

Step 10: Adapt and Reset

Count the Cost and Resolve to Change

Recommended Reading Problogger (19) by Darren Rouse and Chris Garrett The War of Art (20) by Stephen Pressfield Manage Your Day-to-Day (21) by Jocelyn Glei Platform (22) by Michael Hyatt Teach Like a Pirate (23) by Dave Burgess Fred Jones Tools for Teaching (24) by Fred Jones The Power of Habit (25) by Charles Duhigg

Diigo has tools that encourage students to collaborate with others to analyze, critique, and evaluate websites.

Diigo provides opportunities for students to apply higher level thinking skills while researching and gathering information.

Diigo allows you to gain access to the ‘collective intelligence’ of the internet.

Use Diigo to provide visual access to websites you have collected using the built-in program ‘webslides’.

Use Diigo’s advanced tools to link its power to blogs and RSS. Lists of similar websites that you have created can easily be posted onto a blog by using the ‘post to blog’ button.

Use Diigo tools to enhance professional reading and save time creating summaries of online posts.

Access your information from any computer, or even your iPhone or iPad!

To inspire questioning and wondering, Meghan Zigmond (10) put her first grade students in groups and allowed them to use a Padlet wall (11) to capture their questions as they read Douglas Florian's Comets, Stars, The Moon, and Mars: Space Poems and Paintings

She used Socrative to capture her fifth graders' questions and answers throughout the presentation, giving them an immediate channel for their thoughts.

The backchannel gave every student an opportunity to express his or her views and to listen to voices that otherwise may not have been heard.

A backchannel creates ubiquitous opportunities (18). In a blended environment, students and teachers can communicate through multiple modalities, allow their thoughts to develop over time, and engage in authentic learning.

clearing the path is about thinking through the details of the teachers' next steps and removing barriers so that they can visualize these steps happening and articulate how they'll happen.

a concrete plan to focus on as they think about next school year.

he or she should be the one leading the ideas for these next steps based on whatever meaningful focus areas you've identified together

it's too easy for the summer weeks to fly by until, all of a sudden, it's the first day back at school, and the teacher hasn't accomplished any of the summer plans that he or she intended to

Find out from the teachers you support what they appreciated about your support, what they wanted more of, and what they'd want to change.

it helps them identify what they need from a coach or evaluator, and it helps you get insight into how to better support your teachers next year.

closing the year strong with positive, actionable takeaways will ensure that teachers walk away feeling empowered, inspired, and ready to come back even stronger next year!

Evernote doesn't give teachers any way to moderate its use by students.

Evernote isn't publicly viewable, either.

what Three Ring offers that Evernote doesn't is teacher-created class accounts. In other words, teachers initiate the use of Three Ring in the classroom by creating classrooms within the teacher account and adding students to each class

Three Ring

students can create and upload content from their own devices and tag, search and share their portfolios

Three Ring even allows parents to view their students' accounts once linked by the teacher

This is the effect of good portfolios. They craft a narrative of learning, growth and achievement over time.

If your school is fueled by Google Apps for Education, then using Google Sites (3) to create student portfolios, or "Googlios," makes perfect sense.

even if we trust and like each other, we need to know why we're there.

Trust grows in tiny little ways when people are open and authentic, when they ask real questions and listen to each other, when they share their stories and others hold space for those stories, and when they do things together and those things go well. So create space for speaking and listening, ensure that everyone is participating, and then give them something to do.

Purpose needs to be connected to a school's mission, vision, and goals. When there isn't alignment and correlation, again, we can get lost.

while you can have a lot of power in a team, you may not have had the skill development to do so.

And then it happened! They opened up and started sharing their fears and concerns, they asked meaningful questions, and they started learning together

As such, my students and I might spend weeks asking ourselves inquiry-driven questions and checking out online resources (such as those listed below) as brain fodder. Collaboratively, we narrow down our choices. I use my voice in the process as sparingly as possible, but I do guide my learners to projects which reflect our subject area, my own expertise, and my strengths as an educator to projects which can be completed in the time allotted. Lastly, we determine if we have the right resources and tools. It's a messy process, but the results can be incredible.

If you're looking for more about Making, check out these resources: Makerspace.com Makered.org DesignMakeTeach.com Makezine.com Instructables.com #makered & #STEM on Twitter Inventtolearn.com