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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.”

Theorists from Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi to Jean Piaget and Maria Montessori have argued that students should learn by playing and following their curiosity.

The study found that when the subjects controlled their own observations, they exhibited more coordination between the hippocampus and other parts of the brain involved in learning and posted a 23 percent improvement in their ability to remember objects. “The bottom line is, if you’re not the one who’s controlling your learning, you’re not going to learn as well,” says lead researcher Joel Voss, now a neuroscientist at Northwestern University.

A similar study at UC Berkeley demonstrated that kids given no instruction were much more likely to come up with novel solutions to a problem.

and she was trained to highlight strengths

Showing empathy was important

The trainer stressed the importance of avoiding teen patois and not making typos, which undermine authoritativeness.

Having all three factors present in a school can compensate for their absence in the family, community, or peer group. And a school with these factors can be resilient as an organization in the face of challenges and traumatic events it may face.

But in practical terms, text messaging affords a level of privacy that the human voice makes impossible. If you’re hiding from an abusive relative or you just don’t want your classmates to know how overwhelmed you feel about applying to college, a text message, even one sent in public, is safer than a phone call.

What’s more, tears go undetected by the person you’ve reached out to, and you don’t have to hear yourself say aloud your most shameful secrets.”

All people have the capacity for resilience, she says, and there are three factors that tap and nurture that potential: (a) caring relationships, (b) high expectations, and (c) meaningful opportunities for participation and contribution.

The advantage of using texting for a crisis hotline is that teens who are willfully uncommunicative when speaking are often forthcoming to the point of garrulous when texting, quite willing to disclose sensitive information.

The three factors help develop children’s social competence, problem-solving ability, sense of self and internal locus of control, and sense of purpose and optimism about the future – all of which are key to dealing successfully with adversity.

This is all about providing a sense of connectedness and belonging, “being there,” showing compassion and trust.

Teachers make appropriate expectations clear and recognize progress as well as performance. They also encourage mindfulness and self-awareness of moods, thinking, and actions. Principals orchestrate a curriculum that is challenging, comprehensive, thematic, experiential, and inclusive of multiple perspectives. They also provide training in resilience and youth development, and work to change deeply held adult beliefs about students’ capacities.

Teachers hold daily class meetings and empower students to create classroom norms and agreements. Principals establish peer-helping/tutoring and cross-age mentoring/tutoring programs and set up peer support networks to help new students and families acclimate to the school environment.

Resilience is a process, not a trait. It’s a struggle to define oneself as healthy amidst serious challenges.

Several personal strengths are associated with resilience – being strong cognitively, socially, emotionally, morally, and spiritually.

In classrooms, open channels of communication are essential. Nothing should inhibit, embarrass, or shame students from asking questions during a lesson.

a person who displays bad judgment is not ‘forever’ a bad person.”

To help others, educators need to take care of themselves. An analogy: on an airplane, people need to have their own oxygen masks in place before they can help others.

“The admissions process can counteract a narrow focus on personal success and promote in young people a greater appreciation of others and the common good.

ome have pointed out that the report applies mostly to a small percent of students, and what colleges say they value may be a challenge to game the system.

Julie Coiro (University of Rhode Island) takes note of a large international study by the OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development), which found that computers were having no significant impact on students’ proficiency in reading, math, and science.

In many countries, the study found, frequent use of computers actually made students’ performance worse. “Although these findings may relate to differences in professional development or implementation,” says Coiro, “it was clear that drill-and-practice software had a negative effect on student performance.”

Technology is not critical for learning to be personal; all that’s needed is space and time to actively reflect, collaborate, and engage with personally meaningful ideas.

“What students can learn,” says Stygles, “is how to manage their time, select books reasonably, and justify their reading choices. When students understand their capacity – what they can do successfully – they not only protect themselves from shameful failure, but also become stronger readers through repeated experiences of success and pleasure.”

when blended learning is implemented in a balanced way, “teachers and students use a range of human and digital resources to improve their ability to think, problem solve, collaborate, and communicate. A delicate balance of talk and technology use keeps us all grounded in conversations with other people about what really matters.” Coiro has four suggestions for striking this balance:             • Build a culture of personal inquiry. Students have regular opportunities to pursue topics relevant to them, using a range of texts, tools, and people (offline and online) to get emotionally engaged.             • Expect learners to talk. Students engage in literacy experiences involving face-to-face and online collaboration, conversations, arguments, negotiations, and presentations.             • Encourage digital creation. Students create original products that share new knowledge and connect insights from school, home, and the community.             • Make space for students to participate and matter. “Through participation, individuals assert their autonomy and ownership of learning,” says Coiro. “In turn, their inquiry becomes more personal and engaging.”

Once students are empowered to direct their own learning pathways, technology can open the door to a range of texts, tools, and people to explore and connect ideas

“Unlike participation in sports,” says Stygles, “the choice to abandon reading to pursue other talents is not an option. Kids really have no escape from the struggles they face during the learning-to-read process, especially in light of frequent assessment or graduation through levels.”

“Measurement must be replaced by early and frequent positive transactions between reading, teacher, and texts,”

We should share with students what intimidates us about reading, how we find time, and how we focus… If we show our readers realities of reading, maturing students will see reading as less burdensome.”

“Shamed readers do not believe they improve or can improve,” says Stygles

“A good exit ticket can tell whether students have a superficial or in-depth understanding of the material,” they write. “Teachers can then use this data for adapting instruction to meet students’ needs the very next day… Exit tickets allow teachers to see where the gaps in knowledge are, what they need to fix, what students have mastered, and what can be enriched in the classroom…

The key to differentiation is that you have high expectations for all students and a clear objective.

If you know what you want students to master, differentiation allows you to use different strategies to help all students get there.”

Each of these tools allows students to contribute individually to shared creations involving inquiry, peer feedback, and collaborative composition.

Google Docs

Padlet

Coggle

VoiceThread

In short, every child starts out with a natural interest in art, but for most it is slowly drained away until all that’s left is a handful of teens in eyeliner and black clothing whose parents worry they’ll never move out of the basement.”

As of 2015, only 26.2 percent of African-American students have access to art classes.

Gregory has a startling suggestion: take the “art” out of art education and replace it with creativity education. Why? Because creativity is something that almost everyone agrees is vital to success.

We need to make sure that the kids of today (who will need to be the creative problem solvers of tomorrow) realize their creative potential and have the tools to use it.

A total of 21 percent of students said they had been bullied in the following ways: 13 percent made fun of, called names, or insulted; 12 percent subject of rumors; 5 percent pushed, shoved, tripped, or spat on; 4 percent threatened with harm; 5 percent purposefully excluded from activities; 2.5 percent told to do things they didn’t want to do; and 2 percent had their property purposefully destroyed. Girls reported more online harassment (16 percent) than boys (6 percent). These were the locations where students said the bullying occurred: -   42 percent in hallways or stairwells (similar for boys and girls); -   34 percent in classrooms (perhaps mainly during entry, transitions, and exit); -   22 percent in cafeterias; -   19 percent outside on school grounds; -   12 percent online or by text; -   10 percent on school buses; -   9 percent in bathrooms/locker rooms.

hallways and stairwells, taken together, are nearly twice as likely to be the source of the problem as the cafeteria, playground, or buses and bathrooms. Supervision and vigilance in those fluid spaces between classes is likely to benefit vulnerable students disproportionately.”

dance, gesture, and other forms of movement can improve motivation, engagement, and learning.

students in classrooms that integrated movement were “significantly more excited by, engaged in, and focused on the lessons” than they were with conventional teaching methods.

Dancing to memorize information

Moving among stations

Applying movement to assessments

Forming lines, rows, or other groupings – Each student gets a card with a punctuation mark or a word and students silently arrange themselves to form a complete sentence.

Representing terms or ideas with actions – After reading a book about emotions, students stand and act out furious, satisfied, courageous, and other words.

– The teacher gives each group of students sets of fraction cards and they take turns moving to another group in search of equivalent fractions, bringing possible matches back to their group to see if they’re correct.

– To test knowledge of synonyms and antonyms, pairs of students jump straight up and down three times, then choose to land on either their right or left foot; if both land on the same foot, they must come up with synonyms for a word on the board; if they land on opposite feet, they must name antonyms.

– Doing a dance skip-counting numbers (5, 10, 15, 20…) to the “Macarena.”

Many teachers assigned tasks with complex instructions and procedures, but little higher-level thinking was required of students

How many of these do schools teach? Just three, say the authors, even in schools where students get high state test scores: application, recall, and (sometimes) analysis.

a synthesis of the skills they believe adults need for successful lives: Cognitive skills: -   Recall -   Application -   Analysis -   Evaluation -   Creative thinking Interpersonal skills: -   Communication -   Cooperation -   Empathy -   Trust building -   Service orientation -   Conflict resolution -   Negotiation -   Responsibility -   Assertiveness -   Advocacy Intrapersonal skills: -   Flexibility -   Adaptability -   Appreciation of diversity -   Valuing learning -   Cultural appreciation -   Curiosity -   Forethought -   Self-regulation -   Self-monitoring -   Self-evaluation

Most teachers presented students with complex content, but the tasks students were asked to perform were simple recall and application

interpersonal and intrapersonal skills almost never showed up.

These exceptional instructors created “a harmonious environment,” say the researchers, “demonstrating an understanding that doing so is a prerequisite to academic learning.”

It was the teacher, not the subject. This level of intellectual and affective demand cropped up in different subjects, grades, and classes with different student achievement levels. The variable was the teacher.

In a 10th-grade honors humanities class, for example, students were asked to invent questions to guide their study of Western imperialism in China (having just finished a unit on the colonization of Africa). Guided by the teacher, students brainstormed possible questions, decided which were most important, and edited questions until the questions were intellectually stimulating and open-ended.

These outliers managed to weave rigorous instruction of content across the cognitive, interpersonal, and intrapersonal domains, putting to rest the notion that content- and skill-focused instruction precludes higher-order thinking – and vice-versa.

Teachers adapted their teaching to the moment.

to teach a deep and broad range of skills while also addressing disciplinary knowledge – requires intelligence and years of practice.”

Instruction was tied to complex assessments. Often designed by the teachers themselves, these checks for understanding stood in contrast to the test-prep oriented assessments in other classrooms.

Teachers built strong relationships with students.

First, Nehring, Charner-Laird, and Szczesiul suggest that schools need complex, high-level assessments to make all classrooms accountable for teaching the full range of adult skills. Second, “excellence requires highly skilled teachers with finely tuned radar and improvisational ability.” And third, “good teaching is about caring relationships, a parental affection that gives and receives, that honors the fundamentally human nature of our work as educators.

Thomas Guskey (University of Kentucky) stresses the importance of professional development starting with clear outcomes.

Polly details the 5E approach, in which students spend most of a lesson exploring mathematical tasks with limited support from the teacher, and some students get individual or small-group support: -   Engage – The class is given a math task or activity. -   Explore – Students have time to work on the task with their partner or a small group, with the teacher giving only instructions and circulating, sometimes posing questions to support students’ exploration. -   Explain – The class comes together to discuss the problem and how different students solved it. The teacher facilitates the discussion, perhaps choosing a main focus based on what was observed during the work time, and provides direct instruction as needed. -   Elaborate/extend – For the rest of the class, the teacher gets students working on activities, math games, and small-group activities that deepen understanding of the concept and zeros in on students who seem confused or off track. -   Evaluate – Students solve a final task or participate in a discussion of concepts, allowing the teacher to assess learning and plan for future lessons.

“Looking beyond the intended goals to the broader array of possible outcomes is an important aspect of evaluation and vital to judging effectiveness,”

What sparks robust discussions in PLCs is looking at variations in students’ responses to individual items on common assessments and writing prompts.

“The primary purpose of this collaborative data analysis,” says Guskey, “is to guide these teachers’ professional learning experiences so they can improve the quality of their instruction and help all students learn well.”

One additional cautionary note: PLCs tend to jump into “debating new ideas, techniques, innovations, programs, and instructional issues,” says Guskey. “While these are important issues, we must remember that they are means to an important end that must be determined first. Our journey always begins by deciding our destination… Ninety percent of essential questions in any evaluation are addressed in the planning process, before the journey begins.”

“When a teacher models and provides direct instruction at the start of a lesson, it rarely enables students to explore mathematical tasks or engage in productive struggle,” says Drew Polly (University of North Carolina/Charlotte) in this article in Teaching Children Mathematics.

researchers have found that if students grapple with a task before the teacher explains and models it (and receive appropriate follow-up), they’re more engaged and learn better.

What student learning outcomes do we aim to accomplish? -   What evidence will tell us if we met the goal? (ideally more than one source of data) -   What unintended consequences might occur, positive or negative?

“[T]he size of a person’s vocabulary is one of the strongest predictors of his or her reading comprehension,” say Tanya Wright (Michigan State University/East Lansing) and Gina Cervetti ((University of Michigan/Ann Arbor) in this article in Reading Research Quarterly.

Students who enter school knowing fewer words are likely to continue with relatively small vocabularies and struggle with text comprehension throughout school. Students who start with larger vocabularies, on the other hand, have broader general knowledge, need to spend less time accessing memory of words (which frees up working memory to grasp the meaning of a text), read and enjoy their reading more, and build stronger vocabularies – a reciprocal relationship that tends to widen the achievement gap.

Teaching word meanings almost always improved comprehension of texts containing the words taught. • Teaching word meanings doesn’t seem to improve comprehension of texts that don’t contain the target words.             • Instruction involving students in some active processing was more effective than dictionary and definition work at improving comprehension of texts containing the words taught. One caveat: researchers don’t know how much active processing is enough.             • Teaching one or two strategies (e.g., context clues or morphology) for solving word meanings doesn’t seem to improve generalized reading comprehension.

Another participant described affinity groups as “a space where I can say the things I need to say, you know, and be who I am and not have to couch it.” This kind of comfort can be a critical emotional lifeline for Black teachers.

If leadership at PWIs hopes to stem the tide of attrition among Black faculty, they need to invest in a consistent approach to professional development that is not reactionary.

I’ve established healthy boundaries, such as acknowledging that it’s not always my responsibility to coach my white colleagues through their misconceptions about race or Black folks.

I hope school leaders will make it a priority to improve the teaching experience of their Black faculty by intentionally budgeting more time for supportive gatherings like affinity groups and providing more culturally responsive professional development opportunities to sustain teachers throughout the year.

we need to be active, trusting, and respectful participants in the digital lives of young people.

Our young people are still learning their way around the digital landscape largely on their own — when what we need to do is confidently take them by the hand, show them how to look both ways, and cross the street with them — at least at first. That means staying up-to-date about digital safety, the rules of the road, and what’s going on in the neighborhood. Finally, we need to foster the kinds of personal relationships that encourage our kids to talk about where they are going and what they discover along the way (their successes as well as their mistakes) once we let them travel on their own.

y, “Digital Generation: Parents,” is a good place to start.

read Clay Shirky’s Cognitive Surplus (on social media

Jane McGonigal’s Reality Is Broken (on video games). If you want to try to keep up with the moving target of day-to-day digital parenting, I recommend Marti Weston’s information-packed, down-to-earth blog, Media! Tech! Parenting!

inspired by Adora Svitak,

Equally inspiring is nine-year-old Martha Payne, whose blog NeverSeconds, about the lunches served at her school in Scotland, sparked a national controversy about school nutrition that attracted the attention of celebrity chef Jamie Oliver

Some people call it a digital footprint, others a digital tattoo. As a parent, you are no doubt concerned about the possible missteps your children may take

the digital “brand” that will follow them for life.

although your children are already comfortable interacting online, they don’t yet necessarily know how to translate their skills into products that show them at their best

create “a portfolio of work that is both public and interactive, that reflects the potential of the online world and that serves as a solid foundation for a lifetime of participation online.”

Those of us in education need parents like you to be involved as active and open learners about the digital world, learners who can engage with us, their children and their children’s teachers, in much-needed conversations about digital matters.

Self-determination Theory (SDT) as described by Ryan & Deci (2000) and as discussed in Daniel Pink’s (2009) work on motivation reveals three drives that help us engage and maintain enthusiasm. Autonomy or a sense of control is a part of this triad and although we may not be able to decide which tasks we complete or not we can probably determine the order they are approached. Scheduling tasks which give us a boost of energy early in the day might help us move through the challenging middle period while finishing with a task we enjoy can be a positive ending. Putting off the tasks we enjoy least, those which offer the leas rewards until the end of the day is a recipe for disaster.

The other two drives identified by SDT are purpose and mastery. These too are linked to time and shape our perception of a task as a positive or negative experience. The perceived purpose of a task, the degree to which a task is important to us, the intrinsic enjoyment that a task has play an important part in how we value the time we spend on it. If a task is closely connected to our core purposes it is likely to be valued and time spent on is hardly noticed.

Within SDT the desire to master a task is the third drive. Mastery in most instances takes time and situations which prevent us from achieving mastery can lead to negative feelings. Being realistic with our mastery goals and recognising that true mastery is only achieved after significant time may reduce feeling of anxiety when confronted by situations where mastery is the goal but success is difficult to achieve.

His time management matrix shows a correlation between a task's perceived importance and its urgency with tasks deemed important but not-urgent being the ones which allow us to produce our best work. This concept is similar to the idea of wait time or thinking time and the ideas are linked together in Ritchhart’s writing.

Collaborative planning, reflection, problem identification and solution are areas that demand our best thinking but are not always given the time they demand. What this reveals is that the problem many schools face is not one of quantity of time but rather allocation of time.

By talking about how we use time, where we need more time, how we may better distribute our use of time to signal importance and provide opportunities for students and teachers to achieve their best with the time they have we begin to move things forward. Being open to new solutions, breaking with tradition and valuing time as we value money are steps towards a better model for time management in schools, one that has benefits for all.

Those who support homework will say that daily homework helps kids become more responsible, but this is only true at a later age.

Homework leaves less time for kids to be kids.

All students, and especially the youngest ones, should use their evenings and holiday time to do more physical activities, playing outdoors and participating in sports with friends.

Another problem with elementary school homework is that it often takes time away from their sleeping hours. Children need, on average, ten hours of sleep a day. For kids to be 100% the next day at school, they need to have a proper rest.

encourage fun reading.

Although personalizing this activity for each kid will require more effort than homogeneous homework, the benefits of fun reading will be noticeable.

Teach responsibility with daily chores.

Teach them that they are always learners.

Take them to visit a museum.

Overall, administrators, parents, and teachers may leverage after-school experiences where creativity, sociability, and learning converge to enhance elementary schools students’ educations.

The emotional connection that can result when teachers make learning personally relevant to students is what differentiates superficial, rote, topical assimilation of material from a superlative education marked by deep mastery and durable learning.