For example, research suggests that when parents praise effort rather than ability, children develop a stronger work ethic and become more motivated.

Surveys reveal that in the United States, parents from European, Asian, Hispanic and African ethnic groups all place far greater importance on caring than achievement

Genetic twin studies suggest that anywhere from a quarter to more than half of our propensity to be giving and caring is inherited

We live in a culture that does not always encourage or support expressions of loss and, frankly, expects people "to get over" grief fairly quickly

For example, in language arts, students can be told that they will be writing about someone they remember and they can focus on what they miss about that person or how they remember that person in their lives now

In the visual and performing arts, a similar assignment to make the focus of students' products someone they miss or remember.

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.

Many teachers I encounter have decided that they need to crack down on — if not entirely eradicate — screen distractions in their classrooms. (A minority of teachers accept it as a form of 21st century doodling.)

If the activity is engaging and challenging, there is an authentic audience, and prescribed time limits, students won’t mess around.

The more time I spend “teaching” teachers something from the front of the room, the more inclined they are to check email, Facebook, or whatever.

think of Evernote as the Swiss Army knife of organization

Evernote allows students to write, take photos, record audio, upload content and more with the ability to tag items, create notebooks for organization and share content socially.

Did I refer to the class as our class or my class?

8. If our class were a company, would it be out-of-business now?

9. Did students create and experience a great class or simply take a class and get credit?

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

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.

If you're a teacher and not an instructional leader, you can initiate this important conversation, too.

make sure you acknowledge his or her specific strengths so that he or she can build on them

now is the time to give them complete ownership over their development so that it's meaningful for them and they're inspired to do it.

Diigo provides a free, efficient, effective and reliable way to save and organize your favorite websites, online articles, blog posts, images and other media found online.

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

Adding bookmarks to lists is easy. When you save the bookmark, you are able to allocate it to any list you have already created, or create a new list as you go.