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For a quarter of an hour, the investigators from the lab of Larry Rosen, a psychology professor at California State University–Dominguez Hills, marked down once a minute what the students were doing as they studied. A checklist on the form included: reading a book, writing on paper, typing on the computer—and also using email, looking at Facebook, engaging in instant messaging, texting, talking on the phone, watching television, listening to music, surfing the Web. Sitting unobtrusively at the back of the room, the observers counted the number of windows open on the students’ screens and noted whether the students were wearing earbuds.

tudents’ “on-task behavior” started declining around the two-minute mark as they began responding to arriving texts or checking their Facebook feeds. By the time the 15 minutes were up, they had spent only about 65 percent of the observation period actually doing their schoolwork.

The media multitasking habit starts early. In “Generation M2: Media in the Lives of 8- to 18-Year-Olds,” a survey conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation and published in 2010, almost a third of those surveyed said that when they were doing homework, “most of the time” they were also watching TV, texting, listening to music, or using some other medium. The lead author of the study was Victoria Rideout, then a vice president at Kaiser and now an independent research and policy consultant. Although the study looked at all aspects of kids’ media use, Rideout told me she was particularly troubled by its findings regarding media multitasking while doing schoolwork.

Ewan McIntosh at TEDxLondon. In this talk, hybrid teacher/investor Ewan McIntosh shows how really using the design thinking model requires a shift in teacher behavior to “get out of the way” and allow students to find solutions to relevant challenges.

esign Thinking for Independent School Educators.” This webinar by Leading is Learning co-founder Greg Bamford provides a 100-level introduction to design thinking and why is matters in the independent school environment. Design Thinking in Education. This partnership between IDEO and Riverdale Country Day School (NY) focuses on how design thinking is used in schools, often to help schools solve problems about where they should go, what they should do. It includes case studies and nice short videos about educators using design thinking here. The Stanford d. school K-12 Wiki has a range of resources for K-12 educators. Stanford REDLab (Design and Education) has scholarly articles on design thinking and education, videos, and a few models of design thinking units in middle school math and high school science here. The Nueva School in northern California, a K-8 independent school, is a national leader in using Design Thinking. Information on their curriculum and iLab facility is here.

see themselves as members of strong collaborative cultures saw significant benefits in their day-to-day work in key instructional areas, such as planning lessons, developing teaching skills and content, and aligning curriculum and expectations.

Blended learning uses both in-person and online methods to teach students, and there are several different models for implementing it in the classroom.

Flipped learning is one of the blended learning models. This article from Edutopia gives tips for flipping a project-based learning classroom. The tips include things like using short videos, encouraging collaborative virtual work, and considering the scope of technology that is available to students.