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Test scores are an inadequate proxy for quality because too many factors outside of the teachers’ control can influence student performance from year to year — or even from classroom to classroom during the same year.

there’s a far more direct approach: measuring the amount of time a teacher spends delivering relevant instruction — in other words, how much teaching a teacher actually gets done in a school day.

Thirty years ago two studies measured the amount of time teachers spent presenting instruction that matched the prescribed curriculum, at a level students could understand based on previous instruction. The studies found that some teachers were able to deliver as much as 14 more weeks a year of relevant instruction than their less efficient peers.

Blau and Caspi learned two things: first, that in general students felt that collaborating with partners improved the quality of drafts. On the other hand, the students mostly felt that their edits improved other people’s drafts, whereas other people’s edits worsened their own drafts. Blau and Caspi posit that a sense of ownership of the draft was pedagogically useful–that students’ perceptions of the overall quality of their work increased as they felt responsible for it. As a consequence, they conclude that the best way to reap the benefits of collaboration and psychological ownership of writing is to have students make suggestions to one another’s drafts, but not to edit one another’s writing directly.

Information and knowledge

examine the entire school environment

Positive Behavioral Supports

target students' conversational ability and social skills

world economy has continued its expansion

2014 economic global growth is thought likely by major forecasters to be a bit higher than in 2013

growth is coming from the advanced countries

Students are referred to as “customers.”

t deploys data analytics for everything from anticipating future demand to figuring out which students are most likely to stumble.

“Public institutions will not see increasing state funding and private colleges will not see ever-rising tuition.”

suggests the words he might want to use next.

useful

re-design itself at an ever increasing rate,

design thinking is a set of tools, methods, and processes by which we develop new answers for challenges, big and small.

Through applying design thinking to challenges, we learn to define problems, understand needs and constraints, brainstorm innovative solutions, and seek and incorporate feedback about our ideas in order to continually make them better. The more we apply design thinking to the challenges we see, the deeper we strengthen the belief in our ability to generate creative ideas and make positive change happen in the world.

If you are interested in finding a program or resources to help integrate design thinking in your school, the directory offers a great set of organizations already listed for inspiration and new connections.

“Farmers’ markets aren’t sexy anymore

What we need is a system of local “food hubs” that can process and bundle local foods and deliver them to the places where America eats.

Perhaps the only thing all these food hubs share is a conviction that there is value in preserving regional identity, artisanal character, and sustainable practices—in saving some products from the great meat grinder of industrial food distribution.

In the 1950's Benjamin Bloom developed his taxonomy of cognitive objectives, Bloom's Taxonomy. This categorized and ordered thinking skills and objectives. His taxonomy follows the thinking process. You can not understand a concept if you do not first remember it, similarly you can not apply knowledge and concepts if you do not understand them. It is a continuum from Lower Order Thinking Skills (LOTS) to Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS). Bloom labels each category with a gerund.

In the 1990's, a former student of Bloom, Lorin Anderson, revised Bloom's Taxonomy and published this- Bloom's Revised Taxonomy in 2001.Key to this is the use of verbs rather than nouns for each of the categories and a rearrangement of the sequence within the taxonomy. They are arranged below in increasing order, from low to high.

Each of the categories or taxonomic elements has a number of key verbs associated with it Lower Order Thinking Skills (LOTS) Remembering - Recognising, listing, describing, identifying, retrieving, naming, locating, finding Understanding - Interpreting, Summarising, inferring, paraphrasing, classifying, comparing, explaining, exemplifying Applying - Implementing, carrying out, using, executing Analysing - Comparing, organising, deconstructing, Attributing, outlining, finding, structuring, integrating Evaluating - Checking, hypothesising, critiquing, Experimenting, judging, testing, Detecting, Monitoring Creating - designing, constructing, planning, producing, inventing, devising, making

My conclusion is that to do justice to using the term “curating” for educational resources, inquiry must be a part of the process. Part of this process is deciding what goes “in” to the collection – meaning many, many items are evaluated and set aside.

Themes have a common unifying element – but don’t necessarily explain the “why.” Theme supports a central idea – Context allows the learner to determine why that idea (or in this case, resource) is important. So, as collecting progresses into curating, context becomes essential to determine what to keep, and what to discard.

curating, it seems that collecting serves primarily the needs or interests of the collector. With curating, a larger goal is to benefit not only the collector, but other potential learners as well. It is meant to be shared. And, both the process and the product of curating help the curator as well as those who view the curated collection to understand and to learn.

We’ve all got a limited amount of working memory, so when we have to handle information in more than one way, our load gets heavier, and progressively more challenging to manage.

when you lighten the load, it’s easier for students’ brains to take information in and transform it into memory.

The duplicated pieces of information--spoken and written--don’t positively reinforce one another; instead, the two effectively flood students’ abilities to handle the information.

students were challenged to think deeply

I gave the students complete autonomy on how to execute the task, which also increased their excitement about the assignment.

binge and purge” learning: They stuffed themselves full of facts and then spewed them out at test time. Research in cognitive science shows that this is a very poor way to retain information,

spaced repetition works, increasing knowledge retention by up to 50 percent

See Readicide for a powerful argument of how we as teachers, while well-intentioned, can “schoolify” reading and viewing and learning to the point that it’s unrecognizable to anyone anywhere on the planet outside of the classroom, and make students think they hate what they’re doing in the process.

You can’t watch a video like you read a book; the modalities couldn’t be much different.

Those factors include integrating technology into intervention classes; setting aside time for professional learning and collaboration for teachers; allowing students to use technology to collaborate; integrating technology into core curricula at least weekly; administering online formative assessments at least weekly; lowering the student-to-computer ratio as much as possible; using virtual field trips at least monthly; encouraging students to use search engines daily; and providing training for principals on how to encourage best practices for technology implementation. Only about 1 percent of the 1,000 schools surveyed by Project RED followed all those steps, and those that did “saw dramatic increases in student achievement and had revenue-positive experiences,” Ms. Wilson said.

Pinterest goes for the “show, don’t tell” approach

Primary and secondary appraisals formed theoretically consistent and reliable evaluations of threat and challenge. Secondary appraisals were significantly lower for students who viewed the performance as a threat. Students who viewed the performance as a challenge reported significantly less cognitive anxiety and higher self-confidence. Findings indicate that the PAM is a brief and reliable measure of cognitive appraisals that trigger precompetitive emotions of anxiety and confidence which can be used to identify those performers who could benefit from pre-performance intervention strategies to manage performance stress.

Music performance anxiety (MPA) can be controlled when musicians cognitively restructure their own thoughts and feelings about their performance by anticipating symptoms of anxiety and turning them to constructive use

The cognitive interpretation, or appraisal, of an initial emotional response, such as fear, exerts a proximal influence on performance