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On the other hand, do give clear instructions about what kids don't know. What to do when a tornado is spotted

Rules shouldn't restate the obvious. "No cheating" is a stupid rule. "Bring a pencil to class" is a silly rule.

You're shooting for influence, not control

Integrity helps build community. The most important directives in democratic classrooms are around ethical practices: A clear definition of cheating, understood by all students, in the digital age

Carrots and sticks are temporary nudges toward desirable behavior at best, but ultimately destructive

We want kids to behave appropriately because they understand that there are rewards for everyone in a civil, well-managed school.

When faculty of a major Chinese university asked Plucker to identify trends in American education, he described our focus on standardized curriculum, rote memorization, and nationalized testing. “After my answer was translated, they just started laughing out loud,” Plucker says. “They said, ‘You’re racing toward our old model. But we’re racing toward your model, as fast as we can.’ ”

The argument that we can’t teach creativity because kids already have too much to learn is a false trade-off. Creativity isn’t about freedom from concrete facts. Rather, fact-finding and deep research are vital stages in the creative process.

When you try to solve a problem, you begin by concentrating on obvious facts and familiar solutions, to see if the answer lies there. This is a mostly left-brain stage of attack. If the answer doesn’t come, the right and left hemispheres of the brain activate together. Neural networks on the right side scan remote memories that could be vaguely relevant. A wide range of distant information that is normally tuned out becomes available to the left hemisphere, which searches for unseen patterns, alternative meanings, and high-level abstractions. Having glimpsed such a connection, the left brain must quickly lock in on it before it escapes. The attention system must radically reverse gears, going from defocused attention to extremely focused attention. In a flash, the brain pulls together these disparate shreds of thought and binds them into a new single idea that enters consciousness. This is the “aha!” moment of insight, often followed by a spark of pleasure as the brain recognizes the novelty of what it’s come up with. Now the brain must evaluate the idea it just generated. Is it worth pursuing? Creativity requires constant shifting, blender pulses of both divergent thinking and convergent thinking, to combine new information with old and forgotten ideas. Highly creative people are very good at marshaling their brains into bilateral mode, and the more creative they are, the more they dual-activate.

those who diligently practice creative activities learn to recruit their brains’ creative networks quicker and better

Creativity has always been prized in American society, but it’s never really been understood. While our creativity scores decline unchecked, the current national strategy for creativity consists of little more than praying for a Greek muse to drop by our houses. The problems we face now, and in the future, simply demand that we do more than just hope for inspiration to strike. Fortunately, the science can help: we know the steps to lead that elusive muse right to our doors.

What’s common about successful programs is they alternate maximum divergent thinking with bouts of intense convergent thinking, through several stages. Real improvement doesn’t happen in a weekend workshop. But when applied to the everyday process of work or school, brain function improves.

kids demonstrated the very definition of creativity: alternating between divergent and convergent thinking, they arrived at original and useful ideas. And they’d unwittingly mastered Ohio’s required fifth-grade curriculum—from understanding sound waves to per-unit cost calculations to the art of persuasive writing. “You never see our kids saying, ‘I’ll never use this so I don’t need to learn it,’ ” says school administrator Maryann Wolowiec. “Instead, kids ask, ‘Do we have to leave school now?’ ” Two weeks ago, when the school received its results on the state’s achievement test, principal Traci Buckner was moved to tears. The raw scores indicate that, in its first year, the school has already become one of the top three schools in Akron, despite having open enrollment by lottery and 42 percent of its students living in poverty.

project-based learning

highly creative adults frequently grew up with hardship. Hardship by itself doesn’t lead to creativity, but it does force kids to become more flexible—and flexibility helps with creativity.

When creative children have a supportive teacher—someone tolerant of unconventional answers, occasional disruptions, or detours of curiosity—they tend to excel. When they don’t, they tend to underperform and drop out of high school or don’t finish college at high rates. They’re quitting because they’re discouraged and bored, not because they’re dark, depressed, anxious, or neurotic. It’s a myth that creative people have these traits. (Those traits actually shut down creativity; they make people less open to experience and less interested in novelty.) Rather, creative people, for the most part, exhibit active moods and positive affect. They’re not particularly happy—contentment is a kind of complacency creative people rarely have. But they’re engaged, motivated, and open to the world.

solutions emerge from a healthy marketplace of ideas, sustained by a populace constantly contributing original ideas and receptive to the ideas of others

The age-old belief that the arts have a special claim to creativity is unfounded.

When scholars gave creativity tasks to both engineering majors and music majors, their scores laid down on an identical spectrum, with the same high averages and standard deviations. Inside their brains, the same thing was happening—ideas were being generated and evaluated on the fly.

those who diligently practice creative activities learn to recruit their brains’ creative networks quicker and better. A lifetime of consistent habits gradually changes the neurological pattern.

The home-game version of this means no longer encouraging kids to spring straight ahead to the right answer

The new view is that creativity is part of normal brain function.

“As a child, I never had an identity as a ‘creative person,’ ” Schwarzrock recalls. “But now that I know, it helps explain a lot of what I felt and went through.”

In China there has been widespread education reform to extinguish the drill-and-kill teaching style. Instead, Chinese schools are also adopting a problem-based learning approach.

fact-finding

problem-finding

Next, idea-finding

there is one crucial difference between IQ and CQ scores. With intelligence, there is a phenomenon called the Flynn effect—each generation, scores go up about 10 points. Enriched environments are making kids smarter. With creativity, a reverse trend has just been identified and is being reported for the first time here: American creativity scores are falling.

At least a few studies suggest that by limiting the way people navigate texts, screens impair comprehension.

Because of their easy navigability, paper books and documents may be better suited to absorption in a text. "The ease with which you can find out the beginning, end and everything inbetween and the constant connection to your path, your progress in the text, might be some way of making it less taxing cognitively, so you have more free capacity for comprehension," Mangen says.

An e-reader always weighs the same, regardless of whether you are reading Proust's magnum opus or one of Hemingway's short stories. Some researchers have found that these discrepancies create enough "haptic dissonance" to dissuade some people from using e-readers. People expect books to look, feel and even smell a certain way; when they do not, reading sometimes becomes less enjoyable or even unpleasant. For others, the convenience of a slim portable e-reader outweighs any attachment they might have to the feel of paper books.

In one of his experiments 72 volunteers completed the Higher Education Entrance Examination READ test—a 30-minute, Swedish-language reading-comprehension exam consisting of multiple-choice questions about five texts averaging 1,000 words each. People who took the test on a computer scored lower and reported higher levels of stress and tiredness than people who completed it on paper.

to begin addressing the hyper-reading of young people might start with the process of elimination, by helping readers remove the clutter on the web pages they encounter.

Colorado State University offers a useful guide to reading on the web. While it is aimed at college students, much of the information is pertinent to readers of all ages and could easily be part of lessons in the classroom.

Synthesize online reading into meaningful chunks of information.

Use a reader’s ability to effectively scan a page, as opposed to reading every word.

Avoid distractions as much as necessary.

Understand the value of a hyperlink before you click the link.

Navigate a path from one page in a way that is clear and logical. This is easier said than done, since few of us create physical paths of our navigation

Studies have shown that children can learn to regulate their emotions and concentrate better with the aid of mindfulness practices. Even children with attention deficit disorders have learned to concentrate better using these kinds of exercises.

Children as young as four, he says, can be taught to breathe in and out in a conscious way, with a little visual help. To do this, he suggests having the child lie on her back with a stuffed animal or pillow on her belly, which helps her become aware of her breathing as she watches the object go up and down.

Another mindfulness exercise is to ask a child to listen carefully for about a minute and then name five sounds he heard while being quiet.

Not only is this a cyber safety protection skill, it's also great for turning in work from a mobile device when you just can't figure out how to export

apply knowledge of language structure, language conventions (e.g., spelling and punctuation)"

language use, patterns, and dialects

Students benefit much more from learning a few grammar keys thoroughly than from trying to remember many terms and rules.

Experiment with different approaches

show students how to apply it not only to their writing but also to their reading and to their other language arts activities.

If they know how to find the main verb and the subject, they have a better chance of figuring out a difficult sentenc

Traditional drill and practice will be the most meaningful to students when they are anchored in the context of writing assignments or the study of literary models

apply it to authentic texts.

Try using texts of different kinds, such as newspapers and the students' own writing, as sources for grammar examples and exercises.

entence combining: students start with simple exercises in inserting phrases and combining sentences and progress towards exercises in embedding one clause in another.

practice using certain subordinate constructions that enrich sentences.

All native speakers of a language have more grammar in their heads than any grammar book

If a word can be made plural or possessive, or if it fits in the sentence "The _______ went there," it is a noun. If a word can be made past, or can take an -ing ending, it is a verb

whole sentence or a fragment

verb phrase

subject

pronoun f

Students can circle the sentence subjects in a published paragraph, observe this pattern at work, and then apply it to their own writing.  

Most sentences start with information that is already familiar to the reader, such as a pronoun or a subject noun that was mentioned earlier.

end focus.

One facet of our reading instruction that cannot be overlooked is the importance of teacher readers in building a classroom reading community. According to Morrison, Jacobs, and Swinyard (1999), "perhaps the most influential teacher behavior to influence students' literacy development is personal reading, both in and out of school."

If we don't read, why should our students?

Share your reading life with your students. Show your students what reading adds to your life. If you are reading a nonfiction book at the moment, tell them what you are learning. Pass the children's books you are reading to them when you are done. Describe the funny, sad, or interesting moments in the books you read. When you read something challenging, talk with your students about how you work through difficult text. It will surprise them that you find reading hard at times, too, but choose to read, anyway.

Many students in today's world do not read books outside of school. When they do read, it is text-messages, web pages or homework assignments. For students who did not grow up in homes with books, with adults who read and who read to them, this time to read in school is both necessary and pleasurable. Many of my students need catch-up time when it comes to "hours-in" reading. The 10 minutes at the beginning of each period that I allow my juniors each day equals hours of reading across the months of the school year. My most dedicated readers begin books in the classroom, finish them at home, and return to the classroom/school library to check out new books.