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Where we put our attention is not only how we decide what we will learn, it is how we show what we value.

Distraction is contagious.

he myth of the moment is that multitasking is a good idea.

Routine is a great deadener of attention.

When you follow the same routines at home, folding the laundry or doing the dishes, your mind goes on automatic pilot.

same generic suite of teaching activities: listen to a lecture, take notes, ask some questions, talk in groups.

shape the content within the modules in any way that suit their desired purposes

Teachers need to figure out what they want to get out of a flipped classroom, says Marine City High’s Ming. “What’s the purpose of doing it? Is it because you’re looking for more time in your curriculum to do hands-on activities?” An AP government teacher told Ming the best part of teaching his class was holding class discussions. The flipped classroom helped him get through the material with time to spare for conversation.

"Simply stated, the profound improvements that we found after just 4 days of meditation training- are really surprising," Zeidan noted. "It goes to show that the mind is, in fact, easily changeable and highly influenced, especially by meditation."

The meditation training involved in the study was an abbreviated "mindfulness" training regime modeled on basic "Shamatha skills" from a Buddhist meditation tradition

"Findings like these suggest that meditation's benefits may not require extensive training to be realized, and that meditation's first benefits may be associated with increasing the ability to sustain attention,"

I read Harry Wong's First Days of School years ago.  I bought in to his ideas on teaching rules and procedures for the first days of school.  However, doing that on the first day of school made me just like everyone else.  That is not me, I am not everyone else.  I stand at the door and greet my students.  At th

If you accept that Learning is a Conversation, and that some of the most powerful learning can take place in the process of conversing and exchanging ideas with others, then setting up ways to have as many of these conversations as possible seems like an obvious thing to do.

It might be easy to think that the people on the stage at conferences have the knowledge and that if we simply listen to them we will get wisdom, but the truth is that sometimes it just doesn't work like that, and even if it does, most of those ideas gather far more momentum once we start to internalise them through further conversation with others. Ideas beget ideas, one thing leads to another, and you often find some of the best, most useful ideas come to you not from what was said by a speaker, but from things that came to to you as a result of further conversation about what was said.  (by the way, the same logic applies in classrooms too!)

If we limit our notion of learning to the "official" channel - the teacher, the textbook, the syllabus - we miss so much. Yes, learning happens at school, but what about outside school? Yes, learning happens in the classroom, but what about outside the classroom? Yes, learning happens in the act of "being taught", but what about when we are not "being taught"?

The promise of the Common Core is dying and teaching and learning are being distorted.  The well that should sustain the Core has been poisoned.

Whether or not learning the word ‘commission’ is appropriate for second graders could be debated—I personally think it is a bit over the top.  What is of deeper concern, however, is that during a time when 7 year olds should be listening to and making music, they are instead taking a vocabulary quiz.

Real learning occurs in the mind of the learner when she makes connections with prior learning, makes meaning, and retains that knowledge in order to create additional meaning from new information.  In short, with tests we see traces of learning, not learning itself.

This originally started off with me bringing a large, empty jar to one of their weekly staff meetings and labeling it "Gripe Jam". I put a few pads of sticky notes on tables and played a rock anthem like "We're Not Gonna Take It". They had until the end of the song to write down any and all issues they are facing in their classrooms. I took these sticky notes, went home and created a Google Doc / Spreadsheet showing how as many of these challenges as possible could be addressed by digital learning tools/strategies/sites/etc. When I returned the next week, I shared this spreadsheet. The teachers then voted for or select one strategy they'd like to learn more about. This is how we decided where we began our exploring of digital learning.

Acknowledging that many teachers respond better to new ideas when we first listen to their current issues makes them feel heard and respected.

An organization with cost disease can use lower paid workers, increase the number of consumers per worker, subsidize production, or increase price

Cheap graduate students let a college lower the cost of teaching the sections while continuing to produce lectures as an artisanal product, from scratch, on site, real time

We suggest that you do not merely have students evaluate one another's group contributions at the end of the project. Spread the evaluation throughout the process, anchor it to behavior, be present as facilitator and listener, and help the group address any difficulties early on.