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The test designers will probably toss out an item that most students manage to answer correctly.

the evidence suggests that five disturbing consequences are likely to accompany an obsession with standards and achievement:

1. Students come to regard learning as a chore.

2. Students try to avoid challenging tasks.

3. Students tend to think less deeply.

4. Students may fall apart when they fail.

5. Students value ability more than effort

When students are made to think constantly about how well they are doing, they are apt to explain the outcome in terms of who they are rather than how hard they tried.

The upshot of all this is that beliefs about intelligence and about the causes of one’s own success and failure matter a lot. They often make more of a difference than how confident students are or what they’re truly capable of doing or how they did on last week’s exam. If, like the cheerleaders for tougher standards, we look only at the bottom line, only at the test scores and grades, we’ll end up overlooking the ways that students make sense of those results.

the problem with tests is not limited to their content.

if too big a deal is made about how students did, thus leading them (and their teachers) to think less about learning and more about test outcomes.

the findings of the Colorado experiment make perfect sense: The more teachers are thinking about test results and "raising the bar," the less well the students actually perform--to say nothing of how their enthusiasm for learning is apt to wane.

research indicates that the use of traditional letter or number grades is reliably associated with three consequences.

Archaeologists are still excavating Göbekli Tepe and debating its meaning. What they do know is that the site is the most significant in a volley of unexpected findings that have overturned earlier ideas about our species' deep past. Just 20 years ago most researchers believed they knew the time, place, and rough sequence of the Neolithic Revolution—the critical transition that resulted in the birth of agriculture, taking Homo sapiens from scattered groups of hunter-gatherers to farming villages and from there to technologically sophisticated societies with great temples and towers and kings and priests who directed the labor of their subjects and recorded their feats in written form. But in recent years multiple new discoveries, Göbekli Tepe preeminent among them, have begun forcing archaeologists to reconsider. At first the Neolithic Revolution was viewed as a single event—a sudden flash of genius—that occurred in a single location, Mesopotamia, between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in what is now southern Iraq, then spread to India, Europe, and beyond. Most archaeologists believed this sudden blossoming of civilization was driven largely by environmental changes: a gradual warming as the Ice Age ended that allowed some people to begin cultivating plants and herding animals in abundance. The new research suggests that the "revolution" was actually carried out by many hands across a huge area and over thousands of years. And it may have been driven not by the environment but by something else entirely.

Most of the world's great religious centers, past and present, have been destinations for pilgrimages

Göbekli Tepe may be the first of all of them, the beginning of a pattern. What it suggests, at least to the archaeologists working there, is that the human sense of the sacred—and the human love of a good spectacle—may have given rise to civilization itself.

n the 1960s archaeologists from the University of Chicago had surveyed the region and concluded that Göbekli Tepe was of little interest. Disturbance was evident at the top of the hill, but they attributed it to the activities of a Byzantine-era military outpo

To Schmidt, the T-shaped pillars are stylized human beings, an idea bolstered by the carved arms that angle from the "shoulders" of some pillars, hands reaching toward their loincloth-draped bellies. The stones face the center of the circle—as at "a meeting or dance," Schmidt says—a representation, perhaps, of a religious ritual. As for the prancing, leaping animals on the figures, he noted that they are mostly deadly creatures: stinging scorpions, charging boars, ferocious lions. The figures represented by the pillars may be guarded by them, or appeasing them, or incorporating them as totems.

nches below the surface the team struck an elaborately fashioned stone. Then another, and another—a ring of standing pillars.

Geomagnetic surveys in 2003 revealed at least 20 rings piled together, higgledy-piggledy, under the earth.

he pillars were big—the tallest are 18 feet in height and weigh 16 tons. Swarming over their surfaces was a menagerie of animal bas-reliefs, each in a different style, some roughly rendered, a few as refined and symbolic as Byzantine art.

The circles follow a common design. All are made from limestone pillars shaped like giant spikes or capital T's.

They hadn't yet mastered engineering." Knoll speculated that the pillars may have been propped up, perhaps by wooden posts.

Within minutes of getting there," Schmidt says, he realized that he was looking at a place where scores or even hundreds of people had worked in millennia past.

Puzzle piled upon puzzle as the excavation continued. For reasons yet unknown, the rings at Göbekli Tepe seem to have regularly lost their power, or at least their charm. Every few decades people buried the pillars and put up new stones—a second, smaller ring, inside the first.

he site may have been built, filled in, and built again for centuries.

Bewilderingly, the people at Göbekli Tepe got steadily worse at temple building.

Finally the effort seems to have petered out altogether by 8200 B.C. Göbekli Tepe was all fall and no rise.

subjecting us to pop quizzes, cold calls, and pedagogical tactics that during an in-the-flesh seminar would have taken precious minutes of class time to arrange.

felt decidedly unlike a normal classroom. For one thing, it was exhausting: a continuous period of forced engagement, with no relief in the form of time when my attention could flag

One educational psychologist, Ludy Benjamin, likens lectures to Velveeta cheese—something lots of people consume but no one considers either delicious or nourishing.)

adically remake one of the most sclerotic sectors of the U.S. economy, one so shielded from the need for improvement that its biggest innovation in the past 30 years has been to double its costs and hire more administrators at higher salaries.

past half millennium, the technology of learning has hardly budge

Lectures are banned

attending class on Apple laptops

Lectures, Kosslyn says, are cost-effective but pedagogically unsound. “A great way to teach, but a terrible way to learn.”

Minerva boast is that it will strip the university experience down to the aspects that are shown to contribute directly to student learning. Lectures, gone. Tenure, gone. Gothic architecture, football, ivy crawling up the walls—gone, gone, gone.

“Your cash cow is the lecture, and the lecture is over,” he told a gathering of deans. “The lecture model ... will be obliterated.”

when you have a noncurated academic experience, you effectively don’t get educated.

Liberal-arts education is about developing the intellectual capacity of the individual, and learning to be a productive member of society. And you cannot do that without a curriculum.”

“The freshman year [as taught at traditional schools] should not exist,” Nelson says, suggesting that MOOCs can teach the basics. “Do your freshman year at home.”) Instead, Minerva’s first-year classes are designed to inculcate what Nelson calls “habits of mind” and “foundational concepts,” which are the basis for all sound systematic thought. In a science class, for example, students should develop a deep understanding of the need for controlled experiments. In a humanities class, they need to learn the classical techniques of rhetoric and develop basic persuasive skills. The curriculum then builds from that foundation.

What, he asks, does it mean to be educated?

methods will be tested against scientifically determined best practices

Subsidies, Nelson says, encourage universities to enroll even students who aren’t likely to thrive, and to raise tuition, since federal money is pegged to costs.

We have numerous sound, reproducible experiments that tell us how people learn, and what teachers can do to improve learning.” Some of the studies are ancient, by the standards of scientific research—and yet their lessons are almost wholly ignored.

memory of material is enhanced by “deep” cognitive tasks

he found the man’s view of education, in a word, faith-based

ask a student to explain a concept she has been studying, the very act of articulating it seems to lodge it in her memory. Forcing students to guess the answer to a problem, and to discuss their answers in small groups, seems to make them understand the problem better—even if they guess wrong.

e traditional concept of “cognitive styles”—visual versus aural learners, those who learn by doing versus those who learn by studying—is muddled and wrong.

Professors are able to sort students instantly, and by many metrics, for small-group work—

a pop quiz at the beginning of a class and (if the students are warned in advance) another one at a random moment later in the class greatly increases the durability of what is learned.

he could have alerted colleagues to best practices, but they most likely would have ignored them. “The classroom time is theirs, and it is sacrosanct,

I couldn’t wait for Minerva’s wrecking ball to demolish the ivory tower.

The MOOCs will eventually make lectures obsolete.”

Minerva’s model, Nelson says, will flourish in part because it will exploit free online content, rather than trying to compete with it, as traditional universities do.

The MOOCs will eventually make lectures obsolete.”

certain functions of universities have simply become less relevant as information has become more ubiquitous

Minerva challenges the field to return to first principles.

MOOCs will continue to get better, until eventually no one will pay Duke or Johns Hopkins for the possibility of a good lecture, when Coursera offers a reliably great one, with hundreds of thousands of five-star ratings, for free.

It took deep concentration,” he said. “It’s not some lecture class where you can just click ‘record’ on your tape.”

part of the process of education happens not just through good pedagogy but by having students in places where they see the scholars working and plying their trades.”

“hydraulic metaphor” of education—the idea that the main task of education is to increase the flow of knowledge into the student—an “old fallacy.”

I remembered what I was like as a teenager headed off to college, so ignorant of what college was and what it could be, and so reliant on the college itself to provide what I’d need in order to get a good education.

it is designed to convey not just information, as most MOOCs seem to, but whole mental tool kits that help students become morethoughtful citizens.

for all the high-minded talk of liberal education— of lighting fires and raising thoughtful citizens—is really just a credential, or an entry point to an old-boys network that gets you your first job and your first lunch with the machers at your alumni club.

professors and students increasingly separated geographically, mediated through technology that alters the nature of the student-teacher relationship

The idea that college will in two decades look exactly as it does today increasingly sounds like the forlorn, fingers-crossed hope of a higher-education dinosaur that retirement comes before extinction.

Clark started an online fundraiser to pay for bikes. He raised more than $10,000, and neighbors donated dozens of bikes and helmets for the rides.

She couldn’t be sure whether her kids were uninterested or whether they lacked the necessary pens, paper and crayons at home.

He decided he would take his students on socially distanced bike rides across the city. “It was a leap of faith. I got extremely nervous. I was trying to find a way to connect with kids,” Clark said.

her young students are musical detectives, in search of learning. She teaches most grade levels and the school chorus.

t he’s found other ways to keep his students engaged and cycling the city. He invited students to a weekly entrepreneurship class for which they rode their bikes uptown from Dunbar to the gym where Clark works, Sweat DC. The students met with the owner of the gym and the owners of a nearby bar, Hook Hall, and the bagel shop Call Your Mother Deli to learn what it takes to run a business.

She wanted them to create their own composition, their own snowy-day song.

When Clark wanted to teach them about resilience, he took them through the hilly streets of Georgetown.

In lessons for older students, some days there were makeshift drums involved or recorders that students had taken home.

she was able to use the treehouse as a key part of her lessons.

She lugged a bookshelf, desk and heater into the 5-by-7-foot space, and ran an Ethernet cable from the house so she’d have Internet.

before climbing into what passes for her classroom in 2020: her daughters’ decade-old treehouse.

So as one class studied architecture this fall, Daney, 54, encouraged them to walk in their neighborhood to take photos of houses of different styles: ranch, colonial, Victorian.

nd he stuck with his usual method of helping students learn about the design process, asking them to prepare a meal. They started with ideas and research, made a plan, carried it out and evaluated it. The result: soups and pastas and pastries.

Kids need connection, he said. “I think they’re starving for conversation,” including with adults.

In fifth grade, students are expected to learn how to add, subtract, multiply and divide with whole numbers, decimals and fractions. Through a computer application the students have, they can program the robot to move a certain distance, stop, maybe even turn.

With learning all-virtual, he packs a big Ziploc bag — for each student, each quarter — with things like fishing line, foam board, pipecleaners, magnets, Popsicle sticks and rubber bands. Whatever they will need for their projects.

And a lot of the math is a little sneaky. They think they are trying to get the robot to move, when they are actually measuring the angles to get it to move.”  

Others complete their math problems directly on the computer, which can lead to some troubles as they try to show their work.

When Kristin Gavaza interviewed for the music teacher position at Dorothy I. Height Elementary in the summer, she told the principal she had some ideas for how to create a festive concert while students were scattered and learning from home.

The path forward is to learn more about our vulnerabilities and design around them. To do that, we have to clarify our purpose. In education, learning is the focus, and we know that multitasking is not helpful. So it’s up to us to actively choose unitasking.

A moment of boredom is an opportunity for new thinking.

Research shows that when people watch online educational videos, they watch for six minutes,

ake class notes by hand.

he saw that students taking notes with computers suffered from more than inattention.

"They were trying to establish transcripts of the class."

tudents in online classes do better when they include face-to-face encounters.

f you ask people where their love for learning comes from, they usually talk about an inspiring teacher. The most powerful learning takes place in relationship.

But for all its flaws, the lecture has a lot going for it. It is a place where students come together, on good days and bad, and form a small community. As in any live performance, anything can happen.

They learn from speaking and from listening.

Geometry

Thinking Skills

Fractions

Problem Solving

STEAM