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The authentic publication of student work should be a part of EVERY SINGLE UNIT OF STUDY. If an educator can’t figure out a way to help students publish anything in a unit of study they need to either 1) Rethink the unit or 2) Rethink the assessment.

The first comment made by a student was that students don't like, and will become unmotivated to do work, when a teacher doesn't have a plan, is unprepared, and "wings it" each day for lessons.

they like it when a teacher posts the homework ahead of time so that they can start it early if need be.

they absolutely hate when teachers don't get work or tests graded and back to the students in a timely fashion.

motivation and control. One seems to need the other, apparently. Keep the students motivated and you are a great teacher in control of the learning process. But we miss the point. Motivation has a short-term effect. New things will be old again. If we equal motivation with learning we will cling too much to it and direct our best efforts (and school budget) to gaining back control. A useless cycle that can lead us to consider extremely double-edged ideas like paying students to keep them learning.

We need autonomous, self-motivated students in love with the process of how humanity has learnt.

There is a underlying idea in the framing of our questions that needs unlearning. The belief that there are "levels", layers of complexity, hierarchies that we can detect and... well, control. But wait! Isn't that the very old way we want to truly change with new technologies?

Great teachers, he concluded, constantly reevaluate what they are doing. Superstar teachers had four other tendencies in common: they avidly recruited students and their families into the process; they maintained focus, ensuring that everything they did contributed to student learning; they planned exhaustively and purposefully—for the next day or the year ahead—by working backward from the desired outcome; and they worked relentlessly, refusing to surrender to the combined menaces of poverty, bureaucracy, and budgetary shortfalls.

one way that great teachers ensure that kids are learning is to frequently check for understanding: Are the kids—all of the kids—following what you are saying? Asking “Does anyone have any questions?” does not work, and it’s a classic rookie mistake. Students are not always the best judges of their own learning. They might understand a line read aloud from a Shakespeare play, but have no idea what happened in the last act.

Mr. Taylor follows a very basic lesson plan often referred to by educators as “I do, we do, you do.” He does a problem on the board. Then the whole class does another one the same way. Then all the kids do a problem on their own.

Critical thinking is a set of values and cognitive strategies employed to rationally evaluate information for its potential usefulness and accuracy. In this regard, critical thinking covers three fields; Personal values embracing logic, reasoning, objectivity and internal consistency of information Skills and cognitive approaches that allow the individual to search for and evaluate different information sources An appreciation of the relationship between the application of accurate information in decision making and the probability of a predictable outcome

In an age of diverse media, especially with regards to the internet, information sources present confusing options. Not all information is equal. Teaching people to understand the context and cues associated with good information gives them the ability to make better informed decisions that will have the best chance of leading to those outcomes they wish for.

This places critical thinking at odds with philosophies that elevate some bodies of knowledge to being dogmatic and beyond question.

If you come across a question you can't answer, be honest. Don't bluff or portray yourself as an expert when you aren't. Instead model the collaborative skills you've developed and work together with the student to solve problems.

By sharing power you enhance the learning community. 

Here are some problem solving tips.

Children must have some control over the direction of their learning; Children must be able to learn through experiences of touching, moving, listening, seeing, and hearing; Children have a relationship with other children and with material items in the world that children must be allowed to explore and Children must have endless ways and opportunities to express themselves.

In the Reggio approach, the teacher is considered a co-learner and collaborator with the child and not just an instructor.

Teacher autonomy is evident in the absence of teacher manuals, curriculum guides, or achievement tests

there may be levels of web learning maturation at work here: Childhood: people who are very new to using the web for learning tend to accept what is given to them, because they don’t really know what the options are. When online learning with the LMS was new, most people were in this category. Adulthood: people who use the web a great deal and in varied ways tend to do better in online classes, and assess the worth of the LMS (or any tool) based on how well it works for the course. Adolescence: in between are the adolescents. They know just enough to be dangerous. They have enough experience to want convenience and not enough to understand the larger issues of pedagogy, including the restrictiveness of an LMS on what the instructor wants to do. They can drive but have no sense of how traffic works.

Why it’s important to deal now with the “teen angst” of web-adolescence: 1. Not customizing the LMS to suit your pedagogy implies that we all teach the same way. If we all teach the same way, then a computer can do our work instead. (I’ve been reading Daniel Pink’s A Whole New Mind – he’s pretty clear that if a computer can do your job, eventually it will.) 2. Instructors should use the tools that best create the environment they want, and that increasingly means web applications that require multiple log-ins. Students should get accustomed to using separate tools for separate tasks, just like in the real world. 3. Acknowledging the teen view means taking it seriously, but it doesn’t mean developing policy around it. Just as parents try to mitigate the excesses of the teen diet and habits, we owe students our wisdom in creating the learning experience that is most appropriate. (Oh dear, I’m starting to sound like Edmund Burke again.)

I'm a success when I do something that I myself can truly understand

the most essential prerequisite to understanding is to be able to admit when you don't understand something