Group items tagged

""Everyone on this planet is hard-wired to learn, extremely, all the time. The first advice I give to any learner today is: You must take control over your own learning. The good news is, it's easier today than it's ever been." As a group, our extreme learners did not fit conventional definitions of "best and brightest," as defined by high GPAs or test scores. Instead, they were opportunistic in finding places and people to learn with, using not only formal schooling but also informal learning centers, such as maker spaces and science centers. They engaged in authentic, experiential, project-based learning. These extreme learners shared five habits, which can prove instructive as we look to prepare students for an unpredictable future:"

"The key to getting kids to read deeply in any format is to have them engage with the text in meaningful ways. In the digital space, that means disrupting a pattern of skipping around, writing short chats and getting lost down the rabbit hole of the internet. It means teaching kids ways to break down a complex text, find key ideas, organize them and defend them. Practicing those skills in class can be time-consuming, but it also builds good digital reading habits that hopefully become second nature. "The goal in almost all the strategies is to slow the kids down so they are focusing on this text," Hess said. "Number two is to engage them in an active way with the text, and number three you want to encourage oral discourse. And number four you want them to do some reflection." Those steps should sound familiar to teachers because they are important for any kind of reading for comprehension and analysis. The trick for teachers is to learn how to transfer these processes into the digital space and push them even further."

"As they progress through middle and high school, students are expected to take on increasing responsibility for their learning, with more out-of-class assignments that require independent research, reading for understanding, and wider application of classroom lessons. Our new book, Teaching Students to Drive Their Brains: Metacognitive Strategies, Activities, and Lesson Ideas, suggests that learning and applying strategies to "explain it to your brain" can help students improve their study habits. We note some of those strategies here."

"Teachers self-promote. In that, we're no different than everyone else: proudly framing our breakthroughs, hiding our blunders in locked drawers, forever perfecting our oral résumés. This isn't all bad. My colleagues probably have more to learn from my good habits (like the way I use pair work) than my bad ones (like my sloppy system of homework corrections), so I might as well share what's useful. In an often-frustrating profession, we're nourished by tales of triumph. A little positivity is healthy. But sometimes, the classrooms we describe bear little resemblance to the classrooms where we actually teach, and that gap serves no one. Any honest discussion between teachers must begin with the understanding that each of us mingles the good with the bad. One student may experience the epiphany of a lifetime, while her neighbor drifts quietly off to sleep. In the classroom, it's never pure gold or pure tin; we're all muddled alloys. I taught once alongside a first-year teacher, Lauren, who didn't grasp this. As a result, she compared herself unfavorably to everyone else. Every Friday, when we adjourned to the bar down the street, she'd decry her own flaws, meticulously documenting her mistakes for us, castigating herself to no end. The kids liked her. The teachers liked her. From what I'd seen, she taught as well as any first-year could. But she saw her own shortcomings too vividly and couldn't help reporting them to anyone who'd listen. She was fired three months into the year. You talk enough dirt about yourself and people will start to believe it. Omission is the nature of storytelling; describing a complex space-like a classroom-requires a certain amount of simplification. Most of us prefer to leave out the failures, the mishaps, the wrong turns. Some, perhaps as a defensive posture, do the opposite: Instead of overlooking their flaws and miscues, they dwell on them, as Lauren did. The result is that two classes, equally well taugh

" It seems, we are in the dark about engaging students in the homework process.  Specifically, what contributes to homework resistance?  How can we better support students in not only completing, but learning (gasp) from assigned homework? To answer these questions, I examined a number of research articles.  I focused on interviews/surveys with classrooms that struggled with homework completion (to identify triggers).  Also, I used data from classrooms with high homework achievement (to identify habits from the homework pros).   Here are 6 research-backed reasons for why students resist homework- plus tips to help overcome them."

In a connected world, information comes at us constantly, whether we choose it or not, and we must each figure out a way to navigate it. Not for a school assignment, but for our real lives. So we've proposed an experiment. We're running a challenge that invites students to think deeply about their own relationships with news, and devise personal "news diets" that work for them. It runs from Nov. 2 to Dec. 22, 2017, and any teenager anywhere in the world can participate. The challenge has three steps: 1. Do a personal "news audit" to observe the role of news in their lives right now. 2. Experiment with their "news diets" in some way to find new sources that address any lacks they found. 3. Write a short essay or produce a short video that reflects on the process and what they learned. What did they discover about their news habits before and after they did the challenge - and what can they say about the role of news in their lives in general?

Some interesting ideas on how to handle late work and other issues involving grades.

Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times The New York Times recently noted that "tens of billions of tax dollars have been spent on subsidizing coastal reconstruction in the aftermath of storms." Critics of this spending say that it props up a a costly and deadly habit: rebuilding in places that are becoming uninhabitable.

A report out of Harvard's Graduate School of Education about the damaging impact of college admission requirements and the ways they can change to "inspire concern for others."