Towards a more just, sustainable, and healthy planet
This blog first appeared on Corwin Connect. Education researcher John Hattie’s ground-breaking research about the factors that influence student achievement gives us much to think about in terms of our habits and practices. It helps us to prioritize initiatives, counteract negative influences, and get rid of practices – such as retaining students – that show little evidence… Continue reading Supercharge Your Classroom in 5 Steps
This blog first appeared on Share My Lesson. Bonus: If you’re interested in exploring this topic further, sign up for Julie Stern’s free webinar, Teaching Big Ideas for Real-World Transfer of Learning. Educators today seem to be faced with a choice: continue teaching centuries-old ways of organizing the world through traditional disciplines such as mathematics and… Continue reading How Do We Prepare Students for a Complex World?
In an increasingly complicated world, it is essential that we honor the research-rich past and harness children’s natural curiosity as we look to the future. How do we move beyond surface learning to reach deeper comprehension? What strategies help students make connections between ideas and use their learning to unlock new situations? This webinar shares… Continue reading Teaching for Transfer
Today's post was written by a 2015 Ed2Save Fellow, Jessie Mouw. Her Fellow's Project is to promote and redefine the importance of failure as a natural and important part of the learning process. Her words follow: The Case for Failure-Friendly Schools Failure has become the subject of much consideration in roughly the last decade, as… Continue reading Should we teach students to embrace failure?
Differentiation is a word that is used often in education -- but I worry there is a lack of consensus on what it means, it's purpose and what it looks like in the classroom. Here is an attempt to distill the essential elements down to four buckets or key areas: Expectations and attitudes about students, getting… Continue reading What does differentiation look like in the classroom?
First, we must acknowledge three things about assessments: We are not experts on testing, especially about when and how to assign scores or grades The whole enterprise is fraught with questions of legitimacy and fairness It is such an enormous part of formal schooling The three of us dream of a teaching and learning setting… Continue reading Formative Assessments: It’s about growth and behavior change!
Teacher feedback on student work can be a powerful tool to dramatically improve student learning BUT the quality must be good or it can actually have negative effects on student growth. Many researchers and authors give attention to this significant topic. We like Susan Brookhart’s definition and guidance the best. In her book, How to… Continue reading The Power of Effective Feedback
Lately, and rightly so, there seems to be a lot of buzz around differentiation, personalized learning, personalization, individualization... and many folks are trying to distinguish among them. The MAJOR distinction, it seems, is whether or not the goals of students remain the same for all students. Although we at Ed to Save the World hope for… Continue reading What does differentiation really mean?
Assessing for deep understanding and higher order thinking is not easy. It's oh-so-much easier to assess for factual recall. But it's worth doing. Combining the work of Dr. Erickson and Dr. Lanning on concept-based curriculum and instruction with the work of Dr. Susan Brookhart on assessment, we've been able to come up with some decent examples of… Continue reading Assessing Conceptual Understanding
Earlier this month, art students at Burlington High School in Massachusetts were asked to create pieces that responded to this question: "How do you FEEL about standardized tests?" Their teacher, Ms. Chang, published some of their pieces on her class website, here. Check out two of the pieces below. The first is by Josephine Samarjian and… Continue reading Wellness Wednesday: Are we melting their brains?
