Category: Learnings

A sign that our current K-12 system is in trouble is the fact that 1 million students who were enrolled in that system before the pandemic have disappeared. Oh, they’re still alive and kicking, but they aren’t seated in the schools they were in for the 2019-2020 school year. It’s difficult to know if those…

Another day. Another story about a school closure. This one comes from Vermont and was covered by Vermont Digger. This story begins: “On a cold, gray Saturday in March, about a third of all the people living in Windham [Vermont] crammed into the town’s more than 220-year-old white clapboard meetinghouse. One item in particular had…

Play has always been under-rated when it comes to learning, especially in this country. In the U.S., it seems like our children are either playing or learning. Surely, they can’t be doing both! The reality is that, as many countries around the world already realize, children learn deeply during play. The problem today is that…

After a week or so, I’m back. Today, let’s discuss outcome bias and its impact on learning, especially in today’s traditional K-12 system. Outcome bias is the assumption that good results are always the consequence of good decisions and superior performance. Rasmus Ankersen, author, speaker, director of football at Southampton and president of the Turkish…

Has anyone noticed there is a presidential election going on? But even though the candidates have debated the economy, immigration, tariffs, and – Haitian-eating dogs, public education has been largely left on the sidelines this election season. But a recent PDK International poll suggests America has public education on its mind, even though Donald Trump…

Good news! According to a recent article posted by Tom Vander Ark, CEO of Getting Smart, there is a shift happening between our traditional K-12 school system and newer, more innovative learning organizations. Vander Ark writes, “After a two-year investigation including hundreds of interviews, Kim Smith and Jen Holleran published a landscape of innovation in…

Impactful learning depends on constructive feedback, both positive and negative. Recently, Arthur C. Brooks, a contributor to The Atlantic and a Harvard professor, wrote an article addressing positive feedback titled “A Compliment That Really Means Something.” Brooks writes, “…The quality of our relationships, in fact, depends on the ratio of praise to criticism that is…

Last week I promised to stop writing about school cellphone controversy for the rest of the year (even though I included a cellphone story in ABPTL’s latest Friday News Roundup). So I’m not going to write about cellphones. But I am going to write about artificial intelligence. Recently, Edutopia posted a story about Chanea Bond,…

There are schools that need to be closed. They are toxic places when it comes to making kids smarter and stronger, especially black, brown, and poor kids. When I started teaching in 1984 in the Houston public school system, there were at least 20-25 schools, elementary and secondary, in need of closing. Those schools weren’t…

Kids can’t read. Kids can’t do math. Neighborhood schools are closing. Black, brown, and poor learners are seriously behind their white counterparts when it comes to achievement. And the most important topic discussed in our K-12 world this school year – so far – is whether kids will be allowed to access cell phones in…