Tag: teachers

  • Friday News Roundup

    It’s Friday. Time for the News Roundup. What Happens When a 48K-Student District Commits to the “Science of Learning” (The 74) This is a head scratcher. Why more school districts don’t commit to teaching learning science to their teachers is perplexing. One must guess school districts think that learning science is covered in a teacher’s…

  • A Sign of an Ineffective System

    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…

  • A Different Way At Looking At Things

    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…

  • Playing and Learning in the Streets

    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…

  • A Lesson From a Soccer Gambler

    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…

  • Friday News Roundup

    It’s time for the Friday News Roundup! State Officials and Educators Brace for Another Tough Budget year as the School Year Starts (Vermont Public) Vermont, like other states, continues to struggle with their school budgets. Vermont Public reports that, “Last year was a bad year for school budgets. And this year, things could be just…

  • The Politics of Public Education

    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…

  • Maybe the Shift is Happening

    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…

  • The Art of Positive Feedback

    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…

  • Be Careful What You Ignore

    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,…