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- trauma informed training for teachers on Does a Teacher’s Enthusiasm Improve Learning?
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Yearly Archives: 2022
An Amazingly Simple Way to Help Struggling Students (with Potential Controversy)
Imagine that you work at a school where these students consistently struggle compared to those students. As teachers and school leaders, you’d like to help these students do better than they currently do; maybe do as well as those students. (Lower down in the post,
The Power of Us by Dominic Packer and Jay Van Bavel
The broad use of social media, internet search engines, personalized news feeds, and other emerging information technologies have influenced the ways we have been constructing our identities. This has only accelerated during the ongoing pandemic as many of our social
“It’s Good for the Brain!”: The Perils of Pollution, the Benefits of Blueberries
When I talk with teachers about psychology and neuroscience research, I frequently get a question in this shape: “I’ve heard that X is really good for the brain. Is that really true?” In this sentence, X might be blueberries. It might
Getting the Order Just Right: When to “Generate,” When to “Retrieve”?
When teachers get advice from psychology and neuroscience, we start by getting individual bits of guidance. For instance… … mindful meditation reduces stress, or … growth mindset strategies (done the right way) can produce modest benefits, or … cell phones
The Bruce Willis Method: Catching Up Post-Covid
In the third Die Hard movie, Brue Willis and his unexpected partner Samuel L. Jackson need to get to Wall Street a hurry. They commandeer a cab. An experienced cab driver, Jackson suggests taking 9th Avenue south, but Willis insists on
Does a Teacher’s Enthusiasm Improve Learning?
Sometimes research confirms our prior beliefs. Sometimes it contradicts those beliefs. And sometimes, research adds nuance and insight to overly-broad generalizations. Here’s the story: Benefits of Enthusiasm It seems too obvious to say that a teacher’s enthusiasm benefits learning. OF COURSE
When Analogies Go Wrong: The Benefits of Stress?
An amazing discovery becomes an inspiring analogy: Researchers at BioSphere 2 noticed a bizarre series of events: their trees kept collapsing under their own weight. Why on earth would trees collapse? It doesn’t happen outside the BioSphere; so why would
Failure to Disrupt by Justin Reich
Failure to Disrupt: Why Technology Alone Can’t Transform Education is a well-written critical synthesis of overzealous claims and unrealistic attempts to revolutionize education through technology. Its author, Justin Reich, is an Assistant Professor in the Comparative Media Studies department at
Handwritten Notes or Laptop Notes: A Skeptic Converted?
Here’s a practical question: should our students take notes by hand, or on laptops? If we were confident that one strategy or the other produced more learning – factual learning, conceptual learning, ENDURING learning – then we could give our
Too Good to Be True? “Even Short Nature Walks Improve Cognition”?
Good news makes me nervous. More precisely: if I want to believe a research finding, I become very suspicious of it. After all: it’s easy to fool me when I want to be fooled. Specifically: I’m an outdoors guy. I’ve worked at