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- Andrew Watson on The Hidden Lives of Learners
- Andrew Watson on Test Anxiety: How and When Does It Harm Students?
- Elizabeth Lutsky on Test Anxiety: How and When Does It Harm Students?
- Jack D Cerva on Warning: Misguided Neuroscience Ahead
- Jennifer Kresge on The Hidden Lives of Learners
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Tag Archives: classroom advice
The Hidden Lives of Learners
Many times over the last several years, I’ve heard enthusiastic reviews of a seemingly-magical book called The Hidden Lives of Learners, by Graham Nuthall. Here’s the magic: Nuthall’s frankly astonishing research method. Working in New Zealand classrooms in the 1980s, he
The Most Important 5 Minutes in Class: The Primacy/Recency Effect
As we put our lesson plans together, we teachers want to know: are some minutes more valuable than others? That is: Do students remember most at the 10-minute mark of the lesson, because they’re mentally revved up? Or, perhaps they
“No Cameras Allowed:” Does Taking Pictures During Lectures Benefit Learning?
Should students use cameras to take pictures of boardwork? My high school students know my fierce anti-cell-phone policy. Nonetheless, they do occasionally ask if they may take a quick picture. (I typically say yes, and then check to be sure
How Students (Think They) Learn: The Plusses and Minuses of “Interleaving”
As the school year begins, teachers want to know: can mind/brain research give us strategies to foster learning? We might also wonder: what will our students think of those strategies? It seems plausible — even likely — that students will
The Best Book on Cognitive Load Theory: Ollie Lovell to the Rescue
Teaching ought to be easy. After all, we have a functionally infinite amount of long-term memory. You don’t have to forget one thing to learn another thing — really. So: I should be able to shovel information and skills into
Posted in Book Reviews, L&B Blog
Tagged classroom advice, cognitive load theory, working memory
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Do Classroom Decorations Distract Students? A Story in 4 Parts… [Reposted]
As we prepare for the upcoming school year, how should we think about decorating our classrooms? Can research give us any pointers? This story, initially posted in March of 2022, paints a helpfully rich research picture. Teacher training programs often
The Best Teaching Advice We’ve Got
I’m on my annual vacation during this month, so I’ll be posting some articles that got attention during the last year. This post, initially from December of 2021, looks at a proposed different way to “put all the research pieces
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,
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
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