Instead of thinking about what we are not teaching, let’s take this opportunity to focus on what is truly important in our subjects and endeavor to teach it in ways that make it durable, usable and flexible in the minds of our students.
Practicing kindness not only makes us feel good, it helps children strengthen peer relationships, increases prosocial behaviors, happiness, self-esteem, gratitude, and well-being.
When emphasis is given to the process and not the end product, “artists” and novices alike can harness the language of visual art as a tool for rigorous inquiry. Drawing can help us think.
The act of physically writing something may be the best way for most students both to remember their assignments and improve their executive functioning skills.
When we invite students to engage with a text through creative writing, we boost the potential for the characters and stories to be embedded in a student's long-term memory.
It is crucial to re-work our school day to create an environment in which students can sleep well and finish the race for sleep.
Having a classroom built on trusting relationships that accepted that failure could be a part of learning led all of us to be more vulnerable and to take more risks. And this, in turn, led me to feel more comfortable letting go of more control to add more joy into the classroom.
Honing metacognitive skills empowers students with self-knowledge that they can apply beyond classroom walls. But how can teachers help students gain important but under-appreciated set of skills? What does metacognition in action look like?
It turns out, perhaps the most compelling data to support spacing and interleaving is not quantitative at all. Instead, it is the qualitative feedback from students and teachers.
Memory, like all brain functions, is not isolated to one region of the brain—and without it, learning does not happen. What follows is how we have translated research on memory to our respective disciplines, science and history.