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.
In 2021, the challenge of returning to school from winter break feels magnified. So what insights from Mind, Brain, and Education Science can I use to help make this critical point of a unique school year go well?
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.
All students, even high achieving, highly motivated ones, forget huge swathes of what they learned. How can we improve this?
I challenge each educator to remind students that they have the autonomy to voice whatever is on their mind because their perspective is valued and needed.
By releasing myself from being a “sage on the stage” to become a co-creator of educational opportunities with my students, everyone in my classroom is a better teacher and stronger learner.
The Responsive Classroom approach reaches far beyond the old perception of social and emotional curriculums producing “nice” kids in a warm and fuzzy environment. It allows us to build intelligent guidelines for school and to develop classroom practices that are informed by current neuroscience and are relevant to the children of the 21st Century.