Practicing kindness not only makes us feel good, it helps children strengthen peer relationships, increases prosocial behaviors, happiness, self-esteem, gratitude, and well-being.
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.
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.
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.
Changing a schedule is a large scale effort. What was I doing on a smaller scale in my physics class to combine rigor and well-being, strategies that could be done by any teacher without asking permission?