At the Center for Transformative Teaching and Learning, we often say that there is only one, indisputable educational truth: Every day, every student will bring their brain to every class. As schools in the United States and abroad transition to synchronous and asynchronous distance learning, this indisputable truth will remain the same. But equally important to think about is the adult learning brain and the mindset we bring to distance learning.
This page will be updated weekly with resources for teachers, school leaders, and parents as they navigate the challenges of distance learning.
New EdTech resource from The CTTL
The Science of Learning Guide to Education Technology was designed to help teachers use education technology in the most effective way possible. It does this by mapping EdTech tools onto the most promising research in how the student brain learns, works, changes, and thrives. Click here to download the Middle and High School guide, and click here to download the Elementary School edition.
Balancing Stress as a Strategy for Learning Achievement in 2021
Somehow, knowing others have found a pathway of healing and resilience after disaster gives me the energy I need to rise out of these current circumstances and forge forward with our students in my wake, carried on by the force of my will and a toolkit of good evidence-based strategies.
Five MBE Insights for Teaching in a Complex New Year
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?
Parent Tips: Talking About Grades with Students
Help your child see that they are on a team with you and their teachers, and together, you are on a mission to figure out what their learning success strategies are.
Your Checklist for Virtual Project-Based Learning
Projects are still a good way to motivate students during challenging circumstances, but we need to take care so that learning actually takes place. How can we use what we know about the science of learning to design projects that truly work?
The Science of Keeping Kids Engaged—Even From Home
Motivating students with carrots and sticks—through endless, demoralizing cycles of high-stakes testing and assessment—is not getting us the deep learning and love of learning we desire. Fortunately there is a science of motivation, and we need to design it into the very fiber of our virtual courses.
How to Align Your LMS With the Science of Learning
The demands of distance learning will make your Learning Management System (LMS) more important than ever this year. Have you thought about how to align your tech with the best research on how students learn?
Parent Tips: Supporting Learning Doesn’t Mean Giving Answers
When parents provide answers or too many hints via leading questions, it does not help your child achieve the primary goal: learning how to think and learn.
Look Behind You! Parent tips for helping your child use what they already have to build quality learning
Learning involves making all that content and all those skills covered during the school year stick in the brain. Now is a great time to help your child make it stick, and they already have what they need to begin doing that in their backpack.
A magic potion to improve learning?
There is no magic potion to help all students all the time, but there is something that comes pretty close. And it is utterly doable, even in distance learning times, and for the full range of learners…
The CTTL’s “Back to School” Top Ten
We begin each year by trying to get to know each child and helping them believe that our classroom is a place where they belong and can thrive. But once you have got that going, then what? Here is our Back to School Top Ten.
Our Elementary EdTech Guide is Here
Our EdTech guides were not created to drive a technology-first agenda. We do not imagine a future where EdTeach replaces classroom teachers. Rather, the guides were created to help us find the right EdTech tool for the job when an EdTech tool might be the best tool to use.
Tools to Help Students Learn
Many parents around the world are suddenly finding themselves home-school teachers to varying degrees. How can we help all these people choose effective, efficient tools?
“Choose Wisely”: Rethinking How We Think About Teaching and Learning with Technology
Like Indiana Jones in his search for the Holy Grail, we all have been looking for the right hardware and software for both our current and future school experiences. We’ll show you how to do it in this blog, and also in our newest professional development resource for teachers.
Parent Tips: Final Exams and Projects
Summer is not far off, but due dates for final exams and projects are closer. Here are some study strategies and tips you can use to help your child prepare for these assessments and assignments during distance learning.
Teacher Tips: Final Exams and Projects
How will you summatively assess your students’ ability to meet the learning objectives you have set for the year? Whether you are planning some kind of final exam or some kind of project, we have some research-informed strategies to help your students.
Homework in a work-from-home world
We still need to guide instruction, even though this is now harder. The role homework plays will depend on our ability to guide instruction. Here is The CTTL’s ultimate guide to adapting your homework plans to asynchronous and synchronous teaching.
Tending to Social & Emotional Well-being from a Distance: Part Two
I’ve been reminding myself that we just built our planes while flying them, and getting the whole fleet airborne is an incredible achievement; on some days, that alone is good enough. And the rest of the time, I’m wondering how I might steer my seventh-grade Life Science plane somewhere even more interesting, now that we’re up here.
Executive Functioning and Distance Learning
Whether executive functioning was on your radar already or not, don’t panic. New struggles with executive functioning are a normal and reasonable response to what has happened to school in the last month. And there are strategies to help.
Six Elements at the Core of Great (Online) Teaching (Part Two)
In part two of the blog series, Dr. Kelleher translates three more of Carl Hendrick’s six elements of effective classroom teaching and explains how they can be implemented in a virtual learning environment.
Watch: Folio Town Hall with Glenn on Using Educational Neuroscience to Support Remote Leadership and Learning
Watch this Folio Town Hall with Glenn to learn how teachers can use educational neuroscience research on mindsets and metacognition to support remote leadership and learning.
How the late Kenny Rogers will help your child learn
It turns out that the most important factor for being a successful student is using the right strategy at the right time. How can we help our children do this while navigating the challenges of distance learning?
Six Elements at the Core of Great (Online) Teaching
Yes, we are all teaching and learning online now, but the core of what we do should be the same because the core is based on how students learn best. We are reskinning teaching, not reinventing it.
Tending to Social & Emotional Well-being from a Distance
Here are five ways educators can tend to social and emotional wellbeing from a distance – for ourselves, our colleagues, and our students.
Applying Promising MBE Research to Learning from a Distance
Teaching has suddenly shifted — how can insights from research help us?
Parent Tips: How to end the year
Great growth is possible right now, precisely because it is happening in the face of stress. Here are our tips for parents as they help their children complete an extraordinary school year.