We owe it to our students to use evidence to inform our daily work with them. Use Mind, Brain, and Education Science research as a lens to help you find an area or two to tackle.
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.
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.
The Mind, Brain, and Education (MBE) research-informed principles and whole-child approach that have guided the CTTL’s work up until this point feel simultaneously more important than ever — and not yet enough. It is a time to reflect on the truth of what we already know, and examine where we, as teachers, leaders, and supporters of learning communities, need to do better to create change for equitable learning and school experiences.
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.
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.