Global Educator, Curriculum Developer, and Trainer
Are Americans’ lives getting worse? Or does it just seem that way? One of our core responsibilities as high school teachers is to help our students develop critical thinking skills, learn to question assumptions and challenge “common sense”. It’s something we humans are bad at — as a rule — for all sorts of complex…
Read MoreYesterday in AP Psych, I tried to illustrate the difference between “effortful” and “automatic” processing by asking a student what, if anything, he ate for breakfast. Normally, that’s a pretty easy question. No one has to intentionally encode it. No flashcards required. He looked at me, a little confused, and said, “I’m so tired, I…
Read MoreHow often do you check your smartphone? Every hour? Every five minutes? Multiple times per minute? Stop and think about why. Are you really waiting for an urgent call — say, from a doctor, a family member or your boss? Or are you just hoping there will be something cool or funny there? A bit…
Read MoreIf you’ve ever remodeled your house, you know that nothing goes as planned. Last year, bathroom remodelers taking out old shower tile accidentally cut through a pipe (that was installed the wrong way) and flooded our kitchen, directly below. This year, kitchen remodelers removed old soffits and discovered they were not just decorative — they…
Read MoreThanks to Carol Dweck’s work on the Growth Mindset, we know it matters how we react to student performance. Compliments for “being smart” help foster a fixed mindset and a reluctance to embrace challenge, while shout-outs for “working hard” foster a growth mindset and a desire for challenge. That’s all well and good, but what…
Read MoreCartoon from http://theprocessconsultant.com/ If you’re not a teacher, it’s easy to think a teacher’s job is three things: Design and deliver effective lessons Check students’ understanding through daily work, and Evaluate tests and various sort of papers, like essays and lab reports. But that’s just the easy part. Our job is really about managing ambiguity, trying…
Read MoreIs Khan Academy or Crash Course (or something like it) going to drive public schools out of business? Online competition has already dominated our traditional ways of doing almost everything –planning vacations, looking for jobs, watching TV, playing games, meeting dates, talking to friends, consuming news. Just ask my former colleagues in the newspaper business.…
Read MoreI hate it when a student drops my class. At my high school, the beginning of the year is a revolving door of adds and drops, as students try out different classes and re-evaluate the schedules they selected six months earlier, when they were feeling ambitious. This system has a lot of drawbacks — class…
Read MoreA good friend recently returned to teaching high school, after a long hiatus. Now she’s kind of like Rip Van Winkle, waking up to see how the world around her has changed. The biggest shock so far, she told me, is the idea that due dates don’t matter much anymore. She can’t wrap her head…
Read MorePicture a room packed with 35-40 high school students eager to start working on a project, except you, the teacher, have no idea what the project will be. Will they create pencil cases? T-shirts for school teams? Will they design an app or a bot or an e-book? Or will they make jewelry? Car safety…
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MARTHA RUSH 