If You Give a Kid a Real-World Problem If you want to engage students, offer them a real-world problem to solve! (See my blog: “If You Give a Kid a Real-World Problem.”) A compelling problem will drive them into the curriculum; they’ll have a “felt need” to learn! And in our technologically advanced world, they […]
Let’s think differently about how schools can serve students. . . . Learning and Schools Children love to learn! They learn all the time! Schools, however, are frustrated by declining test scores that indicate students are not learning from teachers’ lessons. Sadly, the result is a leaning into more whole-class instruction, more explicit (but not necessarily […]
When information lives online, application must live in the mind. That single reality changes everything about school. For centuries, teachers have been seen as repositories of information, passing along the information that students need to know. Teachers deliver lessons, students absorb content, and success often means recall. In the past, without school, you had little […]
What does engagement sound like? Allowing students to have a say in their work is not enough to build engagement. Adam Fletcher writes a great blog on engagement, including this entry: voice and engagement are not the same. In the Learner-Active, Technology-Infused Classroom (described in my books, Students Taking Charge), engagement refers to the state […]
If you owned an auto factory and the conveyor belt kept delivering cars that had no doors, or had faulty headlights, would you run the factory for a few more hours a day? Of course not! You’d redesign the system to address the root cause. When students attend school all day long and are not […]