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5 Fantastic Ideas for Collaboration Projects

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5 Fantastic Ideas for Collaboration Projects

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5 Fantastic Ideas for Collaboration Projects | Cult of Pedagogy

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These ideas can be adapted for any subject area, along with suggestions for adding criticality and opportunities for student agency to each one.

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Follow a straightforward method that facilitates customization of support for students.

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A 6-Step Plan for Differentiated Instruction

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A 6-Step Plan for Differentiated Instruction

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A 6-Step Plan for Differentiated Instruction

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Middle school teachers can follow a straightforward method that facilitates customization of support for students.

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5 Questions to Ask Yourself About Your Unmotivated Students

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5 Questions to Ask Yourself About Your Unmotivated Students

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Listen to this post as a podcast:

When I ask teachers what their biggest struggles are, one issue comes up on a regular basis: student motivation. You are able to reach many of your students, but others are unreachable. No matter what you try, they have no interest in learning, no interest in doing quality work, and you are out of ideas.

For a long time, I had no solutions; the problem was too complex. I have had my own unmotivated students, and I never had any magic bullets for them. Still, the issue kept coming up from my readers.

So I decided to do some research, to try to find what the most current studies say about what motivates students. This is what I found:

1. Students are more motivated academically when they have a positive relationship with their teacher.

2. Choice is a powerful motivator in most educational contexts.

3. For complex tasks that require creativity and persistence, extrinsic rewards and consequences actually hamper motivation.

4. To stay motivated to persist at any task, students must believe they can improve in that task.

Stopping the Buck: The Teacher's Role in Student Motivation

The research on motivation wasn't hard to find; it seems as if any teacher with an Internet connection and an hour or two should be able to learn everything they need to know about the topic.

So where's the disconnect? If we as a collective group of educators already know what works to motivate students, why are so many students still unmotivated? When I talk with teachers about the problem, I don't hear much about the research.

Instead, we blame technology: "Students are so distracted by their phones."

Or we blame the parents: "Parents just don't want to be bothered" or "They don't want their kids to fail/experience setbacks/take responsibility."

Or we make sweeping generalizations: "Kids today just aren't like they used to be. They act so entitled."

Are we passing the buck? Maybe. It's certainly easier to blame outside forces than it is to make big changes in the way we teach. Unfortunately, even if ALL of the above statements are true, we can't do anything about those things. The only piece we really have control over is what goes on in our own classrooms.

So let's look at our own practice. When we set aside all the outside factors and just focus in on our time with students, how are we doing? How much alignment is there between our own instructional moves and the research on student motivation?

I have put together a list of five questions we can ask ourselves to see if we really are doing everything we could to boost student motivation. To keep me from getting too preachy, I'll do the exercise with you, reflecting on the years when I was a classroom teacher with middle school students.

Okay, let's go.

The Questions

1. How is your relationship with your students, really?

Multiple studies have shown a significant connection between student motivation and the quality of the teacher-student relationship. A good teacher-student relationship provides students with a sense of stability and safety, which sets the stage for more academic risk-taking. So what kind of relationship do you have with your least motivated students? How well do you really know them? Do you have conversations with them about the things they care about? Or have you more or less given up on them?

My response:
At first, I'm thinking I did pretty well in this area. I taught English language arts and my students kept journals, so I got to know them well. But when I think about my less-motivated kids, I'm not so sure I can say the same. The connection I had to Andre, one of my seventh-graders, consisted entirely of me getting him to make up missed work. It was all we talked about: the missing work, why he wasn't turning it in, how important this stuff was for his future. When Andre saw me coming, he probably just saw a looming cloud of nag. We never really talked about the stuff that mattered to him.

How we can do better:
Just becoming more aware of the value of relationships is the most important step. From there, consider one of these resources:

Jim Sturtevant's book, You've Gotta Connect, is full of specific strategies for building stronger bonds with your students. (Episode 9)

Smokey and Elaine Daniels' The Best-Kept Teaching Secret describes how dialogue journals can help us get to know our students better personally and academically.

If you want something faster, take a look at the 2 x 10 strategy, shared by Angela Watson, which has teachers spend two minutes a day for ten days casually chatting with underperforming students.

Remember that relationships between students matter, too. A well-chosen classroom icebreaker can begin building a sense of community in your room.

2. How much choice do your students actually have?

Study after study points to choice as a major factor in motivation. Most of us have probably heard this, but we may not have fully embraced it. After all, providing choice can be messy, with students completing different tasks at different rates, making it hard to be consistent with grading. It can also mean a lot more prep work: If you're going to give students three different options for an assignment, that means you have to prepare all three options ahead of time. Or do you? Isn't that kind of prep work more in line with worksheet-oriented teaching, where students are doing low-level work that was largely prepared by the teacher? If students are engaged in more long-term, authentic, creative projects, it's much easier to provide them with choices, because we aren't constantly trying to provide them with new busywork every day.

My response:
I was pretty good about letting students choose topics for writing assignments, but I also required a lot of seat work as well. I wanted students to do their work at about the same pace, and I knew next to nothing about differentiation. Now I'm thinking about Matt, another one of my unmotivated seventh graders, who was incredibly smart. He sat way low in his chair in the back of the Gifted & Talented language arts class he'd been assigned to, way cooler than all the others, and he gave minimal effort. I used the same nagging approach I'd used with Andre, with minimal success. Now that I know more about differentiation and choice, I realize I could have had a conversation with Matt about letting him work ahead on some things. I could have allowed him, and his classmates, more input on the larger assignments I gave them. If I had given Matt a more active role in his own learning, he might have been more engaged.

How we can do better:
There are lots of ways you can allow more choice in your classroom without having to completely overhaul your way of doing things. Even adding a small amount of choice to what students already have is an improvement. Consider letting them choose:

seating: Could students do some assignments on the floor? In the hall? Or just in different seats?

work groups: Some students thrive in groups, while others do better on their own.

intake mode: If you want a student to read a particular book, and an audio version is available, you could occasionally make that an option.

output mode: For some assignments, it may be possible to have students deliver their response in an audio or video recording, rather than in writing.

timing: If students don't absolutely have to do the same thing at the same time, why not let them choose the order of activities they do?

3. Are you relying heavily on carrots and sticks...or Jolly Ranchers?

Many, many teachers count on rewards ("carrots") and punishments ("sticks") to motivate students. And those who study motivation tell us that extrinsic reinforcement can be motivating if the task is something easy: If you're trying to get students to clean up the classroom quickly, for example, offering class points toward a party can get them to speed up. But for tasks that require creativity and complex thought, extrinsic rewards actually reduce motivation. In your class, how much of your motivational approach is extrinsic? How often do you use grades, treats, privileges or punishments to prod students into doing something they don't really want to do, something they have no real interest in? If extrinsic reinforcement is your primary approach, you may actually be killing off any natural motivation students might have otherwise had.

My response:
I score myself pretty low here. As a teacher, my classroom management was a mess until I learned how to control students with names on the board, extra credit, whole-class rewards for good behavior, and the ever-reliable bag of Jolly Ranchers. I did those things because they worked. But there's a difference between getting kids to do what you want and truly, deeply motivating them.

How we can do better:
Try to catch yourself the next time you're about to tie a challenging activity to a reward or consequence. When introducing a task, try focusing on its inherent interest or value, or how much students are going to learn, rather than on a separate reward or grade. Consider the difference in these two statements:

I'm going to give you a sheet of math problems. The first ten are required, the last two are for extra credit.

I'm going to give you a sheet of math problems. The first ten should be fairly easy, but I want to see how many of you can do the last two-those are the challenge problems. You guys have learned enough that I think you can solve at least one of them, maybe both.

If you have a tendency to go for the first option, you are going for the easy win, the extrinsic reinforcement. If you find that this doesn't do much to motivate your underperforming students, try moving more toward the second option and see if anything changes.

4. Do your words contribute to a growth mindset or a fixed mindset?

What could be wrong with saying "You're so smart"? It's nice, right? It boosts their confidence, no? Well, it's more complicated than that. Students are motivated to persist at a challenging task when they believe they can get better at it. That requires them to have a growth mindset, a belief that their intelligence and abilities can be developed with effort. Teachers can have an impact on this mindset with the things we say to students. So when we say "You're so smart," "You have natural math ability," or "You're a great writer," we are telling the student it's their natural ability that got them where they are. We're contributing to a fixed mindset. And that's not motivating.

My response:
When I was in the classroom, I knew nothing about growth mindset. I thought kids would feel great if I told them they were smart or talented. I can remember a conversation with Janae, a student who commanded the attention of her peers with ease but got into trouble a lot and did poorly in school. I remember pulling her aside and telling her that I thought she had strong leadership qualities, and that if she could just get her grades up, she had a bright future ahead of her. Yeah, that didn't work. If I wanted her to "get her grades up," I would have been better off noticing a well-constructed sentence or complimenting the way she got her group back on track during a cooperative learning activity, showing her exactly what kind of choices she should keep making to be successful.
How we can do better:

Instead of praising something innate and fixed about a student, focus on specific things students can actually control. So instead of telling a student she's a great student, notice the level of detail in her lab report. Marvel at the level of difficulty she was able to handle on that challenging math problem. Point out how much preparation she must have done for the presentation she gave. It's faster and easier to just tell them they're awesome, but taking the time to be specific and focus on effort will pay much larger dividends.

When you have constructive feedback to give, follow the same principle and make it specific. Rather than telling a student she "needs to work harder" on her assignments, tell her what to work on. Is neatness an issue? Does she need to read the questions more slowly? Is she doing the advanced math right, but messing up with the basic addition and subtraction? If a student knows what to work on, she will be far more motivated to do that work.

5. What are you doing to make your content relevant to students' lives?

I think this is another one of those principles that's been around for so long, we assume we're doing it more than we actually are. But showing students how the content relates to their lives really does make a difference. When students believe they are doing something authentic, something that will improve their lives or have some kind of impact, they are naturally motivated. So how are you doing in this area? Do you regularly provide opportunities for students to connect what they're learning to the world they currently live in?

My response:
I got pretty lazy about this. Just like crafting a good opening and closing for each day's learning, I often cut corners on making my material relevant. I was often much more focused on getting through content and tasks than I was on making it meaningful. I was pretty good about giving writing assignments on topics that mattered to them, but I don't know how clearly I connected what they were doing to how it could help them. For example, with something like argumentative writing-I was probably more focused on "this is how you get a good grade on this" rather than on "this is how you change someone's mind."
How we can do better:

Plan it, then say it: Making material more relevant can be as simple as occasionally stopping an activity to explain its relevance. When students are studying the Lincoln-Douglas debates, show parallels with the current presidential election. When you're studying bacteria, talk about all the places bacteria hang out in students' daily lives. Making these kinds of connections is a natural practice for many teachers, but if you're like me, you might forget to add these connections into a lesson. So just add them into your lesson plan; literally write down a few connections you plan to make some time during a class period, then check your plans before class is over to make sure you did it.

More reflection: Even asking students to think about how course material connects to their lives can make a difference. One study (see the Motivation Matters document in the collection) had teachers ask students to write weekly reflections on how the material they were learning related to their lives; lower-performing students in these classes did better compared to those where teachers didn't use this intervention. Researchers referred to these as "value interventions."

Design tasks that end with a public product: In one of the videos in the collection below, educator Kathleen Cushman describes the highly engaging work students do at High Tech High, a school whose curriculum focuses on project-based learning. Student projects have an authentic, public end product-a video, a live presentation, a community service project, a website-something that will ultimately be consumed by people outside of their own classroom. This naturally motivates students to work harder on a task. So look at your curriculum and see if you can find more ways to build assignments around real, public products.

Where to Go from Here

The purpose of this exercise is not to beat ourselves up. It's just a way of deeply diagnosing a problem most teachers struggle with. There's a very good chance that the technology, the parents, or the entitlement are playing a role in what we perceive to be reduced student motivation. But there's a very good chance that our instructional decisions play a role as well.

So pick one area and start there. Make a small adjustment this week and see what happens. Share in the comments where you think you could improve, then come back and tell us what changes made a difference. To solve a problem as complicated as student motivation, there is no magic bullet; instead we'll need a set of tools that we blend and refine over time. This is a process that will definitely be slower and more frustrating than a single, easy solution, but we're professionals. This is our craft. We can do this. ♦

Keep in touch.
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5 Questions to Ask Yourself About Your Unmotivated Students

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If we know what works to motivate students, why are so many students still unmotivated? These five questions will help you determine if your practice is really in line with research.

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17 Brain Breaks Tailored for High Schoolers

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17 Brain Breaks Tailored for High Schoolers

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Kids, like adults, cycle through periods of attention and inattention-though the duration of the interval changes with age and is variable across individuals. By high school, according to neurologist and classroom teacher Judy Willis, concentrated study of "20 to 30 minutes for middle and high school students calls for a three-to-five-minute break."

Regardless of attention spans, brain breaks can prevent older students from feeling overwhelmed and provide space for reflection, joy, and connection during a packed school day. They're also a crucial part of the learning process.

"According to one popular school of thought, it's the active, repeated manipulation of material that lays the neural foundations for skill development," writes Youki Terada, Edutopia's research editor. But breaks are often misconstrued as a pause in the active learning process, instead of "the period when our brains compress and consolidate memories of what we just practiced," neuroscientist Leonardo Cohen and his team explain in a June 2021 study. In fact, Cohen continues, incorporating breaks into learning "plays just as important a role as practice in learning a new skill."

Brain "breaks" can take many different forms inside of the classroom, depending on the aim. To boost students' mood, Willis suggests activities that increase restorative neurotransmitters like dopamine: anything that involves "laughing, moving, listening to music, and interacting with peers." Likewise, brain breaks that incorporate physical activity not only provide a moment of stress relief for students but also increase the blood flow and oxygen supply to the brain-stimulating brain activity and helping students regain focus in the face of fatigue.

1. Thinking Outside the Box: On the board, provide students with the start of a doodle that they'll have to creatively transform into something unexpected. This can be anything from two lines to a squiggle or a half circle. To add in some student voice and choice, have volunteers suggest what the initial drawing prompt should look like. Sourced from Tina Centineo via X (formerly Twitter).

2. "Train Your Brain": A fun activity thatstarts by having students touch the tip of their nose with their right index finger and then touch their ear with their left hand index finger. Then have them switch the position of their hands, touching the tip of their nose with their left hand index finger and moving their right index finger to touch their ear. Kids should keep doing this until they can get it right, which may take only a few tries for some and much longer for others. To add an element of competition, see which student can do this activity for the longest without messing up. Sourced from PE teacher Matt Head via TikTok.

3. Would You Rather: Pair students up and have them discuss fun "would you rather" questions. Here are some examples of prompts:

Would you rather live in a world with no technology or a world with no nature?

Would you rather have the ability to speak with animals or the ability to speak all human languages fluently?

Would you rather have your favorite movie character as your best friend or your favorite book character as your sibling?

To add an element of movement, do this activity together as a class. Announce the prompt out loud, and have students go to one side of the room or the other to show which option they'd rather choose. A select couple of volunteers can raise their hands to explain their reasoning. Sourced from Education World.

9. What Is That?: Find a picture of something your class may never encounter in your subject area and display it for students to see. "I showed a physics class a murmuration of starlings but did not tell them what it was," explains former principal Peter Embleton. "No phones or computers, they had to figure out what was happening and why." This not only ignites student curiosity but may introduce your class to something they didn't previously know existed. Sourced from Peter Embleton via X.

11. 1, 2, 3, Math!: Similarly to rock, paper, scissors, students play against each other in pairs. After the players say "1, 2, 3, Math," each displays one, two, three, or four fingers in the palm of their hand. The first of the pair to correctly call out the sum of both players' fingers wins that round and a point. The first person to win three rounds is the champ. Sourced from: Lori Desautels.

13. Classwide Wordle: The word game that swept the nation is sure to keep your students on their toes. According to the game's website, you'll have six tries to guess the five-letter word of the day. The tile color changes depending on how close the guess is: A green tile means the letter "is in the word and in the correct spot," a yellow tile means the letter "is in the word but in the wrong spot," and a gray tile means the letter is not in the word at all. Try playing together as a class, and have students shout out their suggestions, voting on which ideas they like best. Sourced from Kim West via X.

14. 5, 4, 3, 2, 1: To keep kids alert during a long lesson, have them spend a couple of minutes stretching and moving around the room. Consider creating a short sequence of exercises that students can all do together to get their blood flowing-such as five high knees, four jumping jacks, three push-ups, two deep breaths, and one squat. Offering students the option to stand and do the sequence or alternatively sit and stretch in whatever way they choose ensures that this activity is inclusive and considers everyone in your classroom. Sourced from We Are Teachers.

15. Odd One Out: This Google Arts & Culture game challenges you to "guess the AI-generated imposter" among the artworks. You'll be presented with four images and have to guess which of the options was created by AI before time runs out. Compete all together as a class, or have students play together in small groups. This could inspire an interesting conversation around student perceptions and misconceptions of AI. Sourced from Tony Vincent via X.

17. Invisible Pictures: In groups of two, have one student "draw a picture in the air while their partner guesses what it is," writes assistant professor Lori Desautels. To give students a starting point, provide them with categories like foods, animals, or places, and then allow their creative minds to lead the way. For a bit of extra help, allow the guessing partner to ask one or two yes or no questions that will provide them with crucial context. Sourced from Lori Desautels.

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17 Brain Breaks Tailored for High Schoolers

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As high school students navigate more rigorous academic tasks and denser curricular material, the occasional 3-to-5-minute break delivers a wide range of benefits.

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When a lesson doesn’t go to plan, these activities can help soak up class time and keep learning on track.

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Academic Sponge Activities That Are Teacher-Tested

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Academic Sponge Activities That Are Teacher-Tested

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28 Teacher-Tested, Ready-to-Use Academic Sponge Activities

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When a lesson doesn’t go to plan, these activities can help soak up class time and keep learning on track.

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Do your high school students think that taking notes during class means writing down everything you say? You can teach them effective note-taking skills that increase their engagement.

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2 Strategies for Teaching Students How to Take Notes

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2 Strategies for Teaching Students How to Take Notes

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Do your high school students think that taking notes during class means writing down everything you say? You can teach them effective note-taking skills that increase their engagement.

As a science teacher I hate lecture days. They're boring, they require a lot of energy, and inevitably I find myself repeatedly answering the same questions. Additionally, I need my high school physics students to be able to make connections between ideas, but this is often a challenge, as they tend to focus only on the surface structure.

Note-taking is seen as a passive way of acquiring knowledge. Too often, students take notes ineffectively because they believe they should copy the information. And they do exactly that, word for word. When the lecture moves fast, they're so focused on copying that they can't process the content. But it doesn't have to be this way.

Here are two strategies I use in my classroom to drive student engagement and problem-solving bell to bell.

Retrieve note-taking

Retrieve note-taking leverages the practice of retrieval. Retrieval is simply asking students to recall from their memories using only their brains.

Lecture: First, I give the lecture as normal. Much to my students' surprise and chagrin, they're not allowed to take any notes at this time. It's important that the information I present is long enough that students aren't just regurgitating information from their working memory, but short enough to allow for the rest of the activity.

The first time I tried this was when I was discussing the rules of light for curved mirrors. These notes included sentences that described each rule, as well as visual representations. Because it was the first day of the unit, I added this lecture to two smaller chunks-first for concave mirrors, then for convex ones. This kept the volume of content manageable for students.

I've also done this with complex problem-solving. Most recently I shared with my calculus-based students that we would be having a notes day. I was going to present the derivation for an electric field in standard lecture format while students copied the example. This example was similar in structure to a previous derivation for electric force. One of my students was happy that she wouldn't "have to do much." I decided immediately that we would do retrieve note-taking. Due to the many similarities to an earlier problem of the previous day, I presented the entire problem rather than in chunks as I had done for the light lecture.

Retrieve: Next, I ask my students to write down everything they can remember. I emphasize that it's OK if they remember only one thing. Since this is a science class, we leverage multiple representations-drawings, words, equations, or any combination.

Collaborate: This is where the magic happens. After exhausting their memories, my students discuss their notes with their peers. Through discussion, they add or change their notes as needed. Because each student will remember different parts of the lecture, this activity brings the class together as they piece together the entire content from the lesson.

Additionally, through these conversations, students immediately are tasked with thinking about and explaining the ideas from the content or problem. Points of clarification emerge within student groups, and they feel like they have to remember; they're not asking me to tell them the answer. The best part is that since the focus has shifted from furiously copying all of the details to spending time with the content, students begin to see the big picture.

'Notes to your future forgetful self'

The second strategy is one I've adopted from Building Thinking Classrooms, by Peter Liljedahl. Instead of telling students to copy their work into a notebook, I prompt them to "write notes to [their] future forgetful selves."

Recently we discussed solving motion problems with an energy approach. In these problems, students were expected to define the types of energy present at the start and end of the motion in question, which then created the mathematical model necessary to solve the problem.

The following day, students gathered in groups of three at vertically mounted whiteboards around the room. I presented a problem of an object moving with some initial velocity, then going up and around a track with a vertical loop. This problem required the core skills from the first day, but also required the students to dig into their prior learning about circular motion, which increased the complexity.

When the writing slows, I tell my students if they are "done or stuck to take a walk" and discuss with their classmates. This process takes much longer for them than solving the problem in a traditional lecture, but I hear my students coming to their own realizations through discourse. It also allows me the opportunity to see where their thinking and misconceptions are in real time.

When my class has finished the problem, I prompt them to "write notes to your future forgetful self." I follow this up with "What was something that made you say 'Aha' as you were working?" "What was a conversation you had with a peer that reminded you of an idea you did not think of initially?" "These are the kinds of things you should document so you can work on your homework tonight."

In a traditional setting, I might have students sit back and wait until I finish, then pull out their cell phones to snap a picture of the problem. Surprisingly, while I observe students referring to boards as they write notes, few feel the need to pull out a camera.

The first time I tried these strategies, I was anxious about the amount of time they took. The payoff is worth the time. Not only are my students working through later problems more efficiently, but also they're working more collaboratively and trusting their own genius.

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Do your high school students think that taking notes during class means writing down everything you say? You can teach them effective note-taking skills that increase their engagement. As a science teacher I hate lecture days. They're boring, they require a lot of energy, and inevitably I find myself repeatedly answering the same questions.

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Teachers can use these six strategies to boost students’ ability to work with sustained focus for increasing amounts of time.

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Attention Is Not a Trait—It’s a Teachable Skil

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Attention Is Not a Trait—It’s a Teachable Skil

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Attention Is Not a Trait—It’s a Teachable Skill

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Teachers can use these six strategies to boost students’ ability to work with sustained focus for increasing amounts of time.

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Techniques such as interweaving direct instruction with active learning tasks help students practice sustained, intentional focus.

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Designing Instruction That Accounts for Student Attention

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Designing Instruction That Accounts for Student Attention

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Designing Instruction That Accounts for Student Attention

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Techniques such as interweaving direct instruction with active learning tasks help students practice sustained, intentional focus.

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Teachers can boost their students’ investment and confidence by cocreating a rubric that affirms the many ways to engage with a lesson.

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Giving Students More Ways to Participate

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Giving Students More Ways to Participate

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Expanding How We Think About Classroom Participation

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Teachers can boost their students’ investment and confidence by cocreating a rubric that affirms the many ways to engage with a lesson.

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A high school teacher with four decades of experience shares the principles she has used to build student excitement in a wide variety of subjects.ow to Engage Students in Any Subject Area

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How to Engage High School Students in Any Subject Area

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How to Engage High School Students in Any Subject Area

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A high school teacher with four decades of experience shares the principles she has used to build student excitement in a wide variety of subjects.

Wavebreak Media ltd / Alamy Stock Photo

Decades of teaching social studies, math, biology, English, French, and journalism taught me that no matter what the subject, getting high school students excited about it was the key to learning. I also discovered there are definitely some tricks to getting the kids engaged and having a productive learning environment.

4 Characteristics of Effective Classrooms

1. There's a culture of caring and kindness within the class: You can feel it-kids are smiling, working in groups, engaged. The teacher seems relaxed, and the kids are excited about learning. They feel trusted and respected, and they are. Students aren't afraid of making mistakes because they know they can revise. Grading isn't punitive, new ideas are welcomed, and the teacher is approachable.

I always started out my new classes with an activity I called "personality feature." It was an opportunity for each student to interview one other student in the class and also to be interviewed. The idea was to introduce each student to the class, so they all could get to know each other and work collaboratively. Kids work better when they know the other students and have a sense of trust and respect for them.

2. Students know why they're studying the subject: Their work has to be authentic and relatable. Kids love learning if it connects to their lives. Teachers need to tie whatever students are studying to their lives today, and kids can help with this. For example, in history, kids can work in groups looking for ties about policy decisions to events that happened years ago or even in the last century.

3. There's a student-friendly revision policy: Make sure that students always have the opportunity to revise, even on tests. Kids get discouraged because of poor grades. If there's no chance for them to get a better grade, they lose motivation. Giving them the opportunity to revise (with a deadline) gives them hope that they can improve and so can their grade.

I even had a student-friendly revision policy in math. I gave kids the opportunity to relearn the concept and take the test again. Some kids just take longer, but once they learn it, they retain it as long as it's meaningful to them. That's one of the advantages of adaptive learning. Kids can relearn a concept that's complex as many times as they need until they get it.

As Professor Carol Dweck at Stanford writes in Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, what you think about yourself and your ability to learn is the key to how you learn. Giving kids the opportunity to revise helps them see they can actually learn whatever they want to learn.

4. Embed collaboration in most of the assignments: Working with a partner or in groups makes learning fun. Allow students to pick their partner unless it's not a good fit. Humans are social beings, and no one likes to learn alone.

One example of the importance of collaboration is what's happening with massive open online courses (MOOCs). As many as 90 percent of the learners may drop out before completing courses. People don't like to learn alone or in isolation. They don't like lectures.

They like to talk to each other about what they're learning. Even math concepts, especially complex concepts, are up for discussion. One student can explain the concept to another student, and each learns-the one who teaches learns leadership skills, so it's beneficial for both students.

In a world where kids are focused on "learning loss," test scores, and memorizing, I cofounded a company called Tract a year ago to help give them agency and excitement-to bring the joy back to learning and not focus on test scores. It's a peer-to-peer, project-based, kids' social media platform focused on independence and collaboration. Teens create the learning for preteens on the assumption that no one is more exciting to a kid than a kid who's a little bit older.

Tract is built on the above key points and on my TRICK philosophy (trust, respect, independence, collaboration, and kindness), which I explain in my book How to Raise Successful People. TRICK belongs in all teacher-student and parent-child relationships.

TRICK worked in my classrooms for 40 years and with my own children who became highly successful. It can help empower your students to be passionate about school and learning, too, if you treat them with TRICK, it can make your life as a teacher much easier and more satisfying and bring joy into the classroom.

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How to Engage Students in Any Subject Area

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A high school teacher with four decades of experience shares the principles she has used to build student excitement in a wide variety of subjects. Wavebreak Media ltd / Alamy Stock Photo Decades of teaching social studies, math, biology, English, French, and journalism taught me that no matter what the subject, getting high school students excited about it was the key to learning.

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Successful group work in middle and high school requires thoughtful design. These strategies help teachers structure collaboration so every student contributes—and learns.

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6 Smart Ways to Structure Group Work in Secondary Classrooms

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6 Smart Ways to Structure Group Work in Secondary Classrooms

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6 Smart Ways to Structure Group Work in Secondary Classrooms

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Successful group work in middle and high school requires thoughtful design. These strategies help teachers structure collaboration so every student contributes—and learns.

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How to Personalize Instruction with Seminars | Cult of Pedagogy

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How to Personalize Instruction with Seminars | Cult of Pedagogy

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Listen to the interview with Melanie Meehan (transcript):
Sponsored by EVERFI and Today by Studyo

This page contains Amazon Affiliate and Bookshop.org links. When you make a purchase through these links, Cult of Pedagogy gets a small percentage of the sale at no extra cost to you. What's the difference between Amazon and Bookshop.org?

Over the years, we've covered a lot of different ways to differentiate and personalize instruction, methods for giving each student what they need when they need it, rather than planning the exact same learning experiences for everyone, every day. ( Click here to see all of our posts that connect to differentiation in some way.) The good news is that there are so many ways to differentiate - here we'll focus on another strategy that we're calling seminars.

I say "we're calling it that" because I assume you're already familiar with the word seminar - a short-term gathering of people for the purpose of learning about a given topic. Typically, adults attend seminars. University students attend seminars. What we're talking about today is offering a version of that concept to students within your own classroom. These seminars are mini-lessons given during class time, but the key is that most of the time they are optional - students only sign up to attend if they have an interest in or need to learn more about the topic. And yes, they could just be called mini-lessons - in fact, I heard about this same concept years ago from the high school teachers at the Apollo School - but something special is added when you call them seminars.

That's what Melanie Meehan calls them. Meehan is a Connecticut-based elementary writing and social studies coordinator who has written three books about teaching writing and contributes to the collaborative blog Two Writing Teachers. She appeared on episode 192 of the podcast, where we talked about backward chaining, another differentiation strategy. While working on that piece, she also mentioned the seminar strategy, and I liked it so much I thought we should give it its own separate space.

Melanie Meehan

In the podcast episode above, Meehan talked with me about the logistics of how she sets seminars up in her classroom and what an effective tool they are, not only for differentiation, but also for building student agency. And just like with backward chaining, seminars can be used in any subject area and any grade level.

What do seminars look like in a K-12 classroom?

"Basically, seminars are small group instruction," Meehan says, "and that is, as far as I'm concerned, the sweet spot of differentiation." She acknowledges that seminar is a deliberately 'fancy' word, but "it's a word that kids love."

The seminars are 7 to 10 minutes long, with each seminar covering a small, focused topic. They are offered during times when students are working independently on other tasks. During a typical class period, Meehan usually offers one or two seminars.

When she first introduces the concept of seminars to students, she talks about her own daughters attending seminars in college: "It was the special classes where they got to really work on what they were interested in. So I'll bring them up as seminars in terms of what are you really interested in learning about? And it just generates some excitement and some joy around the whole process."

Nuts and bolts: What are the logistics?

Choosing the Topics

Seminars can be offered in any subject area; because she teaches writing, Meehan's seminars are all geared toward that. "It can be any of the learning targets that align with the standards that the unit's going after," she explains. "So that could be developing sections for my writing, it can be making sure that I have enough information in a given section. It can be making sure my reason's clear. Depending on what genre they're working on, those seminars can be content-specific. But they can also be writing behavioral. They can be, I'm having a hard time getting to work. I'm having a hard time staying on task. So sometimes I'll put those up too."

Topics can come from Meehan's observations of students at work, noticing areas of struggle. They can also come from student surveys. Meehan has a Google Form ( click here to make a copy) that asks students to evaluate themselves with these questions:

"Once I have that information," Meehan says, "I can establish seminars based on that. If I get four kids who have checked that they need some work on including small stories into their argument pieces, I've got a seminar going."

Sign Ups

Meehan has students sign up on a sheet of chart paper with lined sticky notes indicating the seminars being offered that day. "So I can just pull that sticky note right off of the chart, and be like, oh, okay. You four needed to work on ways to help your introductions. Great. Seminar's going on about hooking introductions. I've got Jenn, Melanie, Garth, and Julia, you four come on up. I'm giving that right now."

Ideally, seminars will only be given to groups of four to five students. If more than five sign up for a seminar, Meehan will offer two separate sessions. If a large number of students show interest in a topic, that becomes a whole-class lesson.

How do these lessons fit into class time? Meehan describes a typical 45-60-minute class period: "I'm envisioning a 7 to 10 short, what we would call a mini lesson. So a quick, here's your learnings for the day. You don't necessarily have to do it today because you might be in a different place in your writing process, but probably at some point in this unit, you are going to need this teaching point. And, you know, off you go, and you're working on your independent pieces. So during that independent time, and in my head, there are two 20-minute solid blocks of independent writing time. So you've got your 7- to 10-minute full group lesson that everybody's listening to, you've got your 20 minutes of independent writing time, during which time you have the opportunity to teach kids as small groups or teach kids individually. I like to challenge the teachers that I work with to think about having in those 20 minutes one small group and one conference, at least.

"So if you can fit those in in those 20 minutes, then you're doing a good job being efficient, because after that 20 minutes, you'll do a quick interruption. You might highlight something that you saw. You might have an additional teaching point, you might ask somebody to share what they're proud of. That's the two-, three-minute interruption, which sometimes kids need, right? Great, everybody. Back to work. You got another 20 minutes, and teacher, you've got another opportunity for another seminar and another meeting with the kids."

Are seminars always self-selected?

Meehan's long-term goal is to build student agency, with students understanding their own needs and taking steps to meet them. Seminars are an important part of making that happen. "Ultimately the goal of learning is transfer," she says. "It's owning your learning and being a learner out in the world without a teacher at your side. So I love having kids sign up for their own seminars."

With that said, Meehan also occasionally assigns seminars to students. If a seminar is being held and she knows a student needs to work on that particular skill, she'll either gently encourage them to attend or simply tell them they really need that seminar. And if, during a writer's workshop, she notices four or five students who appear to be stuck or off-task? "You've got a seminar. Like, hey, friend, have I got a seminar for you. This one's going to be mandated."

Sometimes student choices don't always align with what Meehan thinks they need, like when a student chooses a seminar on a skill they have already mastered. But in those cases, she usually won't interfere. "I can move them along quickly through the choice that they've made and honor that choice," she says. "And then they're much more pliable toward my recommendation for the next one."

Leveling Up: Student- Run Seminars

Once students have gotten used to attending seminars run by the teacher, you can start to move toward having students give the seminars themselves. When Meehan notices that a student really understands a topic, she'll instruct them to listen to her give a seminar as if they'll have to teach it themselves.

"I'll be like, you're going to be the one who listens and then turns it around because we've got so many other kids who need it," she says. "So you're going to become my teaching partner, and at the end of this, you're going to go off and teach it to another group, and I'll teach it to the other group."

By taking this approach, Meehan not only becomes more efficient at managing demands on her time, she also builds more confidence and agency in her students.

"I think that we run past the power of the abilities of some of the kids in the room," Meehan says. "Kids are sometimes really effective teachers to each other." So if she notices that a student is starting to master a skill, she might say something like, "You've used transition words brilliantly in your piece. Could you run a seminar on that for your friends?"

Having students teach each other also pushes them to a new level of mastery. "A kid might have a specialty or a strength that they want to develop, and that also forces them to kind of prepare for it and make sure that they're extra good."

Seminars in Any Class

Although this idea is being presented here in a writing class, which is built on a workshop model, seminars could be offered in any subject area. Even if you are teaching a content-heavy subject, as long as you build in some time for students to work independently, you'll have an opportunity to offer seminars on the unique set of skills needed for success in your subject.

LEARN MORE

You can find more from Meehan on her website, melaniemeehan.com. The seminar approach appears along with lots of other fantastic strategies in her 2022 book, Answers to Your Biggest Questions About Teaching Elementary Writing ( Amazon | Bookshop.org).

Come back for more.
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How to Personalize Instruction with Seminars

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Listen to the interview with Melanie Meehan (transcript): Sponsored by EVERFI and Today by Studyo This page contains Amazon Affiliate and Bookshop.org links. When you make a purchase through these links, Cult of Pedagogy gets a small percentage of the sale at no extra cost to you.

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The key to not taking it personally is investigating the cause—the student may not be challenged by the work, or may not understand the work. There are strategies for overcoming these and other challenges.

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‘I’m Bored’: The Dreaded Student Complaint

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‘I’m Bored’: The Dreaded Student Complaint

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‘I’m Bored’: The Dreaded Student Complaint

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The key to not taking it personally is investigating the cause—the student may not be challenged by the work, or may not understand the work. There are strategies for overcoming these and other challenges.

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Brainstorming Techniques: 15 Creative Activities to Do Solo or as a Team

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Brainstorming Techniques: 15 Creative Activities to Do Solo or as a Team

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We're all familiar with traditional brainstorming as a way to produce new ideas. You sit in a room with a whiteboard and work with whatever comes to mind. Maybe you play a few rounds of word association to strengthen your ideas, or pull up Google and use research to flesh them out.

But there are many alternative exercises for tackling problems and developing new ideas, both individually and in a group setting.

Ranging from structured to silly, here are 15 creative brainstorming exercises and techniques to help you get your problem-solving juices flowing.

Brainstorming Techniques

1. Storyboarding

2. Mind Mapping

3. Group Sketching

4. Word Banking

5. S.C.A.M.P.E.R.

6. S.W.O.T. Analysis

7. Six Thinking Hats

8. Zero Draft

9. Brain Netting

10. Questioning Assumptions

11. Wishing

12. Alter-Egos / Heroes

13. Forced Connections

14. Reverse Brainstorming

15. Brain-Writing

Visual Activities

1. Storyboarding

If you're trying to design a process, storyboarding can help you see where your collective understanding of a problem supports or conflicts with a proposed solution, and where more thought/research is needed. By developing a visual story to explore the problem at hand as a narrative, your team will be able to see how ideas interact and connect to form a solution.

Sticky notes are your friend. Take a few minutes to have everyone on the team write out their ideas as individual notes. These don't have to be complete thoughts -- physically pinning up quotes, pictures, user info, and the like can help you see new relationships between different components.

Once you have a group of sticky notes to work from, start arranging them on the board as a progression: first this, then that. Organizing your ideas as a continuous series will help you see new connections and eliminate extraneous material that doesn't support your end goal.

2. Mind Mapping

Mind mapping is a fairly common term nowadays -- in fact, many types of software provide automated mind-mapping templates so you can better organize your data. Well, it also happens to be a great way to organize your ideas.

To create a mind map for creativity purposes, write down the task or problem you're trying to solve at the center of your idea sheet (feel free to do this on your computer, but whiteboards are ideal).

Then, expand on this problem by surrounding it with terms that better describe what you need. If your problem is low website traffic, for example, some terms to write around this phrase might be "organic traffic," "trusted content," "SEO," and "video strategy."

Once your mind map has this first layer, add a second layer to each of your needs describing how you might be able to solve for these individual challenges. Around "SEO," you might write "topic clusters," "dedicated SEO strategist," and "video marketing course."

Keep adding to your mind map using the steps above until you've sufficiently broken down your problem into manageable parts. It's a fantastic problem-solving technique that fosters creative answers to subjects that might otherwise seem uninspiring.

3. Group Sketching

You don't have to be an artist or a designer to benefit from sketching. Visual thinking can help to trigger and develop ideas that discussion and writing might otherwise leave unturned. Similar to brain-writing, group sketching involves participants building on each other's ideas.

Each member of your team will sketch an image related in a central way to a concept, idea or topic you want to explore further. Each sketch is then passed to someone else, who sketches another related image on the same piece of paper. This is repeated multiple times around the group. The final images are then reviewed and discussed with the aim of discovering connections that individuals hadn't spotted on their own.

Idea Sorting Techniques

4. Word Banking

If you assume "work banking" is a fancy term for "word association," well, you're right. But in a word banking session, what you do with the words you come with is much more sophisticated.

While word associations often focus on pairs of words, word banking asks you to form big groups of terms that all describe just a few themes or topics. Creating word banks in a business setting can help you dismantle a project into manageable parts -- kind of like a mind map, as described in technique #2 earlier in this article.

Then, when your work bank is complete, you can retroactively form connections between the terms you came up with, and use those connections to craft ideas that are guaranteed to include all of your most important characteristics.

5. S.C.A.M.P.E.R.

S.C.A.M.P.E.R. is essentially a process for expanding and improving upon ideas by testing and questioning them from different angles. For each letter of the mnemonic, ask yourself a related question about your project or the problem at hand:

Substitute, e.g.: What would happen to the project if we swapped X for Y?

Combine, e.g.: What would happen to the project if we combined X and Y?

Adapt, e.g.: What changes would need to be made to adapt this project to a different context?

Modify, e.g.: What could we modify to create more value on this project?

Put to another use, e.g.: What other uses or applications might this project have?

Eliminate, e.g.: What could we remove from the project to simplify it?

Reverse, e.g.: How could we reorganize this project to make it more effective?

This method forces you to approach your project or problem in unexpected ways. Each question asks you to dig a little deeper into the issue and consider new possibilities.

6. S.W.O.T. Analysis

Entrepreneurs and business leaders know exactly what a SWOT analysis is. Well, it also happens to be a helpful brainstorming exercise.

S.W.O.T. stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. And when launching a company, it's your textbook starting point (literally -- there isn't a single business school textbook in the world that doesn't have a version of it).

But while a company's founder might use a SWOT analysis to create his or her business model, brainstormers can use the same diagram to better organize their ideas.

Your SWOT analysis doesn't have to be all that complicated when brainstorming. In fact, it can simply be four columns on a whiteboard during your average "shout it out" ideas meeting. When thinking of a new logo design, for instance, ask yourself what you like most about your current logo (strengths). What do you dislike about it (weaknesses)? What should it have more of (opportunities)? What other company logos should you be mindful of (threats)?

7. Six Thinking Hats

There's a whole host of problem-solving exercises and tools that help participants to put themselves into the shoes of another. This particular tool was invented by Edward de Bono, a psychologist, author, and consultant who pioneered the technique in his 1985 book Six Thinking Hats. The method involves breaking down ideas into six areas of thought:

When approaching a new problem or project, have each member of your team put on one of these different "hats" for the discussion. Each "hat" represents a unique set of priorities and perspectives that will help focus your discussion and consider the project from a wide variety of angles.

For example, if you're wearing the "Devil's Advocate" hat, it's your job to consider the project's limitations and challenges. It may feel uncomfortable at first to temporarily adopt a very narrow form of thinking, but the extremes can help teams fully explore a project or idea.

Creative Exercises and Games

8. Zero Draft

The Zero Draft is an ideation technique for individuals often used by writers and is essentially a form of focused free-writing. For marketers and agency professionals, it can help focus the first stages of a new project by establishing what you currently know and getting your initial ideas out of your brain and onto paper.

Taking your central theme or topic:

1. Write down everything you currently know about the subject.

2. Write down what you need or want to know about the subject, but don't currently know.

3. Reflect on why the subject is important.

4. Add anything else that takes your fancy -- this is a chance to get whatever's floating around in your head out into the world.

The Zero Draft method is all about getting everything you can think of relating to your topic down on paper, so don't be concerned if it looks messy and unfocused. The goal is just to get past the initial block that often plagues creative professionals in the early stages of a new project.

9. Brain Netting

Creative exercises and ideas meetings always go better the more people you have in the room. Unfortunately, that means remote employees might not be solicited for their input as much as they should be. Brain netting is the act of connecting with folks electronically to make sure everyone can offer their input and feedback on a project.

Brain netting doesn't just have to be a group phone call, though. Company messaging platforms like Slack are the perfect way to get everyone into a chatroom to spill their ideas. As ideas are submitted, each chatroom member can even vote for their favorites and combine the best qualities of multiple concepts.

10. Questioning Assumptions

We all carry assumptions with us -- assumptions about what is and isn't possible, about what people want, what will work, and what won't. This exercise forces us to challenge these and put everything on the table.

Draw up a list of all the assumptions you can think of about your currently project -- true or not -- and discuss the list as a group, questioning each one. Doing this at various stages in your campaign development can spark fresh ideas, as well as identify knowledge gaps.

11. Wishing

This technique encourages your team to let imaginations run wild. Ask participants to dream up the most unattainable, extreme, and impractical solutions they can think of to a given problem. Create a list of a few dozen wishes pertaining to the task at hand.

Focusing on a selection of wishes, consider and discuss the ideas in detail, with the aim of triggering new but more realistic concepts to pursue. What makes them so impossible? How can that idea be scaled down? Which features of that wish could we integrate into this other approach? You might be surprised to discover applicable, real-world solutions among your team's wildest wishes.

12. Alter-Egos / Heroes

This is a fun exercise where small groups imagine how they would go about solving a given problem if their team were led by a famous character, fictional or real. How would Cat Woman go about positioning your brand as a thought leader in virtual reality? What would Steve Jobs do to improve your latest communications package? How would Don Draper get your core messages across to millennials?

You can either chose someone you think embodies the right qualities for the job to help develop your vision, or someone at the opposite end of that scale, to explore less conventional ideas.

13. Forced Connections

This exercise involves bringing together ideas that serve very different needs or interests to form a new concept. You see this sort of thinking all the time in products like the Apple watch, the Swiss Army knife, smartphones, or even sofa beds.

To put this method into practice, bring a bag of random items to your next meeting, or draw up two lists of unrelated items on the board. Ask team members to pick two or more items and explore different ways they can be connected. This technique can produce some silly results, but it's ultimately a helpful way of getting your team out of a creative rut.

14. Reverse Brainstorming

In certain corporations and government entities, data security is the highest priority. So high, in fact, that these organizations have been known to hire hackers -- many of whom have committed internet crimes -- to hack their systems and find out where the weaknesses are.

This "reverse" approach to security, wherein you hack your own company, is considered one of the best ways to secure a server from intrusion. And for us, it's the inspiration behind this fourth brainstorming technique.

When you reverse brainstorm, you essentially work to create problems rather than solutions. 'Why on Earth would you want to do that?' You might ask. Creating problems teaches you what not to do so you're more intuitive to the needs of your project. Think of it like hacking your company to find out where the weaknesses are.

Say, for example, you want to drive awareness to a new product. As a marketer, you have many promotional channels at your disposal, but you don't know how to use them or where to start. In a reverse brainstorming session, you might come up with the following:

Avoid hyperlinks to the product's purchase page

Don't tweet about the product

Criticize the features of your product

Obviously, these are all horrible ideas if your goal is to promote the product. But, take the reverse of these ideas, and you've effectively created three excellent starting points for a supportive campaign: Link to the product in a series of blog posts, develop a Twitter campaign around the product, and identify specific features of the product that prospects would be most interested in reading or hearing about.

15. Brain-Writing

In this exercise, participants simply write down a few rough ideas for solving a particular problem on a piece of paper. Each piece of paper is then passed on to someone else, who reads it silently and adds their own ideas to the page. This process is repeated until everyone has had a chance to add to each original piece of paper. The notes can then be gathered, ready for discussion.

The big advantage of brain-writing is that it makes sure everybody is given the opportunity to have their thoughts and ideas thoroughly considered by the group. This avoids the loudest or most extroverted people unintentionally dominating the sessions.
This is a modified excerpt from Creative Ideation for Digital Marketers: Theory to Practice by Dani Mansfield.

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15 Creative Exercises That Are Better Than Brainstorming

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We're all familiar with traditional brainstorming as a way to produce new ideas. You sit in a room with a whiteboard and work with whatever comes to mind. Maybe you play a few rounds of word association to strengthen your ideas, or pull up Google and use research to flesh them out.

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Want students to remember something? Ask them to draw it.

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Boosting Students’ Memory Through Drawing

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Boosting Students’ Memory Through Drawing

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Want students to remember something? Ask them to draw it.

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Teachers can provide learning experiences that guide high school students to become comfortable with uncertainty and risk-taking.

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Daily Activities That Support Students’ Creative Mindset

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Daily Activities That Support Students’ Creative Mindset

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American author Gail Sheehy once noted, "Creativity can be described as letting go of certainties." A quiet and persistent myth shapes how learners see themselves: Creativity belongs to a small group of people-artists, performers, and the naturally imaginative. Everyone else is in search of the right answer. How do we as educators reinforce the notion that all students can be creative? How do we challenge all students so that creativity is more than being able to sketch a bowl of fruit?

Creativity can be viewed as a way of engaging with the world-students notice, question, connect ideas, and imagine alternatives. Creativity is the way students approach problems, interpret information, and express understanding. We believe that the process of developing a creative mindset should inspire confidence, curiosity, risk-taking, and a sense of identity in all students. The " creative mindset muscle " needs regular exercise. It's not that disengaged students aren't motivated; it may be that their creative minds need to be nurtured.

Here is our essential question: What opportunities do your students have to build their creative mindset? Carol Dweck defines a growth mindset as "individual beliefs regarding the potential for change in human characteristics such as intellectual ability and personality." With an understanding of growth and fixed mindsets, we think it's important to present learning experiences to help students build a growth-centered creative mindset.

We offer the following set of low-stakes, classroom-ready routines that can be used with learners at every grade level, K-12. They are designed to sit naturally inside your existing curriculum; no overhaul required. Most important, these routines help students move from "getting the right answer" to seeing themselves as thinkers who generate ideas, navigate uncertainty, and create new possibilities.

Ambiguous Object Activity

We've all opened the junk drawer in our kitchen, pulled out a long-ignored object, and asked ourselves, "What the heck is this?" This is the essence of the ambiguous object activity that Stanford's d.school developed.

An ambiguous object (mystery objects or unknown objects) is "an object with a form or function that would stump someone," such as a balloon tie for your fingers or a hot dog spiraler. As the d.school notes, "We sometimes struggle with ambiguity because we're trying to find the correct solution when one might not exist." The ambiguous object activity helps learners "practice detaching from the right answer and drawing on their interpretive skills." Through thoughtful and intentional questioning, students are challenged to determine "What the heck is this?"

We've used this five-minute activity as a class opener or icebreaker. (Note: It also works well at faculty meetings and workshops.)

Students ask yes or no questions about the object:

Do you use the object inside or outside the home?

Is it used in the kitchen?

Does it involve food?

As they ponder our answers to the questions, students slowly zero in on the object's function, or they're completely stumped.

How does this help students develop their creative mindset? When students are presented with unfamiliar or open-ended materials (and questions) and asked to interpret what they see, they must slow down. They observe more carefully and learn to tolerate uncertainty. That can be a challenge, but overcoming this challenge signals that students are engaging in sense-making rather than answer finding.

Wonder Wander

Creativity needs breathing room.

In their tightly packed daily schedules, students often don't have the opportunity to explore. Offering students brief, intentional opportunities to wander and observe their surroundings builds the habit of wondering. How do we get our students out of their seats, out of the classroom, to explore the world around them? That's where the "Wonder Wander" comes in.

High school students in Don's Entrepreneurship or Design Thinking classes have their own "Wonder Wander" journals. At any time in the class, Don or a student may yell out "Wonder Wander!" Students grab their notebooks and head out for approximately 10 minutes. Sometimes the "Wonder Wander" is open-ended; other times, students are prompted to head to a certain floor or look for objects that are circular, square, or made from a certain material.

How does this help students develop their creative mindset? Noticing things more intentionally leads students to generate better questions. When they wander with purpose, they practice asking their own questions instead of waiting for someone else to supply them. These questions become entry points for both problem-solving and sensemaking.

Disruptus Activity

Creativity also develops when students regularly reimagine what already exists. We remind the students that invention is "the creation of a new, original process," while innovation is "the practical improvement of an idea or product to provide value to users." This is the essence of the Disruptus activity: Create, transform, disrupt.

Disruptus is a game (approximately $20) that, according to the game box, "revolves around new ways to create, transform, and improve ideas or objects." The game includes cards with images of everyday objects, including a skateboard, a fire extinguisher, and a toaster.

For example, we start with the wire whisk card. As a class, we agree that the object is a wire whisk, and then the group is encouraged to propose ways to improve upon the wire whisk. Students draw two more Disruptus cards, take elements from each card, and use these elements to create a new object or idea. They're required to sketch their new object and give it a name.

How does this help students develop their creative mindset? In our experience, this kind of remixing helps students move from copying what they see to intentionally transforming it. They begin to recognize that innovation is rarely about starting from nothing. Innovation is about noticing patterns, borrowing intelligently, and disrupting familiar forms in thoughtful ways. Students build confidence, learn to experiment and take creative risks, and approach new challenges as designers, ready to reshape existing ideas rather than wait for the "right" one to appear.

What the Creative Mindset Looks Like

When creativity becomes a daily habit of mind:

Students ask more original questions.

They share unfinished ideas with greater confidence.

They approach challenges with flexibility.

They notice opportunities for improvement and problem-solving.

They develop their own creative identity.

Creativity doesn't grow from occasional big projects. Instead, creativity grows from daily, low-stakes habits. By weaving short creative routines into class each day, we've watched students begin to see themselves differently: They ask more original questions, share half-formed ideas without apology, and approach complex problems with greater flexibility and persistence.

Over time, these small moments compound, and students start to develop their creative identity. The daily practice of sitting with ambiguity, noticing patterns, and reflecting on their thinking reshapes how they learn in general, helping them understand that uncertainty isn't a barrier to success, but where meaningful learning and meaningful change begin.

Responses are generated by artificial intelligence. AI can make mistakes.

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Daily Activities That Support Students' Creative Mindset

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Supporting students' creative mindset with daily opportunities to make observations allows them to explore new possibilities in learning.

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17 Tweaks That Make a Big Difference in Group Work 

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17 Tweaks That Make a Big Difference in Group Work 

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Listen to the interview with Connie Hamilton:
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It's pretty well known in educational circles that cooperative learning is supported by research, but so many teachers still struggle with it, so when things don't work well, they give it up. In my observations of thousands of teachers, I've noticed that sometimes the smallest tweak in instructional approaches reaps the biggest impact, and group work is no exception.

I've gathered some of the most common efforts among teachers everywhere that aren't met with the same amount of effort and success from their students, and for each one, I offer a small tweak that can make big improvements. Sometimes the tweak is a shift in semantics, other times it might be a slight change in how information is presented, and in some cases, it focuses on how teachers react when students lean on them to "help" instead of doing the heavy lifting themselves.

The instructional methods are sorted into six categories: grouping structures, giving directions, assigning roles, support during student collaboration, the teacher's primary role, and the learning tasks. In each of these six categories, look for examples that describe how you approach or respond to group work, then consider these suggestions for elevating the effectiveness of student collaboration while limiting or reducing the energy you contribute.

Grouping Structures

When determining how students will tackle a task, our options are to have students work independently, with a partner, or in a group. Be more intentional with how you make this key decision by considering some of the thoughtful decisions around structuring student work.

Common approach #1: Inviting students to work with a partner if or when they like
Tweak: Select when, how, and why tasks are individual vs. partner work.
While the goal for allowing students to work with a partner any time they choose is intended to send the message that we can always get help from peers, it doesn't leave room for purposefully designing a task with collaboration in mind. The interactions between students is often not much more than a quick check to see if they got the same answer, rather than communicating their thinking along the way. So when you assign partner work, do it with intention.

Common approach #2: Choosing partners or groups randomly
Tweak: Optimize interest, level, connection, skill, personality, etc. to determine groups.
It's OK to have random groupings once in a while, especially when a quick engagement strategy is needed. However, if groups are primarily student choice or random, we miss the opportunity to mindfully align students with others based on a variety of factors.

Try using Clock Partners to organize multiple pairings. Here's how it works: Students make "appointments" with different peers at specific times. Then, when the teacher announces they should join their 3:00 partner, the pairings are already predetermined. Only you know that the 12 o'clock partner is a reading buddy, while the 6 o'clock partner considers how introverted or extraverted students are.

Common Approach #3: Assigning the same group size to all students
Tweak: Design groups of different sizes if warranted.
When flexibility is warranted, allow for a blend of solo, partner, and group structures. It can be effective to have groups of 4 or 5, a couple of partners, and a few students working alone. Depending on the task, you can offer varying levels of challenge based on their group structure.

Giving Directions

How students engage in active learning usually has steps or at a minimum some guidance. Students come to expect teachers to be the beacon of information when it comes to describing exactly - and I mean every minute detail - of what they are supposed to do.

Common Approach #4: Reading directions to students
Tweak: Give them time to independently read and repeat to peers.
Instead of reading directions, or even having a single student read them to the entire class, give your learners time to read independently, then repeat or paraphrase them to a partner. If your students often disregard the directions, this small tweak will not only give them two exposures (once when they read and once when their partner repeats), but it also gives you a point of reference. You can easily refer them back to the directions if they are going rogue in a way that jeopardizes learning.

Common Approach #5: Giving multiple steps in a row
Tweak: Post steps for students to revisit as needed.
Working or short-term memory is taxed when multi-step directions are expected to be retained for future reference. Instead of requiring students to remember all the steps of a complex task, provide a visual with them clearly stated.

Common Approach #6: Answering questions about the task
Tweak: Refer them to the resources provided or prompt them to problem-solve.
When you have provided an opportunity for students to review the directions and have made them accessible for reference as needed, there's no need for you to answer questions that they can clarify without asking you. Try to build independence and responsibility by encouraging students to access other sources to get the information they seek.

One way to accomplish this is to respond to their question with a question that prompts reflection or metacognition (see examples above). Answering questions with a question bounces the responsibility off of you and back on to them.

Of course, what you say is as important as how you say it. Cynical or sarcastic tones, when posing questions, can break down your relationship with students. Be sure your questions are delivered in a positive and productive way that strives to encourage students to activate their empowerment.

Assigning Roles

As adults who have ample opportunities to practice effective communication skills, it can be easy to overlook the fact that students do not always know how to balance partner or group tasks or communicate with peers. These are critical soft skills that can be fostered when collaborative tasks have structure and students understand the various roles group members or partners play when working and learning together.

Common Approach #7: Not differentiating between partners or group members

Tweak: Start with A/B partners.

The easiest way to elevate your intentionality and make student collaboration more effective is to assign names for your partners. A/B, red/gold, peanut butter/jelly, it doesn't matter. This simple detail assigns a speaker and a listener and structures the conversation to ensure the speaker is heard and the listener understands. It's the basics of the communication cycle where the sender (speaker) sends a message and the receiver (listener) provides feedback about the message.

Common Approach #8: Assigning roles without practice or models

Tweak: Plan mini-lessons on how to fulfill roles.

Don't get overwhelmed by this tweak. Just start with one skill at a time. Offer a mini-lesson that clearly explains how a quality summarizer, questioner, or detective would perform their role. Include models that students can critique or reflect on their effectiveness. In a small group, assign one person to execute that role, then rotate it to another group member or partner for the second part of the task.

Eventually, you will have a list of roles like the ones above that students understand how to apply in their collaborative groups. The goal is for all students to have all the skills and be able to apply these soft skills fluidly without the need to be assigned a specific role.

Common Approach #9: Giving only "housekeeping" roles to some students

Tweak: Assign academic or cognitive roles to everyone.

Jobs like "materials manager" or "time keeper" might be necessary to support groups in their journey to successful learning, but students should not have the sole role of making sure everyone has a ruler and a pencil. Every learner should be assigned a cognitive role that contributes to the learning of the group and each individual in it. Then, if you want to assign housekeeping tasks, they are add-ons to the academic roles. So for example, your summarizer might also be responsible for returning supplies at the end of the lesson.

Supporting Learning

Facilitating effective group tasks is no easy feat. It requires careful thought and intentional planning. When you have gone through the time and effort to coordinate a quality collaborative learning task, resist the natural tendency to slip into a teacher-directed mode every time a student seeks your help.

Common Approach #10: Chasing hands
Tweak: Provide tools and resources in advance so your help isn't needed.
During collaborative learning, the goal is for students to learn from and with one another - not you. Students already know you're the safety net. Ideally, we provide other options - such as appropriate tools, access to a text, sufficient or additional time, and opportunity to collaborate - that help them persevere through productive struggle before asking you for help. So for goodness sake, don't front load an invitation to seek you out at the first sign of difficulty by announcing, "If you need help, just raise your hand and I'll come over." Just think for a moment what this communicates and encourages.

Common Approach #11: Allowing individuals to ask the teacher questions
Tweak: Require students to access all resources, including other group members, before asking you.
When groups are truly working together, they tap into each other's expertise, knowledge, and thoughts. If an individual partner or group member has a question, do some investigation to make sure the other group members have been included in problem-solving before you were sought out. A simple question such as, "What have you tried so far?" will initiate conversation about potential options and could lead to an "aha" moment without your help.

Common Approach #12: Reteaching rather than systematically scaffolding
Tweak: Use prompting strategies to help learners help themselves.
During lessons, teachers are constantly checking for understanding through structured or casual formative assessments. When a red flag comes up indicating that learners have misconceptions, are struggling, or simply haven't met the target, it's natural to have an urge to support them. Rather than revisit a lesson to reinforce a concept or skill, trigger problem-solving by giving metacognitive prompts. Before repeating the key points of a lesson, try asking questions like What strategy might work?, Where have you seen a similar problem?, or How are you going to tackle this? These types of questions trigger students to think about the knowledge they already have, then apply it. When you jump to reteaching, you skip the opportunity for students to lead their own success.

Teacher's Primary Role

A collaborative learning structure positions students in the center of their learning. By design, the intent is for the teacher to take a passive role, seemingly invisible. It's often our nature to uncloak too soon and flip the lesson to be more teacher-centered during small chunks of time without even realizing it.

Common Approach #13: Spending your time answering questions and helping during group work
Tweak: Observe and gather anecdotal data while students are working.
Your primary role is to listen and watch as students build their learning. This is sometimes a mindshift that is hard to make and even more challenging to maintain. Carry a clipboard or tablet to document what students are grasping, what is challenging, and who has provided evidence of learning. Not only will your noticings be valuable assessment data, but you will be more aware of when you are pulled away from your task to assist students in doing theirs.

Common Approach #14: "Checking" in with groups
Tweak: Do not interrupt.
The gradual release of responsibility (GRR) is often referred to by its "I do, We Do, You Do" parts. Every time you approach a group and ask them how it's going, you effectively jolt them from the "You Do" part into the "We Do" phase of GRR. Unless you have a need to abruptly stop their learning progress and have them repeat what they've already done or learned, don't. Stay invisible by listening from a short distance to hear and observe how students are doing rather than interrupting them.

Learning Tasks

Learning targets, learning intentions, lesson objectives, or whatever you label as the purpose for the lesson, are almost always linked to content expectations. They communicate what students should know and be able to do in math, music, writing, and so on. When students have clarity on the learning target, it is much easier for them to work toward that goal. When teachers hold that level of clarity, instructional decisions during the lesson are intentional and therefore, more successful.

Common Approach #15: Grading a single project or assignment for all group members
Tweak: Learn collaboratively and assess individually.
I have been involved in countless conversations about group grading practices during collaborative learning. The research that supports collaborative learning applies to individual learners, not the group as a whole. The act of engaging with other learners while you're learning not only deepens the learning, but makes it more likely for students to remember it. However, group grades do not reflect how each student stacks up against the target. Activities that involve groups working together should be followed by individual assessment to gather accurate data about what each student took away from their group learning task.

Common Approach #16: Grouping students for simple tasks
Tweak: Design group work for complex tasks that require multiple thinkers.
Just because there is evidence that group work and student collaboration supports learning, doesn't mean it's always the best fit for every lesson and learning task. When a planned activity is simple and students are capable of completing it independently, you run the risk they will devalue working with their peers, regardless of the task, because they believe they don't need their peers. Select a collaborative structure when a variety of thoughts and ideas will benefit each individual's learning. Remember, group or partner work is more than just sharing the load to complete a task. Collaboration should offer a perspective or experience that single students would not have without their classmates.

Common Approach #17: Basing feedback solely on content
Tweak: Notice and assess speaking and listening skills.
Soft skills like problem solving, respectful listening, patience, articulating thinking, and many more are qualities educators and families expect students to exhibit. But too often, we don't necessarily give these skills attention unless they're exceptional or lacking. Instead of isolating your feedback solely on what students learn within your content area, pick a speaking and listening skill and include comments about how it is helping or hindering their group's effectiveness.

If you recognize one of these common approaches to group work in your own teaching style, give it a tweak and pay attention to the impact your subtle change makes on the effectiveness of group work.

Hacking Group Work is available on Amazon and Bookshop.org.

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17 Tweaks That Make a Big Difference in Group Work

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Cooperative learning can be a powerful learning strategy, but only if it works well. These small changes can make group work more effective in your classroom.

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Tips and real-life examples show how teachers can guide students to create genuinely useful artifacts of analysis and interpretation.

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Encouraging Creativity and Deep Reflection Through Annotation

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Encouraging Creativity and Deep Reflection Through Annotation

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Encouraging Creativity and Deep Reflection Through Annotation

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Tips and real-life examples show how teachers can guide students to create genuinely useful artifacts of analysis and interpretation.

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Not all feelings of self-doubt and anxiety are antithetical to learning. In fact, confusion and frustration can be fruitful—and drive deeper learning.

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Hard School Work and the Right Kind of Anxiety

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Hard School Work and the Right Kind of Anxiety

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Not all feelings of self-doubt and anxiety are antithetical to learning. In fact, confusion and frustration can be fruitful-and drive deeper learning.

When students encounter some academic challenges, like unfamiliar math problems, it activates the same fear center that lights up when people see snakes or spiders, according to Stanford Professor Jo Boaler. The fear can send the mind reeling and lead to feelings of inadequacy and destructive thoughts like "I'm stupid."

But not all feelings of anxiety and self-doubt are harmful to learning. A recent Mindshift article clarifies that some anxiety can be fruitful, and even build up a student's self esteem as they face more difficult tasks in the future.

"Getting butterflies before a big presentation or feeling jittery when starting a new project are common responses to events that seem challenging," the article notes. By setting up classroom environments that normalize errors and by giving students time and opportunity to work through challenging emotions, teachers can help students to develop into better problem-solvers, critical thinkers, and collaborators.

Manu Kapur, the pioneering researcher behind the theory of productive failure, told Edutopia recently that the urge to jump in and make learning easier when students struggle is instinctive. But sometimes, our best intentions put us on the wrong side of learning.

When students are stuck, they feel all sorts of emotions-shame, guilt, and frustration, for example, Kapur says. But his research demonstrates that believing positive emotions are always positive for learning, and negative emotions are always negative for learning, simply isn't true.

"I think good teaching happens when you control that impulse [to help struggling students]," Kapur said. "Any kind of knowledge work, any kind of challenging problem requires a certain level of frustration," he asserts, sensibly. "In fact, if you're not feeling those things, that means you're probably not learning."

Taken together, the insights point to the importance of planning and designing your curriculum to regularly showcase challenging work that pushes students up against their limits and results in high levels of failure. That means sequencing work carefully so that students aren't constantly overwhelmed-some work should be relatively easy-but it also means priming your students for this work by creating a supportive classroom environment and teaching your students to view and respond to failure in a healthier way.
CREATING THE RIGHT CLASSROOM ENVIRONMENT
Here are some strategies to get you started.

1. Create a strong relationship with students. Be forthright about your goals. Explain the purpose of presenting them with challenging work, and why you believe they can succeed at it-despite the uncomfortable feelings that may arise in the process.

Research demonstrates that the most effective teachers build rigorous classroom environments by getting to know their students, being approachable, and showing that they themselves truly enjoy the work-and then deftly translating emotional capital into academic capital. "When students feel teachers care about them, they work harder, engage in more challenging academic activities, behave more appropriately for the school environment, are genuinely happy to see their teacher, and meet or exceed their teacher's expectations," the researchers concluded.

2. Be an advocate for errors. Mistakes might be embarrassing to start with, but you can take the sting out by regularly explaining that excellence in all fields of life is achieved through trying and failing. Some teachers in Edutopia's community make intentional mistakes very publicly and reward students for finding them, while others take the most common mistakes the class made on a test or quiz and analyze them together, or even ask students to debate which common, but wrong answer, is " more right "-which creates the opportunity to tease out important subtleties and normalizes errors.

3. Encourage 'rough draft' thinking. Create a new mindset for students: Explain that the initial work they do to solve a difficult problem is just their "rough draft" thinking. Amanda Jansen, author of Rough Draft Talk in Mathematics Classrooms, writes that this simple shift can ease pressure off of students and encourage them to take academic risks. You can also build reflection into this mental model-similar to how a writer might reflect on a first draft-as a method of taking stock of what a student got wrong and helping them to think through how they might go about fixing it in the future.

4. Grade less, teach more. Correcting every single mistake can make a classroom feel like a pressure cooker, according to research. Consider assigning more work-including work that will challenge students-and formally grading it less often. Students will be more likely to experiment, take risks, and produce a greater volume of high-quality work.

5. Use student passions to promote risk-taking. Try using surveys and other get-to-know-you activities to gain insights about what your students are passionate about. In addition to solidifying relationships, it will also allow you to use some of those topics to develop engaging, responsive lessons.
INTEGRATING CHALLENGING WORK IN THE CLASSROOM
Research shows that people are better at learning information they are already curious about. In fact, researchers found that the teaching of detailed material that is not of broad interest to students might "be best done in the context of instruction on topics that students are highly motivated to learn."

1. Design for failure. Instead of giving students problems and activities that they can easily handle, Kapur argues for "productive failure" lessons that include carefully designed tasks "just beyond students' reach." Students will likely fail in the process of trying to accomplish the assignment and generate many incorrect ideas and solutions.

Use this approach at key junctures during the school year, according to Kapur-when a particularly crucial concept is being learned, for example-and allow the failure to go on for 35 to 40 minutes before stepping in, building off of students' ideas and solutions, comparing and contrasting them, and finally teaching the correct concept. The idea is to explore challenging concepts with students in a safe way, so that "over time they learn how to deal with it," and productive failure becomes the norm. In the end, we want kids to realize: "Okay, I'm stuck. This is normal. I need to do something about it," Kapur concludes.

2. Try pre-testing. A great way to conduct a formative assessment about what students know-and don't know-about a new lesson is to give them a quick low-stakes or ungraded quiz on the subject before they start learning about it. This will result in high rates of failure and might be a bit uncomfortable, of course, but it can help students identify the gaps in understanding that they'll need to pay close attention to as they continue learning the material.

3. Debate before you're truly ready. Recent research building off of Kapur's work suggests that letting students debate topics prior to teacher instruction is one easy way to prime them for deeper engagement. Debating also strengthens critical thinking and collaboration skills, as well as organization and presentation skills.

Debates can explore tough topics, such as an ethical issue embedded in a piece of literature they're reading, or the validity of the theory of evolution. You can also ask students to apply their understanding of concepts to big new areas of inquiry-for example, students might try to use their incipient knowledge of biodiversity to debate whether recycling programs are enough to reduce plastic pollution.

4. Expose students to challenging, subject-specific texts. Create opportunities for students to read and grapple with challenging disciplinary-specific texts that experts might read on a regular basis. Spark interest by giving the learning experience a purpose. For example, students might be given a complex chemistry question and related text, and be asked to write an explanation of their solution using the discipline-specific language a chemist would use. The exercise will be challenging, but it will also help students see themselves as active participants in the field they're studying-rather than receivers of knowledge.

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Hard School Work and the Right Kind of Anxiety

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Not all feelings of self-doubt and anxiety are antithetical to learning. In fact, confusion and frustration can be fruitful-and drive deeper learning.

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Students often struggle to work effectively in groups, and this framework can alleviate common problems.

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A Simple Way to Build Rich Tasks for Group Work

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A Simple Way to Build Rich Tasks for Group Work

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A Simple Way to Build Rich Tasks for Group Work

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Students often struggle to work effectively in groups, and this framework can alleviate common problems.

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OK, look. We need to have a talk. A lot of you are out there giving lectures, presentations, and workshops, and your slideshows need work. Maybe not all of them, but definitely most. I thought I got the message out there a few years ago when I urged people to read Presentation Zen, the book that forever changed my own slideshows. But I didn't have much of an audience back then, and since that time I've seen far too many PowerPoints and other slideshow presentations that still appear to be suffering from some very fixable problems.

So I'm going back in. I've put together a list of seven things you can do to make your slideshows better. A lot better. Here we go.

1. Put it in Presentation Mode (please!!)

I can't count the number of times I've sat down to listen to a presentation, and watched in horror as the presenter simply scrolled through the slides while still in editing mode, where the featured slide takes up about half the screen, the thumbnails of the other slides are visible on the left, and the editing toolbar is still visible across the top. No no no no nooooo!!!

A PowerPoint in editing mode. Do not give your presentation in editing mode.

In both PowerPoint and Google Slides, there's a button you can click to put your slide deck in presentation mode, where the entire screen is filled with just one slide and the animations work as they are supposed to. Doing this gives the audience a rich, full-screen experience with each slide, one at a time, which is much more pleasing than looking at the back end of it all.

The same PowerPoint slide in slideshow mode. Much better. Do this.

To find presentation mode in PowerPoint, click Slide Show on the top menu, then choose From Beginning or From Current Slide. In Google Slides, go to the top right and look for the Present button. From there, you'll have several options for putting your slideshow in fullscreen mode.

2. Cut Way Back on Your Text

Slides are meant to supplement and enhance your presentation, to provide visual interest and add new dimensions to your message. If your presentation is going to be memorable, the audience should get something from both you AND the slides. The slides themselves shouldn't BE the presentation.

This seems like common sense, but somehow we have arrived at a place where many, many presenters use the slideshow to deliver the whole presentation: They put ALL the information on the slides and assign themselves the role of simply dictating that information to the audience. Once your audience realizes this is what you're going to do for every slide, they immediately start looking for ways to occupy their brains for the foreseeable future.

A slide with lots and lots and LOTS of text.

I can hear your protests now: But I have information to give my audience! If it's not on the slide, they may not remember it. Even more importantly, I MIGHT NOT REMEMBER IT EITHER!

Not to worry. Here are some specific ways you can pull text OFF of your slides while still giving the exact same amount of information to your audience:

Shorten Your Bullet Points

Instead of writing long sentences or phrases on your slides, try sticking to just short phrases. Then use the notes panel to script out what you're going to actually say. You can either print out the notes and keep the printout nearby while you present, or when you put your slideshow in presentation mode, you should be able to set it up so that you can see the notes panel, but your audience can't, allowing you to follow the script without reading directly off the slides. Ideally, if you have rehearsed your presentation enough, you should be able to do this without really reading the notes verbatim.

This slide contains the same items as the slide above, but the definitions have been removed.
The presenter can simply explain the definitions, then include them in a handout.

Make More Slides

Take one slide that has a lot of information and spread that text over several slides, rather than cramming it all together on one. In other words, instead of one slide that has five bullet points, create a whole section of your presentation that has five different slides, each of which illustrates a separate item from that original bulleted list.

Create a Handout

Many presenters and instructors want to put lots of information on their slides so they can provide those slides to students or audience members after the presentation, for reference. This is a recipe for awful slides. If you want your audience to be able to access your content later, provide a handout that summarizes your main points. The handout could also be provided right along with your presentation, as it would help English learners, students with hearing difficulties, and others follow along better.

This handout can be in paper or digital form. A PDF works well for this purpose, because it can be opened on most devices, regardless of platform.

To distribute a PDF handout, store it on a cloud-based platform like Google Drive or Dropbox, create a sharing link to the file, then shorten that link with a site like Bitly, put the link inside a QR code, or both, and provide these to your audience after the presentation so they can grab the handout for themselves.

3. Update Your Assets

One of the simplest ways to improve your slideshows is to update outdated artwork and fonts.

This slide has outdated clip art and uses Comic Sans, which is arguably the most maligned font
in the history of fonts. But there's more to know about Comic Sans-see below.

Fonts. You can literally download thousands of fonts for free from sites like dafont and install them right into PowerPoint. If you're using Google Slides, you can choose from the nearly 1,000 fonts Google has licensed for use in G Suite tools. But don't go crazy: Only use the fun, decorative fonts for things like titles. Stick to simpler, easier-to-read fonts for headings and body text. This article from Visual Hackers offers a detailed overview of choosing fonts for presentations.

A note on making slides more accessible for people with disabilities: Comic Sans, the font used in the above slide, has been widely criticized for its outdated look, but it also happens to be one of the most readable fonts for people with dyslexia, so you may choose to keep it for that reason, or switch to another more readable font. It is also recommended that you use 40+ font size for titles and 20+ for main text. Learn more about making slideshows more readable here.

The same slide with updated graphics and font. Ahhh.

Artwork. The clip art that so many of us used in the past is really starting to look out of date. Now we have so many free visuals available to us online. I recommend you either go with free stock photos from sites like Pixabay or Unsplash, or simple icons that can be found right inside PowerPoint or added into Google Slides with an add-on like Insert Icons for Slides. If you go searching online for images, be sure to educate yourself about the legal and ethical use of images you find online.

4. Create Previews and Signposts

It's difficult to sit through a presentation when you really have no idea how long it's going to be or how many major points are going to be covered. If you let your audience know they are in the capable hands of a presenter who has put together a well-organized presentation, they'll be able to relax and concentrate on your message.

A preview slide lets attendees know where you're headed.

You can accomplish this by offering a preview of your presentation at the beginning. This can be a simple slide that lists the major topics you're going to cover. Then, as you move through the presentation, update them by returning to that list and showing them where you are.

5. Go Light on the Animations

Most tools offer huge collections of animations you can use in your slideshows: You can have bullet points explode onto your slides, bring a picture in with a slow, dramatic spin, and fade from one slide to the next with a checkerboard effect. It's all really neat-o.

Unfortunately, for your audience it gets old pretty fast. Ideally, they should be focused on your words, not on the way those words bounce onto the screen. So when it comes to animations, less is definitely more.

I have found that the most effective use of animations is to "build" slides that contain several elements. For example, if you have a slide that contains several bullet points or images, and you plan to talk about each one separately, set up your animations so that each item only appears when you're ready to talk about it, triggered by a click of your mouse or a presenter's remote ( this is the one I've used for years now). Doing this keeps your audience from reading ahead so they can focus only on the point you're currently talking about. A simple choice like "appear" or "fade" in PowerPoint does the trick nicely for this type of animation.

6. Keep Things Consistent

Within each slide and from slide to slide, do whatever you can to keep your elements consistent. Doing so will make your presentation look much more professional, which will give you more confidence as a speaker and will give your audience a lot more confidence in you.

Fonts: Stick with one style for your headings and one for your body text. You could do a third for your more decorative elements, like large titles or divider pages. Ideally, these elements will be the same size from page to page.

Colors: Choose just a few colors for your slideshow and keep them the same throughout.

Other design elements: If you are using photographs, try to go with similar styles throughout the presentation. If you're using icons, use other icons of similar colors on multiple slides.

7. Proofread...Out Loud

This is one of the hardest things to make yourself do, but it is probably the thing that will make the biggest difference: Go through your slides and read them out loud. No, reading it carefully in your head is not the same. Do it out loud. I promise you will catch at least one error.

This is not the same as practicing your presentation; that you should definitely do multiple times if you want to do a good job in front of an audience. But if you really want to catch those embarrassing spelling, punctuation, and other mechanical errors, the only way to find them is to read your slides out loud.

Need Some Fresh Templates?

I have just created a set of four slideshow templates that you might want to get for yourself. They're available in PowerPoint for Windows and Google Slides. Each one contains 27 different slide designs, and they also come with a separate template for a 2-page handout, styled to look similar to the slideshow, so you can create a PDF to accompany your presentation.

The templates also come with a collection of video tutorials that show you exactly how to customize them for your use. Click on each design below to preview the whole template, or scroll to the bottom to get the bundle of all four designs at a discount!

Come back for more.
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These simple creativity challenges can encourage students to have the mindset of an artist, a designer, and a change-maker.

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These simple creativity challenges can encourage students to have the mindset of an artist, a designer, and a change-maker.

We're living in an era when the thinking process is becoming increasingly more important in a student's learning journey: the ability to be reflective, adaptable, flexible, and nimble during times of constant change.

While an answer, statistic, or other random "product" can be found by simply asking the ever-growing breadth of artificial intelligence options, the process of creative and critical thinking cannot.

How might we shift toward a culture of thinking that's process oriented in our learning spaces? What types of thinking would be most beneficial during a constant state of flux? Here are three ways of thinking that can help prepare students for career, life, and, most important, humanity.

Thinking like an artist

In a world that's moving at breakneck speed, thinking like an artist is about slowing down to uncover the nuance, complexity, and emotion of the world around us. Thinking like an artist is about developing the skills for meaningful expression. Adapted from the Columbus Museum of Art's Making Creativity Visible project, this process focuses on the dispositions inherent in thinking like an artist.

Artists are playful and imaginative, and they experiment with ideas. They generate original ideas and approach the world with an insatiable curiosity. They're comfortable with ambiguity and persist through failure. They value questioning, collaboration, and reflection. They communicate ideas and celebrate the beauty of thinking in unique and whimsical ways. What if you asked students to think like an artist in your learning space? What would that look, sound, and feel like?

Imagine if you asked students to find an object in the room and to write a series of questions they would like to ask the object. Then have them pick a question and answer it from the object's perspective. Ask the students to use some simple materials like tape, paper, and scissors to make something connected to the answer they came up with.

This is a quick creativity challenge that can help create the conditions for students to think more like an artist in your space. If we want students to slow down and be more playful with their thinking, we must give them opportunities to exercise these dispositions.

Thinking like a designer

We currently have a surplus of problems facing our world. Our students see, hear, and/or feel the problems that surround us every day. Imagine if we asked our students to think like a designer in our learning spaces. What if we facilitated learning experiences as an opportunity to identify and solve problems?

Designers find inspiration in the people, questions, and problems of their community. They use this inspiration to generate human-centered ideas. Designers prototype and implement a variety of possible solutions. They reflect and iterate on these solutions until they find one that has a lasting and meaningful impact on those most closely connected to the problem. Inspired from the work of IDEO, a design firm in Palo Alto, California, thinking like a designer can help students see how learning can be a more collective act, as opposed to the more individualistic one common throughout schools today.

How might you create space in your classroom to empower students to think more like a designer? Imagine if you had the students at the beginning of the year write down one worry they had about the upcoming year on a sticky note. Next they each found a partner and shared their worry. You gave them the time to conduct an empathy interview to get a better understanding of the worry. Then, with simple materials like tape, paper, string, scissors, and markers, you tasked them with designing an artifact that would help relieve some of the stress of their classmate's worry. After students completed their artifact, they took turns sharing the artifact, its meaning, and how it addressed the worry of a classmate.

The purpose of this creativity challenge is to recognize the power in thinking like a designer -finding inspiration in those around us and gathering ideas from deep, meaningful conversation and creating solutions that matter to others.

Thinking like a change agent

One element we need more of in our schools is meaning. Students know that much of what they're learning is isolated and devoid of meaning. They know that the majority of what they're learning is to satisfy state measured assessments. What if we asked students to think more like an agent of change in our learning spaces? What might that look, sound, and feel like?

Pulling from the work of the Columbus Museum of Art and Project Zero's Cultivating Creative and Civic Capacities project, I and my colleagues have identified some essential dispositions of thinking like a change agent. Change agents must be able to imagine a more beautiful, just, and sustainable world for everyone. They must be able to slow down to investigate the complexity of taking action. They must be able to harness the power of influence to inspire change. Lastly, they must be able to explore the tensions between the individual and the collective society we all live in.

How might you create the conditions in your learning space for students to think like a change agent? Imagine if you took your students on a noticing stroll around the campus or community. What if you asked them to identify meaningful issues, problems, or questions that they observed along the way, and to investigate some of these noticings to dig deeper into the interconnected nature of the causes and impact and where there might be opportunities for transformation?

Students could then take time to imagine new possibilities. How might your students design possibilities that influence others to take action and enable student experiences to be more beautiful, just, and sustainable?

The purpose of this creativity challenge is to help provide a process for students to find meaning by thinking like a change agent. What if we moved from maintaining the status quo to challenging it?

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Tips for Guiding Students to Think Creatively

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These simple creativity challenges can encourage students to have the mindset of an artist, a designer, and a change-maker.

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Small but purposeful classroom shifts can nudge kids from passive learning into active participation, giving them a stake in the game.

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Propelling Students Beyond ‘Doing School’

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Propelling Students Beyond ‘Doing School’

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Many students aren't very engaged in their learning, according to a recent survey of nearly 300,000 high schoolers-and close to half say they're merely "doing school," but not finding it particularly enjoyable or valuable.

"These kids turn up. They do their homework. They get good-enough grades. They comply, which in academic terms means they're behaviorally engaged," write journalist Jenny Anderson and Rebecca Winthrop, the Brookings Institution's global education expert, in the 2025 book The Disengaged Teen. "But they're not investing in what they're learning, nor are they that interested in trying to make sense of it."

To break the passivity habit, students need opportunities to " claim ownership of their learning," writes eighth-grade language arts teacher James Salsich. In classrooms focused on active learning, work is frequently student-driven and collaborative, requiring teachers to "give some portion of the authority that has traditionally been theirs over to students," Salsich says. "Students, on the other hand, take increased ownership for the direction and progress of their learning."

Shifting classrooms toward a more student-centered model doesn't require rewriting the entire script, experts argue. In fact, even minor tweaks in everyday teacher language, for example, can have a significant impact on student buy-in, according to psychologist and motivation researcher Johnmarshall Reeve. "When students are allowed some opportunity to take their own initiative, they are more engaged in class and better able to master new skills, they have better grades and fewer problems with peers-and they are happier, too," wrote Anderson and Winthrop earlier this year in the New York Times.

Still, allowing students more agency doesn't mean "letting them do whatever they want," Anderson and Winthrop caution. "It doesn't mean lowering expectations, turning education into entertainment or allowing children to choose their own adventure." Instead, it involves a concerted effort to challenge kids to set and pursue goals, while "helping them build strategies to reach those goals, assessing their progress and guiding them to course-correct when they fall short."

A Foundation for Agency

Cultivating student independence "honors their capacity to surprise us with their insights, resilience, and creativity," writes educational consultant Lainie Rowell. The goal isn't to step away, instead, it involves " shifting how we support, moving from rescuing to empowering."

Position experts: High school English teacher Marcus Luther begins each school year by asking students to articulate their values and preferences via a short index card survey. The exercise positions kids as active experts on themselves whose input will shape the classroom. This same principle applies when creating classroom norms, writes lead innovation designer Amy Adams. Involving students in establishing the expectations they'll learn and work by creates a sense of ownership for kids from the start.

Set expectations: Becoming active learners isn't necessarily something students know how to do. Asking them to co-create and sign learning contracts-a document that "outlines actions the learner promises to take in a course to achieve academic success"-can clarify how they might take charge of their learning, writes Todd Finley, a professor of English education at East Carolina University. For example: "I will contribute at least one comment to every in-class discussion."

Shift responsibility: Rather than be the sole judge of who is actively learning, Luther turns the mirror toward students, regularly asking them to assess their own engagement. On a scale of one to five, with five being super active, "How active a learner are you at this point?," he asks. "It's okay if you want that to change!"

Similarly, students often view the work of tracking their academic progress as the teacher's role, but shifting some of this responsibility back to the learner can empower students to take the reins. Middle school social studies teacher Erin Merrill has her students independently track their own progress using kid-friendly language in data notebooks. "My students tell me they really like seeing what they have to learn, which isn't something they're given in a lot of classes, and they like having that visual of how they're doing, especially growing over the course of the year," she tells EdWeek.

Tapping Student Expertise

Some students find it challenging to recognize the skills they already possess, particularly those who've struggled consistently in academic settings. "If you've never felt successful at something, how do you know it's possible?" asks instructional coach Tyler Rablin in his recent book, Hacking Student Motivation.

Celebrate small wins: Helping students see and celebrate their small wins -like mastering a specific skill or grasping a difficult concept-can build confidence and demonstrate expertise, even if it's emerging. When high school English teacher Cathleen Beachboard sees students progressing, she writes a quick Hope Note to leave on their desk. "It might say something like, 'I see how hard you're working-it's paying off! Keep going,'" she explains.

Keep track: Ask students to select a work sample each week that represents a milestone in their learning and keep it in a folder. A student who struggles in math may discover through this portfolio reflection-reviewing collected work to identify patterns of strength and growth-that they have a clear grasp of adding and subtracting fractions, for example, which builds confidence.

Ask your neighbor: "When the teacher is the only one in the room with the knowledge, there is a bottleneck," explains Peter Johnston, a former elementary teacher and author of Choice Words: How Our Language Affects Children's Learning. Often, when students encounter a roadblock, they don't actually need the teacher's perspective, says second grade teacher Angela Coleman. With the Ask 3 Before Me strategy, students must seek help from three peers before approaching the teacher. Stepping back shows students they're "capable of answering their own questions and knowing what to do if they can't instead of always relying on an adult," Coleman says.

I see how hard you're working-it's paying off! Keep going.

High school English teacher Cathleen Beachboard writes "Hope Notes" and leaves them on students' desks when she sees them progressing.

Encourage peer review: In elementary math specialist Louisa Connaughton's classroom, when students are done solving math problems, they check their answers with each other, not her. "Because students are less reliant on me and more reliant on each other, I am freed up to work with more focus with students who really need my support," she explains. If students find their answers are different, they are motivated to pool their expertise and work together to figure out how or why they got different responses.

Language Shifts That Pack a Punch

Language used with students doesn't just convey information, it shapes the learning dynamic, Johnston writes. "We cannot persistently ask questions of children without becoming one-who-asks-questions and placing children in the position of the one-who-answers-questions." Language, when used intentionally, can both describe and shape the role students play in the classroom-while positioning them as competent, valuable contributors and legitimate sources of insight who will drive their learning forward.

Confer competence: Elementary school teacher Laurie McCarthy notices when students help each other, for example, "which they do automatically (without awareness) when they are engaged," Johnston says. But rather than let these moments pass, she highlights their value to the learning community. This "builds students' sense of agency, and makes available the language they will need to explain it," Johnston notes. Then McCarthy invites the student to teach the strategy to the class, a quick and simple act that "confers an enormous sense of competence while distributing the knowledge and establishing classmates as bona fide sources of information." Small shifts like this can accumulate over time into something powerful: a ripple effect in how students see themselves and their role in the learning process.

Speak, think, and write like a...: It's not enough to simply label students scientists, or mathematicians, Johnston notes. Students must actively inhabit these identities, understanding "what scientists (or mathematicians or authors) do, how they talk and act." High school history teacher Benjamin Barbour challenges his students to choose a modern-day artifact and adopt a historian's mindset, for example, imagining what future historians might infer about our society from this object centuries from now. This engages students in the actual work of historians as they "make hypotheses about a society from its material culture and weigh how different interpretations of historical objects can shape our understanding of the past."

In the science classroom, educational consultant Eric Rhoades has moved away from the I Do, We Do, You Do model in favor of more iterative processes that mirror " how scientists develop theories." Thinking routines like See, Think, Wonder challenge students to occupy the role of researchers as they analyze, observe, interpret, and question scientific phenomena. "If and when they get stuck during a thinking routine," Rhoades says, remind them that persisting through uncertainty is exactly what real scientists do and that breakthroughs come from working through that confusion, not avoiding it.

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Propelling Students Beyond 'Doing School'

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Small but purposeful classroom shifts can nudge kids from passive learning into active participation, giving them a stake in the game.

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Student Motivation Checklist - Dave Stuart Jr

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Student Motivation Checklist - Dave Stuart Jr

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PDF checklist for tracking student motivation in the classroom.

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Student Motivation Checklist - Dave Stuart Jr.pdf

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Replacing or supplementing your lessons with instructional videos has a large impact on student learning, the research shows.

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6 Research-Backed Reasons to Record Important Lessons

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6 Research-Backed Reasons to Record Important Lessons

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After teaching high school math for years, Kareem Farah realized that lecturing in front of his students wasn't working particularly well-he was a bottleneck, he had come to realize, a talking head who was reaching, at best, a handful of students at any given time. Worse, pacing was a problem that a simple change of speed wouldn't solve: Slow it down and the lecture would bore most of the kids; go too fast and other students would fall behind.

Farah, a teacher at a Title I high school in Washington, D.C., also noticed that when his students missed a few classes, it set them up to fall behind for the rest of the year. In response, he began recording his lessons on video to give his students a way to access the material from anywhere.

Getting in front of the camera intimidated him at first, but Farah quickly realized that readily available tools made the process fairly painless and didn't require much tech savvy. He created his first instructional videos by using a mic and a screen-casting program-such as Explain Everything-to record his lecture over informative slides. He then uploaded his video to Edpuzzle, which allowed him to embed questions to check for understanding.

The strategy was so effective that he taught whole units this way. "Once the lecture bottleneck is removed," Farah says, teachers can "rethink many of the other rigid constraints that have defined most instructional delivery models." His students could even watch his lectures at home and proceed to the next lesson once they mastered a concept, allowing them to move at their own pace while freeing him up to roam the classroom and tailor instruction to students' individual needs.

Here are six research-backed reasons why you should consider recording (at least some of) your lessons.

SHORT VIDEOS ALIGN WITH KNOWN ATTENTIONAL LIMITS

Instructional videos allow you to break up a longer lesson into several smaller ones-increasing the likelihood that students will be able to sustain attention and commit what they're learning to memory. They also provide natural breaks during study time, which we've argued are dramatically underutilized in the classroom.

Think about where to break your lessons. "It is recommended that teachers should make the videos as short as possible, but one complete knowledge point should be contained in one video," the researchers in the 2022 study suggest.

VIDEO LIBRARIES ENABLE SELF-PACED LEARNING

The asynchronous, always-on nature of video libraries solves many of the sequencing issues that plague teachers: how to reincorporate students after absences, what to do with kids who need to revisit a foundational concept, or how to differentiate between students.

Accessing a library at different entry points-skipping ahead or revisiting previous lessons-is a built-in advantage of video learning, and it allows students to self-pace while freeing the teacher to circulate and troubleshoot with individual students. In a 2019 study, researchers concluded that students "learn better when multimedia instructions are presented in (meaningful and coherent) learner-paced segments, rather than as continuous units." That's because the ability to control the pace of videos provides more time for processing or reviewing information, allowing students to "adapt the presentation pace to their individual needs."

Being able to control a single video's playback in real time, meanwhile-by pausing and rewinding-allows "students to regulate their cognitive load, leading to better learning," researchers conclude in a 2021 study. "This ability to self-pace has been previously identified as a key feature contributing to the success of online learning, more generally."

VIDEOS SUPPORT RICH FORMATIVE ASSESSMENT-ASYNCHRONOUSLY AND AT SCALE

Modern tools for video creation and distribution take advantage of built-in auditing systems that collect valuable data about what's working for your students, and what's not. Better, they can do it asynchronously, and they often provide ready-made charts and graphs that simplify formative assessment-like trying to determine a student's on-task behavior.

Other tools allow you to test for specific knowledge. "Embedding questions in your instructional video using programs like Edpuzzle can improve student interaction and provide you with invaluable formative assessment data," explain Farah and educational technology expert Robert Barnett.

VIDEOS SUPPORT FLEXIBLE REVIEW (AND RE-REVIEW)

That last point is a significant one. A 2011 study found that even when students were encouraged to ask questions, they frequently avoided raising their hands and interrupting the teacher, largely out of politeness and a desire to keep the classroom running smoothly.

A video library gives students "the ability to access the content when it is needed, such as when they are reviewing and preparing for exams," a time when the need for retrieval of information is particularly crucial, explains Nisha Malhotra, a professor of economics at the University of British Columbia. After creating a series of instructional videos based on his lectures, he surveyed his students and discovered that a majority of them watched the videos at least twice-a strong signal that a single lecture would not have sufficed.

VIDEOS ALLOW KIDS TO REPLAY 'THE MUDDIEST POINT'

"Sometimes it's helpful to see if students understand why something is incorrect or why a concept is hard," writes educator Laura Thomas. Asking students to explain "the muddiest points" is a common way to address "where things got confusing or particularly difficult."

In practice, though, students may not feel comfortable raising their hand to ask the teacher to go over the concept again during class time.

Failing to master a challenging but foundational concept, meanwhile, can wreak havoc on the rest of the quarter. When students watch videos at home, they can rewind as often as necessary, reviewing concepts they find confusing while jotting down questions to discuss with their peers or teacher. A 2022 study concluded that even a simple pause button helped students to "prevent cognitive overload," significantly easing the task "of paying continuous attention to a steady stream of new information that has to be integrated with existing knowledge structures."

VIDEOS DRAMATICALLY IMPROVE CONTENT CLARITY AND IMPACT

You think you're giving a brilliant, off-the-cuff example that ties everything together, but when you see yourself on video, you realize that the connections you made aren't as clear as you thought. Videos tend to improve lectures because they give you plenty of time to organize your thoughts and allow you to watch yourself and fix the inconsistencies and logical leaps that are often sprinkled through an in-person lecture.

While in-person lessons can be thrown off-track by digressions and distractions, videos are more time-efficient and allow teachers to "make content more coherent, and add design principles that they would not perfectly execute in class (e.g., timing key points with slides; highlighting important information)," researchers explain in a 2021 study. They discovered that teachers were more likely to "prioritize core content" when making videos, editing out irrelevant details that diverted students from the learning objectives.

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6 Research-Backed Reasons to Record Important Lessons

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Replacing or supplementing your lessons with instructional videos has a large impact on student learning, the research shows.

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Small, daily shifts in the way middle and high school teachers ask questions can boost student engagement.

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How Teachers Can Cultivate Curiosity Among Middle and High School Students

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How Teachers Can Cultivate Curiosity Among Middle and High School Students

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Small, daily shifts in the way middle and high school teachers ask questions can boost student engagement.

I'm not naturally inclined to visit art galleries. Yet, when I visit an art gallery, I get curious. I ask questions such as, what will be the overarching theme, and what will surprise me? After I view a piece of art, I try to determine how close my predictions of the purpose of the piece align with the artist's statement. I use inquiry to activate my curiosity even when the experience is not my initial preference.

In a seven-period day, kids are likely not going to be stoked for every single period. They are likely visiting a few of their own "art galleries" per day. So, how do we cultivate curiosity when students are not necessarily intrinsically motivated about the context or content we find ourselves engaged in?

While I think we are all naturally curious, our curiosity is usually tapered by our intrinsic interest in something. Moreover, our curiosity only goes so far. The brain naturally centers on memory rather than critical thinking. As such, we fall to our memory rather than rise to new or deeper thinking. How then can we create meaningful curiosity around challenging content? I think it's all about daily habits.

Macro- and Micro-inquiry

To cultivate curiosity with learners, we often center our efforts on "macro-inquiry" approaches such as running complex problems or projects, giving students a driving or essential question, using protocols (e.g., jigsaw), or giving students tasks in which they work in groups. Macro-inquiry sets the stage for curiosity but doesn't sustain curiosity over time.

Micro-inquiry is all about small, doable practices that students engage in several times a day to cultivate curiosity. When we ask a question and give students time to process it, prompt them to dig deeper with their initial responses, prime them to evaluate the ideas of others, or push them to evaluate the differences from their initial thinking and the ideas conveyed by the teacher and their peers, we are engaging in micro-inquiry.

Macro-inquiry is starting a fire; micro-inquiry is keeping the fire going.

This changing of focus from macro- to micro-inquiry makes quite a difference in student learning. Research over the past 15 years has shown that "active" rather than "facilitative" teaching strategies make a big difference. This is why project-based learning (PBL) is less impactful than rigorous PBL, which requires more specific, daily instructional and feedback strategies at all levels of learning. It's the daily actions that matter most in the classroom.

So, what can we do to embed micro-inquiry into our classrooms? Let's take a look at a few approaches.

Strategies to Initiate Curiosity

Think again: Ask students to form one or more guesses to a prompt (e.g., What do you think is the answer to this problem? What is your hunch on a potential solution to this problem?) before they start an activity, rank those guesses, and prepare to check their guesses in the middle and end of the activity. Then, they should compare their initial thinking with their current understanding.

Scaffold the start: Start with guided inquiry before open-ended questions. Lay out a number of questions up front, and ask students which one they want to ask or how they would change the question to be more interesting.

Praise the pause: State the following before you expect students to respond to a question: "I'm about to ask you about X-prepare to respond to the question with an answer, an answer and an example to support your idea, or a different question." Giving students an opportunity to process their thinking with you and their peers is helpful.

Strategies to Keep Curiosity Going

Students reflect on the question in writing ("in"- inward focus),

turn and talk with a partner ("2"-pair share), and

then hold a discussion with the class (out).

In2out: Structure inquiry by following these steps:

Pass the questions around: When you ask your class a question, make sure at least five students answer before you respond.

Four corners: When there is more than one answer that emerges from students, ask them to move to different parts of the room to identify their preference. They should discuss why they chose their selection and move around the room if they change their mind.

Strategies to Deepen Curiosity

Present deepening prompts: Move questions outside the default "what" and "how" to "should," "to what extent," "where," and "when." For example, rather than just asking "What is environmental racism?" you can ask where we see it occurring in our communities. In lieu of asking, "How do we address environmental racism?" you can ask, "When do solutions that mitigate environmental racism work effectively, and when do they fail?"

Keep inquiry going: Prompting all responses from students with "What makes you say that?" or "Where would I find out if you are correct?" pushes them to seek out their own rationale and precision in thinking.

Cue transfer: Ask students to think about their thinking. Questions may include: How does the process of questioning in this classroom extend to other environments, and how do you stay curious when things are hard and/or boring?

While none of these strategies are likely earth-shattering, the novelty lies in the sustained use of these practices over time. How do we sustain these practices in three months' time, at 2:30 on a Friday afternoon, and Monday morning after a holiday break?

As writer James Clear states, "We never rise to our goals, we fall to our systems." When we set up "macro-inquiry" with the goals of curiosity, we often fall short. We desire curiosity to be ignited through an emotional cue, when small habits will enable students to behave their way into curiosity over time. Start with and stick with micro-inquiry habits each day, and see if curiosity becomes a habit for your students.

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Cultivating Curiosity Among Older Students

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Small, daily shifts in the way middle and high school teachers ask questions can boost student engagement.

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When done right, lectures remain an invaluable tool for building student knowledge. Here’s the research on how to optimize your time in front of the class.

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8 Evidence-Based Tips to Make Your Lectures More Engaging—and Memorable

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8 Evidence-Based Tips to Make Your Lectures More Engaging—and Memorable

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8 Evidence-Based Tips to Make Your Lectures More Engaging—and Memorable

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When done right, lectures remain an invaluable tool for building student knowledge. Here’s the research on how to optimize your time in front of the class.

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Two factors have given lectures a bad name: overuse and poor execution. Let's deal with both.

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Listen to the interview with Catlin Tucker:
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The pandemic pushed many educators out of their comfort zones as the teaching and learning landscape shifted beneath their feet. Teachers experimented with new technology tools, learning platforms, and instructional strategies to engage students online, in concurrent classrooms, and on hybrid schedules.

Those who relied primarily on the whole group, teacher-led model quickly discovered that talking for extended periods of time in a video conferencing session failed to engage learners. Students were no longer in a physical learning environment where teachers had a high degree of control. Instead, students had control. They decided whether they turned on their cameras, unmuted to participate in lessons, or completed assignments. The pandemic exposed the shortcomings of the whole-group approach to instruction.

By contrast, educators using blended learning prior to the pandemic had a smoother transition online because they were comfortable using technology to disseminate information, organize resources, and engage students.

Even though many educators are back in physical classrooms this year, blended learning models provide us with powerful structures we can use to weave together online and offline learning to position students at the center of the learning process. Instead of reverting back to a teacher-led, whole-group instructional model, blended learning offers a range of models that free us from the front of the room and allow us to work directly with individual and small groups of learners.

Blended Learning Defined

Blended learning is the combination of active, engaged learning online combined with active, engaged learning offline to provide students with more control over the time, place, pace, and path of their learning. This adapted version of Staker and Horn's (2012) often cited definition is rooted in constructivist principles. It emphasizes the student's role as an active agent in the learning process. They must be doing, making, thinking, discussing, questioning, problem-solving, collaborating, and reflecting.

This combination of online and offline learning can take many forms. For example, we can shift some direct instruction online via videos, allowing students to self-pace through lectures and mini-lessons. We can design a mix of online and offline learning stations that students rotate through, creating time for small group differentiated instruction or feedback sessions. The various models provide different avenues for combining online and offline learning, so we can select the best instructional approach to meeting specific student needs and ensuring all learners make progress toward learning objectives.

The "WHY" of Blended Learning

Teachers need a mindset, skill set, and tool set that allows them to navigate any educational landscape confidently. Blended learning offers educators this flexibility because the models work in a classroom, online, or a combination of the two. In addition to being flexible, blended learning addresses two aspects of education that will never change: a) learner variability and b) technology.

First, learner variability is the norm, not the exception. Students will always be different from one another in terms of their skills, needs, preferences, backgrounds, language proficiencies, and interests. If we want to make learning accessible and equitable, why would we use a one-size-fits-all lesson to teach a diverse group of learners? Instead, we must architect learning experiences that strive to remove barriers and provide flexible pathways so all students make progress toward firm, standard-aligned goals.

Second, technology has permeated every aspect of our society. We can use technology to shift students to the center of learning, giving them more opportunities to make decisions about what they learn, how they learn, and what they create to demonstrate their learning. Blended learning fundamentally shifts the teacher and student roles in a classroom. Educators shift from experts at the front of the room to facilitators working with students, and students shift from passive consumers to active agents. These shifts have a powerful impact on the quality of learning and the quality of relationships in a classroom.

The "why" driving my work has shifted as my work has evolved. When I began blending online learning into my low-tech classroom twelve years ago, my goal was to engage students. I was focused on integrating technology to give every student a voice, foster collaboration, and encourage them to make meaning as a learning community. Now, I facilitate professional learning for educators all over the world, work as a blended learning coach, and teach in the Master of Arts in Teaching program at Pepperdine University. My work with school leaders, teachers, and coaches combined with my doctoral research on teacher engagement in blended learning environments has caused my "why" to shift over time. The purpose driving my work now is to help educators reimagine traditional instructional models and workflows to make this profession more sustainable and rewarding. That way, they can invest their finite time and energy in the aspects of this work that are cognitively, emotionally, and socially engaging.

Addressing Common Teaching Pain Points with Blended Learning

In The Complete Guide to Blended Learning ( Amazon | Bookshop.org), I highlight student agency, differentiation, and control over the pace of learning as pillars of high-quality blended learning and demonstrate how teachers can weave these into each model. When teachers prioritize these three things in the design of their lessons, they create learning experiences that are more engaging, accessible, and equitable for students. They also help to address key "pain points" that teachers experience that can cause them to feel frustrated and disillusioned with this profession.

Pain Point #1: Low Levels of Students Motivation

One pain point I hear about in my work is a perceived lack of student motivation, which manifests in low levels of engagement. Research on motivation indicates that students are more likely to be motivated when they experience autonomy and agency, feel confident in their ability to complete a task, and belong to an inclusive learning community. It's easy to forget that many students spend all day in classrooms where they do not get to make any decisions about their learning. Blended learning provides a natural framework for offering students autonomy and meaningful choices. I encourage teachers to build student agency into each learning experience, inviting students to make content, process, and/or product decisions. They do not need to create a choice board full of options. Instead, simply offering students a "would you rather" choice between two options, as pictured in the table below, can be motivating.

Pain Point #2: Diversity of Skills and Needs in a Class

The second pain point teachers struggle with is the spectrum of needs and abilities in a class. It is daunting to meet this diversity of needs with a single learning experience. The good news is that blended learning models make it easier to effectively and consistently differentiate, and begin to personalize learning, because teachers are working directly with individual students and small groups. It is more challenging to differentiate when ushering a group of 30+ students through a lock-step learning experience.

As teachers architect their lessons, they should consider differentiating the content, process, and product. These questions can help us identify places in the learning experience that will benefit from differentiation:

How can we ensure students can access the content?

What supports and scaffolds will they need to process the information and begin to make meaning?

What level of academic rigor and complexity is within their zone of possibility?

What do they want to create to demonstrate their learning?

The more consistently we differentiate, the more confident we will be in our ability to meet learners where they are in their journeys toward mastering specific concepts and skills.

Pain Point #3: Classroom Management

The third pain point is unproductive and distracting behaviors. Classroom management has always presented challenges, but the last year was particularly rough as students transitioned back into physical classrooms. One factor that contributes to classroom management issues is the misalignment between the pace the learning is moving and the pace the learner needs it to move. If the pace of learning is too fast, students get frustrated, may not feel valued, and disengage. If the pace of learning is too slow, students get bored, make their own fun, and disengage. As teachers design learning experiences using the various models, it is critical to consider where in a learning experience we can give students more control over the pace they consume and process information and navigate complex tasks.

If teachers prioritize student agency, differentiation, and student control over pace in their design work, they are more likely to architect blended learning experiences that allow students the flexible pathways they need to be successful. The result is classrooms where students are active agents engaged in the learning.

Four Rotation Models

The phrase "blended learning" is an umbrella that encompasses a range of different models that combine online and offline learning in various ways. Each model gives students different degrees of control over the time, place, pace, and path of their learning. When working in traditional school settings, I focus on the rotation models because they work beautifully in a classroom, online, or a blend of the two. There are four main rotation models: a) station rotation, b) whole group rotation, c) flipped classroom, and d) playlist or individual rotation.

1. The Station Rotation Model

The station rotation model rotates students between online and offline learning activities. In this model, the teacher works with small groups of learners while giving students more control over the pace and path of their learning at the other stations. Grouping students at stations creates smaller learning communities within a larger class and makes it more manageable to effectively differentiate instruction and models, supports and scaffolds, and the academic rigor and complexity of practice and application.

A station rotation lesson is composed of three types of stations: a) teacher-led, b) online, and c) offline. The number of stations may vary depending on the optimal number of students at each station or the length of the class period. It's important to note that a station rotation can span a couple of days and does not need to happen in a single class.

Teachers can facilitate a range of activities at each station. The table below provides some ideas for how they might use the different stations.

2. The Whole Group Rotation

The whole group rotation rotates the entire class between online and offline learning activities. In the original taxonomy of blended learning models, this was called the lab rotation because students worked offline in a classroom and then rotated into a computer lab for online learning. The ubiquity of devices in schools, thanks to 1:1 initiatives and Chromebook carts, has eliminated the need to leave the classroom to get online, hence the name change. Ideally, the whole group rotation model gives students more control over the path of their learning during the online learning portions of the lesson.

The goal of the whole group rotation is to pair each learning activity with the best learning landscape and mode for that activity - online or offline, individual or collaborative. It allows for some whole-group instruction (e.g., mini-lessons) while making it possible to differentiate and personalize elements of the lesson by pulling small groups for additional instruction and support during the online learning portion of the lesson and assigning personalized practice. The table below provides an example of what a whole group rotation could look like in practice.

3. The Flipped Classroom Model

The flipped classroom model uses video instruction to shift the transfer of information online. The benefit of presenting information in a video is that students can control the pace they consume and process that information - pausing, rewinding, or rewatching as needed. They may also be able to add closed captioning and slow down the pace of the video to increase accessibility.

Teachers often ask, "When should I make a video, and when should I provide live instruction?" I suggest they make a video if they plan to say the same thing the same way to all students. If they plan to differentiate the way they present the information (e.g., using problems or prompts at different levels of academic rigor), I encourage them to use the station rotation model and lead differentiated instruction at their station.

Teachers may worry about assigning video content for homework since some learners may not have reliable internet, a device, or a quiet space to work. It is important to note they do not need to send videos home with students. Instead, they can use video instruction in the classroom to spend less time transferring information and more time supporting students as they practice and apply. In The Complete Guide to Blended Learning, I share my approach to designing a three-part flipped lesson to guide educators in designing dynamic lessons around video content, as shown in the table below.

The pre-video activity can serve as the "welcome task" at the start of class to engage students before they watch the video instruction. As students transition to the video lesson and engagement activity, it's important to build a buffer of time around the video so students can control the pace they consume and process that information. When we use video instruction in class instead of sending it home, students lose control over time and place, so it is critical they maintain control over the pace, rewinding and rewatching the video as needed. Since learners will pace through the video lesson at different rates, some may move onto the post-video activity in class while others may need to take that work home to complete or have time the following class to finish. If time is provided at the start of the next class, those students who completed the post-video activity can work on an extension opportunity designed to challenge them further.

4. The Playlist/Individual Rotation Model

The playlist model presents students with a sequence of learning activities designed to move them toward a clear learning objective or desired outcome. A playlist can be used to teach a concept, strategy, skill, or process, or to guide students through a multi-step performance task, writing assignment, or project. This model gives students control over the pace of their progress through the playlist, so it is ideal for any task where students will benefit from variable time on task.

Teachers can also differentiate the path of a playlist. If they build a playlist in a digital document or slide deck, it is easy to copy and modify it to create differentiated versions. For example, they may make a "middle of the road" version they think most students will be successful with, an advanced version, and a more scaffolded version. The different versions may include different degrees of embedded support, and students may work on different products to demonstrate their learning.

A playlist should function as a one-stop-shop, providing students with on-demand video instruction and models, review and practice activities designed to collect formative assessment data, discussions (online or offline), reflective prompts, self-assessment activities, etc. I encourage educators to include "teacher check-ins" at strategic moments in the playlists when students would benefit from feedback and support. These check-ins provide the time and space for us to sit with individual students to review their formative assessment data, discuss their progress, and make additions or modifications to their playlists to ensure each student continues to make progress. Teacher check-ins make personalizing each student's playlist sustainable and create opportunities to pull time-consuming tasks like giving feedback and assessing student work into the classroom instead of taking that work home. When done with students, these tasks present opportunities for us to connect with learners and develop our relationships with them.

Below is an example of a math playlist created by Diego Torres, a graduate student I had the pleasure of working with in my advancing methods course. The left-hand column displays the "path" or learning activities in the playlist and integrates "would you rather" choices. The right-hand column is where students capture their work.

Blended learning provides us with a robust toolbox full of models that are flexible enough for any teaching and learning landscape. Instead of feeling limited to a single model that positions the teachers to do the lion's share of the work, these blended learning models shift control to students and create more time and space for human connection in the classroom.

The last two and a half years have taken their toll on educators. The rates of burnout and attrition are alarming, and districts are reporting teacher shortages all over the country. Too many educators are exhausted and disillusioned - they need better ways of approaching this work. They are doing too much of the work in classrooms, and students aren't doing enough. I believe blended learning is the life raft educators need to reimagine their approach to this work and rediscover their joy in this profession.
Reference:
Staker, H., & Horn, M. B. (2012). Classifying K-12 Blended Learning. Mountain View, CA: Innosight Institute. http://www.christenseninstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Classifying-K-12-blended-learning.pdf

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Instead of the teacher doing the lion's share of the work, these models shift control to students and create more time and space for human connection.

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There are several simple ways for teachers to introduce students to interpreting data visualizations.

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There are several simple ways for teachers to introduce students to interpreting data visualizations.

I truly believe that data literacy is literacy in the Information Age. Increasingly, we are inundated with conflicting claims about products, medical treatments, the weather-you name it-and it's tough to make the right decision. To make a rational, optimal choice requires us to be data literate-to be able to understand the nature of how data is collected and visualized in a variety of different formats.

Unfortunately, most standards don't put an adequate emphasis on data literacy, given its importance in modern society. The good news is, there's a way to take a lesson on pretty much any topic and add an authentic data element, and there are ways to use these graphs to build student engagement.

Adding Data Elements

Step 1: Define the topic. For this example, let's say we have a lesson about climate change. From experience, students often want to know how they can make a positive impact. Ideally, we could find some data about how choices students make over their lifetime will affect greenhouse gas emissions.

Step 2: Find data. One of my go-to resources is OurWorldInData.org. I really like this site because it's legit (founded and run by scholars in the UK), and their data browser has tabs that show the graph, a table of the data, and the sources all in one place.

Here is a graph I found pretty easily that shows greenhouse emissions for different food products. Instead of telling students, "You can reduce your carbon footprint by eating less meat," we can guide them to an even deeper understanding by analyzing this graph for themselves.

Our World In Data makes things easy by giving us a nice graph. If you need to make your own, Google Sheets and Microsoft Excel have options for making charts from a CSV or XLSX file. You might also check out RAWGraphs for a free graph-building wizard.
Step 3: Make the graph mysterious (enigmatize it)!
We might just have students think-pair-share about which dietary changes would have the biggest impact on climate change. Alternatively, we could go another step to build some mystery and investment around the "reveal" of what the graph is telling us, while also deepening student understanding of how raw data gets represented through different visuals.

Strategy A: Blank out the labels. This strategy requires having a graph and its data as a table. Here I have simply blanked out the labels for a few of the bar plot categories. (I dragged little white boxes over the labels and added blanks using a photo editor). I would now ask students to fill in the blanks by looking at the data table (which I got from the same source under the table tab).

Students will need to carefully compare the graph and table to figure out what's missing, concreting the connection between the data and its visualization. As an added bonus, because of the mystery element, students will be more engaged in digesting the graph further!

To facilitate, I would ask some probing questions and reward student observations. Do we notice any general patterns in the data (is there something in common about the categories that have high emissions)? Are there any plant products with super-high carbon footprints? Why might that be?

Strategy B: Turn the graph into a puzzle (cipher). Another way to add a level of mystery to a graph is to encipher the labels. ( Encipher here means to change all the letters using a rule that the students need to crack.) In this example (with a New York Times graph), I used the 2,000-plus-year-old " Caesar cipher" and shifted each letter forward one place (e.g., CAT -> DBU). Enciphering labels is a good data literacy hook because many students are really into ciphers and puzzles, but it also works well to deepen student connection to a graph when the table of data is too big for Strategy A to work. Cryptii is a great resource for creating ciphers.

At the top of the graph it reads, "Percent of nutritionists saying a food is healthy." But after using the Caesar cipher, the word "nutritionists" becomes "ovusjujpojtut." At the bottom of the graph it reads, "Percent of all Americans saying a food is healthy." But after using the Caesar cipher to change a few key words, it becomes, "Percent of bmm Bnfsjdbot saying a food is healthy."

There are multiple ways for students to decipher the text. Many will use brute force and randomly try shifting letters forward or back a few spaces. Alternatively, some students might reason that the last word before "saying" in the x-axis label is a plural word (ending in s). Thus, if t should be an s, we need to go back -1. Shifting all letters back one changes "bmm Anfsjdbot" to "all Americans."

Once we've deciphered it, now we're curious about the next level of the enigma. What does it mean that granola is off the 1:1 line in this graph?

I hope these tips inspire you to weave data literacy into all sorts of lessons. I'm sure you'll come up with lots of clever ways of enigmatizing graphs that I haven't thought of!

Other Resources

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There are several simple ways for teachers to introduce students to interpreting data visualizations. I truly believe that data literacy is literacy in the Information Age. Increasingly, we are inundated with conflicting claims about products, medical treatments, the weather-you name it-and it's tough to make the right decision.

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Give me 5 minutes and you'll have a new teaching strategy under your belt.
Suppose you're an art teacher. This week, you want to introduce your students to Impressionism, the style of painting used by artists like Monet and Renoir. Now, you could just give them the name of the style and a definition, then show some examples.

OR!!!

Using a strategy called Concept Attainment, you could reverse that order. Instead of providing any terminology or any kind of definition, you could simply tell students that you're going to study a new style. To learn the style, you'll show them paintings that use that style, and paintings that don't - Yes and No examples. Their job will be to come up with a list of characteristics that they think define the style.

You begin with this first Yes example:

Then a No example:

Followed by this one, another Yes example:

Then another No:

As they study the examples, students work to develop a definition, or a list of characteristics common to all the Yes examples. Once they've done this, you give them more Yes examples to test and refine their list. Ultimately, students arrive at a thoughtfully crafted definition of Impressionism - one that will stick with them much longer than if you'd just given it to them to begin with.

For a more thorough example of how Concept Attainment works, I offer you this video demonstration:

The Research Behind the Strategy

I first learned this strategy in Silver, Strong, and Perini's 2007 book, The Strategic Teacher: Selecting the Right Research-Based Strategy for Every Lesson ( Amazon | Bookshop.org). In their chapter on Concept Attainment, the authors explain that the reason this strategy results in deep understanding is because it works with the way human beings instinctively learn. As we experience the world, we naturally organize things into categories based on common attributes. Concept Attainment is structured in the same way.

In their 2001 book, Classroom Instruction That Works , Marzano, Pickering and Pollock identified nine classroom practices that produced the most significant gains in student learning. This strategy uses two from that list: identifying similarities and differences (which was at the top of the list), and generating and testing hypotheses. (See the 2022 edition of the book on Amazon or Bookshop.org)

I like this strategy because it really involves students in their own learning. Instead of just delivering the information to them, you're helping them discover it on their own. Also, it's captivating - a mystery to solve! - which is far more likely to engage students than straightforward delivery of information. Finally, it's a pretty easy switch to make from what you're already doing: definition-then-examples becomes examples-then-definition, then maybe a little lecture just to tighten things up.

Share Your Experience

Concept Attainment could be used in just about any subject area and at any grade level. I could see it in corporate training, in coaching, even when teaching a preschooler how to wash his hands ( "We're going to come up with some rules for hand washing. Watch these five kids wash their hands. These three are doing it correctly, these two are not. What do you think the rules are?")

If you have used the strategy and have more information, variations, tips on doing it well, or even a correction to how I'm presenting it here, please tell us about it in the comments section below.

Hope this adds something new and different to your repertoire! ♦

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How to Use the Concept Attainment Strategy

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Instead of just delivering information to students, this fun approach helps them discover it on their own.

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Contrasting Cases: A Simple Strategy for Deep Understanding

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Contrasting Cases: A Simple Strategy for Deep Understanding

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Listen to the interview with Sarah Levine:
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When I ask my students what color this is, most of them say "green." Then I contrast that green with similar colors, and ask them, "How would you describe the color now?"

Then kids generally shift to more specific descriptors like "dark green," "forest green," or "emerald green," and they add names for the other kinds of green they see.

This shift occurs because it's easier to understand the characteristics of a thing when you contrast it with other things that are just slightly different (Gentner; 1999; Schwartz, 2016). Cognitively speaking, contrasting similar things activates and helps add to your mind's map (also called a schema) of those things, which helps you recall more details, make more connections, and develop more general rules about what something is or how it works.

This is why, when someone asks you a broad question like "How would you define learning?" or "What is learning?" you might draw a blank or go to vague generalizations. But let's say someone asks, "How did you define learning 10 years ago, and how do you define it now?" or "How would you compare learning to ride a bike and learning to write a paper?" or even "What's a bad definition of learning compared to a better one?" Depending on the contrasting case, you will think more specifically about different parts of learning. You will generate more ideas and maybe make insights you would not otherwise have made.

Contrasting cases is a valuable tool for any cognitive work-in any subject area-that involves going beyond surface traits and considering deeper connecting principles, or reflecting on specific features of a thing. You can read a really helpful introduction to this approach in Schwartz et al.'s book, The ABCs of How We Learn. ( Amazon | Bookshop.org)

Here are a few examples of what this approach looks like in different disciplines:

writing instruction: Having students compare pieces of writing at different levels of proficiency improves the writing they produce (Lin-Siegler et al., 2015).

math: Having students compare two or more ways of solving a problem improves their procedural knowledge and problem-solving flexibility (Rittle-Johnson & Star, 2007).

science: Comparing similar structures in organic chemistry and phenomena in physics helps students strengthen their conceptual knowledge (Chin et al., 2016; Graulich & Schween, 2018).

In my field of study, literary interpretation, using contrasting cases is especially useful to help students enrich their reading experiences and build interpretations of many kinds of texts, including fiction, poetry, or political speech. But you can use this approach in any subject where you're studying rhetorically powerful texts, like advertisements, headlines, art, primary historical documents, and film.

In this post we'll drill down specifically to using contrasting cases for language study. I'll show you three variations of this approach: (1) Synonym Scale, (2) There and Not There, and (3) Bare Bones vs. Dressed Up.

1. SYNONYM SCALE

Let's say you're teaching about climate change in a science class, or propaganda in a social studies or English language arts class. You are interested in having students consider the rhetoric around climate change. Maybe you start by asking them to focus on the common phrase global warming, and you ask them how that phrase might affect public understanding of climate change.

As a teacher, you probably already have a mental framework, or schema, for language about climate change, so you already know other phrases people use to describe climate change (like extreme weather or climate crisis). Because of this knowledge, you are probably already using contrasting cases when you consider the rhetorical effects of the term global warming. So you might already have in mind that, compared to other terms, the phrase global warming could make climate change seem less urgent than it is, or might make people think positively about it, since people like to be warm.

But in many cases, our kids don't yet have those schemas to draw from. And it's really hard to think about the effects of something in isolation. So when you ask how global warming might affect public understanding of climate change, your kids might say kind of obvious things like, "The phrase global warming will remind people that the earth is getting warmer," Or "it will make them think about how the globe is changing." Here is where you can use contrasting cases to help students build their schema and better understand how language can work to mislead, manipulate, rally people to action, and more.

First, look for synonyms that help highlight the ideas you are interested in exploring. If you want to help your kids think about rhetorical effects, you'll look for synonyms that highlight or downplay the urgency of climate change. You can draw on your own and your students' knowledge, or go the interwebs for possibilities. For example, after a quick synonym search, I chose mild and extreme synonyms like climate change, climate emergency, climate fluctuation, climate arson, extreme weather, increase in average temperature, and global heating.

When you share these synonyms with students (and ask them to contribute more), they can better conceive of and articulate the effects of the original phrase, as well as all the others, and further understand tone, connotation, symbolic meaning, and other aspects of textual and rhetorical interpretation that contribute to people's understanding of science. You can offer them sentence stems that help them articulate these effects, if you like.

Next, you can teach kids to put synonyms on a scale anchored by positive effects on one side and negative effects on the other (a similar approach is used in Up-Down-Both-Why). In pairs or groups, kids can debate the order of those terms (like, is warming more alarming than heating?) based on their interpretations of the terms' connotations. They can also consider how context matters (positive for whom? negative effects on what?), how familiarity with a term might diminish its impact, or how different words suggest different levels of agency or blame.

The strategy is especially useful for helping students understand the relationship between language and power.

For example, try contrasting carefully chosen synonyms for "woman" as more positive or more negative can help students think about gender, power, and language: female, muñeca, gal, doll, woman, broad, sister, lady, chick, señora, chica.

Contrasting recent news headlines about political or social issues can help students reason about bias more generally, as with this comparison of the left and the right's framing of Florida's "Don't Say Gay" bill.

Contrasting cases works beyond individual words and phrases. You can compare whole essays, poems, short stories, or news articles to help students develop general criteria for writing, or see nuances in authors' choices. For example:

If you want kids to identify the conventional features of a college essay, show them a bunch that all have the same fundamental elements. Ask them to see what the essays have in common. By identifying those commonalities themselves, they are more likely to remember and be able to implement them, as compared to you listing the elements or showing them just one example of a good essay.

Let's say you want to help kids explore the effects of some aspect of personal narrative writing, such as descriptive imagery. Write 3 to 5 short beginnings or endings that are all about the same topic, but are different because they have too little or too much detail, strong verbs and weak verbs, and so on. Ask students to debate which narrative works best or is most powerful, and why.

Contrasting several translations of a text can help students explore the nuances of each, and the effects of particular authorial choices. Many language teachers do this kind of work already. In my ELA classroom, many students speak Spanish and English, while some others speak only English. In a unit on versions of love, all my students looked at two translations of Pablo Neruda's "Tonight I Can Write (The Saddest Lines)." The multilingual students discussed which translation they felt best captured the meaning and tone of the original. The English-only students learned from their classmates and were still able to compare the two translations and explain which they felt worked better for them. I usually look online for texts with more than one translation, like this one with a bunch of translations of Neruda, or these contrasting translations of a poem by Wang Wei. Also, this book contains a number of poems in different languages with several English translations each.

2. There and Not There

If you'd like kids to think about the effects of specific authorial moves, you can use contrasting cases to present the original version alongside one where you've gotten rid of those moves. Then your students can compare the "there" and "not there" versions. Doing this helps students interpret and maybe even more deeply appreciate or critique the effects of the original.

For example, consider an excerpt from Martin Luther King's classic speech, "I Have a Dream." Let's say you want students to reflect on the effects of King's use of repetition in the text:

But one hundred years later, the Negro still is not free. One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination.

But if you ask kids, "What are the effects of this repetition?" they may say something like "It really helps you see how many years later it is," or "It makes you see how things are still the same after all this time." Both of those observations are valuable. But again, it's really hard to comment on the effects of something without being able to compare a rich stock of examples that are already in your head.

Try getting rid of the repetition and asking your kids which speech seems more effective, moving, persuasive, and so on.

The comparison gives kids more to work with. When I have done this with my students, one or two kids usually say they prefer the shorter speech-it's more efficient. Or I myself make that argument. Then other kids can counter with their interpretations of the effects of the structure of the speech, which means they are building an interpretation for a reason-to help someone else see what language can do.

3. Bare Bones vs. Dressed Up

In another version of contrasting cases, you can help your kids learn to boil a text down to its essence, and then compare it to the original to better understand the effects of the original. This approach works well with longer pieces of literature, essays, or speeches. For example, I asked my students to try to articulate the essence of Toni Morrison's Beloved. One wrote, "Slavery is really, really awful, and it can ruin you, and you have to be super strong to find yourself even after you've escaped."

This student captured the essence of the book really well. But if you can capture the essence of the book so well, what's the rest of the book doing? Why not just read that theme statement and skip the novel?

You can use contrasting cases to have students explore how authorial moves and specific details of a story contribute to the overall effects and themes. With Beloved, for example, you can compare the addition of each event, each setting, each character, and each turn of phrase to the bare bones version of the text. What does the ghost of Beloved actually add to the story? How does it help a reader feel and think? Why include the setting of 124? What does that add to the bare bones of the story? And so on.

Or back to the college essay. No matter the particulars, every essay is essentially saying, "Take me!" If you ask your students to compare the bare bones version of an essay with other dressed up versions, you can help them evaluate the effects of different features, like sentence structure, tone, or specific narrative choices.

Here are some final sentences of college essays (no room here for entire essays). I made them up with a particular purpose: to have kids think about the effects of tone and specificity in different endings. Along with the bare bones version, I created a generic version that is also kind of humble (#1), a detailed one that seems to connect with a story told in the body of the essay but is not as humble (#2), and one using an arrogant and inadvisable tone (#3). Kids will probably think all of them are pretty cheesy. Some will point out that the bare bones version might actually do the job. Either way, students can contrast them based on how well they paint a picture, how humble they are, or other criteria you choose. They will develop more sophisticated understandings of writing for effect, and they will build up the schemas that good readers and writers need.

When students are working on their own college essays, contrasting cases can work as a writing tool. Have them write terrible versions and then revise.

There are many ways to tweak contrasting cases for your kids. The big take-aways are: 1)It's easier to think about the effects of a thing if you can compare it to other, similar things; 2) Contrasting cases allow you to see underlying rules and big ideas; and 3) You create contrasting cases by finding or creating examples that differ in one important way: different solutions to the same math problem, different photographs of the same subject; different headlines about the same event. When we want our kids to do deep and critical thinking, let them contrast different examples. One is often not enough.

References

Chin, D. B., Chi, M., & Schwartz, D. L. (2016). A comparison of two methods of active learning in physics: inventing a general solution versus compare and contrast. Instructional Science, 44(2), 177-195. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11251-016-9374-0 [ PDF]

Gentner, D., & Namy, L. L. (1999). Comparison in the development of categories. Cognitive Development, 14(4), 487-513. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0885-2014(99)00016-7

Graulich, N., & Schween, M. (2018). Concept-Oriented Task Design: Making Purposeful Case Comparisons in Organic Chemistry. Journal of Chemical Education, 95(3), 376-383. https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.jchemed.7b00672

Lin-Siegler, X., Shaenfield, D., & Elder, A. D. (2015). Contrasting case instruction can improve self-assessment of writing. Educational Technology Research and Development, 63(4), 517-537. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11423-015-9390-9 [ PDF]

Rittle-Johnson, B., & Star, J. R. (2007). Does comparing solution methods facilitate conceptual and procedural knowledge? An experimental study on learning to solve equations. Journal of Educational Psychology, 99(3), 561. [ PDF]

Schwartz, D. L., Tsang, J. M., & Blair, K. P. (2016). The ABCs of how we learn: 26 scientifically proven approaches, how they work, and when to use them. W. W. Norton & Company.

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Contrasting Cases: A Simple Strategy for Deep Understanding

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Listen to the interview with Sarah Levine: Sponsored by Listenwise and Read&Write by Texthelp This page contains Amazon Affiliate and Bookshop.org links. When you make a purchase through these links, Cult of Pedagogy gets a small percentage of the sale at no extra cost to you. What's the difference between Amazon and Bookshop.org?

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This four-step framework allows teachers to engage students in a short, powerful lesson.

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This four-step framework allows teachers to engage students in a short, powerful lesson.

In the fast-paced world of education, time is a precious resource for both teachers and learners. The good news is that even with limited time, you can make a significant impact on your students' learning. Microlearning leverages the brain's natural inclination to process information in short, focused sessions, facilitating better learning transfer and leaving a lasting impact on students.

Over the last 18 years, I've dedicated a substantial amount of time to crafting lessons that unfold in 15 to 30 minutes-my suggested maximum for microlearning. My ACE-C framework, which stands for Ask, Correct, Engage, Connect, is a blueprint to deliver effective microlessons. This four-step framework not only makes it easy to develop a lesson (you can do it in real time, in no time) but also capitalizes on brain-based learning and memory retention.

A 4 Step Process

Step 1: Ask-Craft an Effective Question (1-3 minutes). Ever wonder how to spark a student's curiosity? The answer lies in a well-crafted question that unlocks critical thinking and ignites the passion for learning. An effective question is clear, open-ended, and designed to engage brain-based learning and memory retention, allowing room for reflection.

For example, in a STEAM-focused lesson, such as one centered on human anatomy for middle school students, you can start by asking, "Why is the heart important?" This question, simple enough for immediate understanding yet open-ended for diverse responses, sets the stage for a microlesson. The objective of this microlesson is to explore the intricacies of the cardiovascular system, fostering curiosity and engagement.

When such a question is posed, students activate brain-based learning and memory processes, deepening their understanding of the vital role the heart plays in our bodies. This approach establishes a dynamic learning environment where each student's ideas are valued and acknowledged. What other topics could benefit from this questioning strategy? How might educators adapt this microlearning technique for different age groups, considering their cognitive development stages?

Step 2: Correct-Provide Clarity (3 minutes). Now that students' ideas have been acknowledged, they need to be clarified and corrected as needed. In this phase, you want to ensure a sense of togetherness among students, fostering a positive classroom atmosphere, by encouraging all answers through comments such as "Great answer" or "I see why you'd think that" or "That's interesting." You then follow up your encouragement with clarity. For the question about the heart, provide details like "The heart pumps blood to deliver oxygen and nutrients in our body."

1. Assign groups of students to represent each of the heart's four chambers: right atrium, right ventricle, left atrium, and left ventricle.

2. Designate one side of the room as the lungs and the other side as the body to visually represent the flow of blood in the circulatory system.

3. Have each "chamber" stand in a designated area, and make a sign to place on the floor in front of them.

4. Use a soft ball or soft object (representing oxygen) and have the right atrium pick it up. The right atrium passes the ball to the right ventricle, which then throws it to the left atrium. The left atrium passes it to the left ventricle, which throws it to the body (the other side of the room).

5. As they are playing, explain to the students that this mimics the flow of blood through the heart's chambers. You can also have students throw the ball slowly and speed up the pace of throwing, and note that during activity the heart pumps faster, which moves the blood more quickly. This active engagement contributes to a deeper understanding and retention of the material in a quick and fun way.

Step 3: Engage-Active Learning (7 minutes). This step focuses on active learning and doesn't delve deep into memory processes. In this stage, students become active participants, immersed in hands-on activities that cement their understanding. In our example lesson about the heart, here is an activity that could work.

Step 4: Connect-Make It Relatable (3 minutes). After the activity, encourage students to share their observations and allow them to connect their practical experiences with the concepts discussed.

In this step, the idea is to cement the learning by making a connection to either something else they are familiar with or something outside of the current lesson, making the subject matter relevant to the students' lives. In this lesson about the heart, students might share stories about other things that function like heart chambers, such as how the traffic flows with stoplights or how students move through the halls between classes.

This connection to real-life scenarios not only reinforces the importance of the topic but also illustrates how the knowledge gained in the classroom can be applied beyond the school walls.

Implementing the ACE-C Framework

The ACE-C framework can be used for any topic. It can be used at the beginning or end of a unit or can be a perfect tool to reinforce a portion of a unit that students didn't connect to. At the beginning of a unit, consider using it to spark curiosity and to set a base level of understanding to be built upon. Alternatively, these strategies can be used at the end of a unit to reinforce key concepts and provide a creative recap. The ACE-C framework can be altered easily based on age.

When considering creating lessons for various age groups, you can simplify the scenarios for younger students and amplify complexity for older ones. For instance, the heart chamber activity might focus on basic functions for elementary students, while high school students could explore more intricate aspects, like blood composition. No matter the topic, you can Ask, Correct, Engage, and Connect your way to designing effective microlessons that leave your students clear on a target objective and with a spark of curiosity.

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This four-step framework allows teachers to design effective microlessons that engage students in short, powerful lessons.

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Short, recorded instructional lectures that focus on one concept or skill can be powerful teaching tools.

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Enhancing Flipped Learning With Microlectures

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Flipped learning with microlectures-instructional videos that are under 10 minutes-can be very effective for teaching and boosting engagement.

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How HyperDocs Can Transform Your Teaching

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How HyperDocs Can Transform Your Teaching

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Listen to my interview with Lisa Highfill, Kelly Hilton, and Sarah Landis, authors of The HyperDoc Handbook ( transcript):

In many classrooms, a learning cycle looks something like this: First, we write plans for a series of lessons and a final assessment. We gather materials-handouts, websites, rubrics, video clips. Then we teach the lessons one at a time, to the whole class, at the same pace, distributing materials as needed. Finally, we end with a project, test, or other assessment.

It's a very teacher-directed model, which can limit learning in a number of ways:

Students don't feel much ownership for their own learning. Instead, they depend on the teacher to tell them when and how to learn the material.

Because so much of the teacher's time is spent in direct instruction, there's little opportunity to work one-on-one with students.

Because it's up to the teacher to adjust instruction for students with varied needs and levels of readiness, differentiation becomes one more thing to do.

ENTER THE HYPERDOC

A HyperDoc is a digital document-such as a Google Doc-where all components of a learning cycle have been pulled together into one central hub. Within a single document, students are provided with hyperlinks to all of the resources they need to complete that learning cycle. Here's an example.

In the above HyperDoc, all of the bolded words are linked to outside resources. The right-hand column is set aside for students to take notes and do other kinds of thinking and planning as they work through the lesson.

One of the earliest iterations of the this type of "hub" was the WebQuest, which guided students through a lesson using all online resources. Now that Google tools like Docs and Slides have become so prevalent, teachers are using these tools to create similar lessons, choosing and mixing resources that go well beyond simple web pages. Last year, we looked at something called a playlist, which teacher Tracy Enos used to organize her language arts lessons and differentiate instruction for her students.

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Meanwhile, teachers Lisa Highfill, Kelly Hilton, and Sarah Landis were doing similar work in their own classrooms. They coined the term "HyperDoc" to describe their version of this, and in 2016, they published The HyperDoc Handbook to teach others their method for creating these lessons.

The book explains how HyperDocs work, why they have such an impact on instruction, and their model for how teachers can design HyperDocs for high-quality instruction. In the podcast episode above, I interviewed all three about their work. Here I will blend their expertise with some of my own thoughts about this exciting format.

BENEFITS OF HYPERDOCS

Fewer lectures. Teachers have been told for decades that we need to do less lecturing, to step away from being the sage on the stage and become more of a guide on the side. "I feel so bad for teachers when they hear that," Highfill says, "because they're like, 'Well, what am I supposed to do? I need to get information into their heads.'" A HyperDoc offers a solution by taking care of the direct instruction part of a lesson and offering a lot more as well.

More face-to-face interaction. A good HyperDoc runs itself, allowing students to work through it without needing you to guide them through each step. "Although it seems odd that you're putting a student in front of a device," Landis notes, "really what it's doing is freeing you up to move around and have increased face time with the students."

Flexibility. If one part of your lesson isn't working, you can just change it in the HyperDoc and the change takes effect immediately; no need to re-copy all your materials. Similarly, if each student gets their own copy of a HyperDoc, the elements can be changed on each to meet individual students' needs.

Multimodal opportunities. Because it is digital, a HyperDoc allows us to include all kinds of multimedia. "Living in this digital age, we're able to expose kids to different types of media that allows each child to access the learning or the content or the information in a way that's visually or auditorily appealing to them," Landis says. "I might be visual, and I might first study an image, then watch a video, and then I'm finally ready to tackle that article my teacher really wants me to read."

They don't know that maybe their text ... is at a different reading level," says Hilton. "Or they're able to use Privacy. If students' HyperDocs have been customized for them, no one else needs to know. "Read&Write for Google and just put headphones in, and that's just a little agreement between you and that student."

MODELS FOR BUILDING HYPERDOCS

Because HyperDocs are such adaptable tools, teachers structure them in many different ways, and you should experiment until you find a structure that works for you. Here are some options to consider:

Playlist: This model, explained in this article, follows a step-by-step sequence of activities that consist of learning activities as well as check-ins with the teacher and housekeeping tasks like setting up accounts on websites.

Self-Paced Learning: Explored in this post by math teacher Natalie McCutchen, this system lays out a path of lessons for a whole unit, along with links to review materials, pre-tests, and practice questions. Students decide how much practice they need and determine when to take the assessment for each learning goal. If they grasp the material quickly, they can test and move on.

5E Model: This first stage of this model is to Engage student interest. Next, students Explore the topic, Explain what they have learned, and Extend their learning by applying it in new situations. The last stage Evaluates student learning.

HyperDoc Model: The HyperDoc Handbook authors have developed a model that has some components of the 5Es above, but with some additions and adjustments. This template explains all 7 stages. One important component of this model is the first step, Explore. Highfill explains the value of this stage: "Kids are exploring and coming up with ideas and answers about a concept on their own, and it's engaging them from the beginning, instead of passively listening to a teacher explain something." During this time, while students explore, the teacher is actively gathering information: "I listen to my students," Highfill says, "I'm studying them and hearing to what level are they understanding a concept. I have the ability to pull a small group. I can work with my language learners during that time. The whole time I'm doing formative assessment in the classroom, which will then really be my basis for the next part of the lesson."

Agenda: This model, borrowed from the kind of planning done at a typical Montessori school, provides each student with a planner listing out their assignments for the week. Students decide how they want to use their class time each day, but are expected to complete all goals by the end of the week. Although these are traditionally done on paper, they could easily be converted to a HyperDoc format.

OTHER USES FOR HYPERDOCS

Building an extended lesson or unit is one of the most instructionally robust ways to use HyperDocs, but they can also be used for:

substitute teacher plans

video or podcast playlists

learning centers or stations

student-made HyperDocs

parent resources

departmental-, team-or grade-level HyperDocs to gather and share resources among teachers

TIPS FOR SUCCESS

Start with a template.
Rather than build your first HyperDoc from scratch, you might find more success by starting with a pre-made template, like the ones available for free on HyperDocs.co. You could also start with a completely finished HyperDoc that someone else created for their own classroom and modify it for your own use.

Build in participation, collaboration, and multimedia.
One risk inherent in HyperDocs is that they could simply become online worksheets, replicating the kind of work students could just as easily do on paper. Take advantage of this medium by including ways for students to participate actively, collaborate with others, and learn from a variety of media: video, interactive posters like ThingLinks, podcasts, online flashcards, and so on.

Offer choice...
HyperDocs are designed to allow students to work at different speeds and navigate learning in a way that works best for them. So when you can, offer choices: Give students options for the kind and quantity of materials they need to learn the material, how they will practice and apply it, and how they will demonstrate their learning.

...but don't "kitchen sink" it.
If you stuff your HyperDoc with every possible resource on a topic ("everything but the kitchen sink"), you'll overwhelm students. Choose resources thoughtfully.

Give students HyperDocs training.
Even if your students have used HyperDocs in other classes, your design probably has its own unique qualities, so take the time to demonstrate how it should be used. And within the HyperDoc itself, provide clear directions for its use.

So if you create a HyperDoc," says Hilton, "in the header or footer, say Collaborate with other teachers.
You do not need to do this alone! Thousands of teachers are sharing and collaborating on the HyperDocs.co site and using the #hyperdocs hashtag on Twitter. And be sure to give credit to the person who created the original: " Created by, and maybe link to your Twitter handle or your email, for yourself, and then if you make a copy of someone's, we encourage you to give that person credit by saying Inspired by or Remixed HyperDoc originally created by, just because we want an inclusive, appreciative sharing community."

Don't feel like you have to create a HyperDoc for every lesson.
"That's not something that any teacher should feel pressured to do," says Landis, "and it's not really realistic. We don't want teachers doing any one thing all the time, because then it becomes redundant for our kids."

HyperDocs Resources: How to Learn More

Book: The HyperDocs Handbook

Website: HyperDocs.co: The online hub for Landis, Hilton, and Highfill's work on HyperDocs. It contains helpful blog posts and the Teachers Give Teachers system where participants share their own HyperDocs with one another. To browse and borrow other teachers' HyperDocs, all you need to do is register.
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How HyperDocs Can Transform Your Teaching

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HyperDocs make room for more interactive, personalized, and student-directed learning. Let's look at how they work.

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One Page of WHAT? 8 Creative Ways to use One-Pagers - Spark Creativity

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Have you been wondering, what the heck is a one-pager? Are you ready to discover the OODLES of ways you can use it in your classes? Yay! I first heard about one-pagers last year. Students simply show what they've learned on a single piece of paper, using words and images.

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A Simple Trick for Success with One-Pagers

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A Simple Trick for Success with One-Pagers

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Sponsored by Chill Expeditions and Kiddom

Have you heard the whispers about one-pagers in the online teacher hallways? The concept of a one-pager, in which students share their most important takeaways on a single piece of blank paper, has really taken off recently.

The one-pagers I see on Instagram draw me in like a slice of double chocolate mousse cake. The artistry students bring to representing their texts on a single piece of paper, blending images and ideas in creative color, is almost hypnotizing for me. Perhaps you've had the same experience.

But it's the very beauty of the models that get posted that can drive students and teachers away from the one-pager activity. Sure, it's great for super artistic students, we tend to think, but what about everyone else?

Turns out it CAN be great for everyone. As long as you know how to structure it.

What Is a One-Pager?

Let's backtrack a bit and talk more about what a one-pager is. It's pretty simple, really. Students take what they've learned-from a history textbook, a novel, a poem, a podcast, a Ted Talk, a guest speaker, a film-and put the highlights onto a single piece of paper. AVID first developed this strategy, but now it's widely used in and out of AVID classrooms.

But why is this seemingly simple assignment so powerful?

As students create one-pagers, the information they put down becomes more memorable to them as they mix images and information. According to Allan Paivio's dual coding theory, the brain has two ways of processing: the visual and the verbal. The combination of the two leads to the most powerful results. Students will remember more when they've mixed language and imagery.

Plus, one-pagers provide variety, a way for them to share what they've learned that goes beyond the usual written options. Students tend to surprise themselves with what they come up with, and their work makes for powerful displays of learning. Plus, they're fun to make. Let's not pretend that doesn't matter.

So, assuming you're sold on trying this out, you're probably wondering what exactly goes into a one-pager?

Students might include quotations, ideas, images, analysis, key names and dates, and more. They might use their one-pagers to make connections to their own lives, to art or films, to pop culture, to what they're learning in their other classes. They might even do it all. You'd be amazed at how much can fit on a single piece of paper.

Many teachers create lists of what students should put inside their one-pagers. Knowing they need two quotations, several symbolic images, one key theme, etc., helps guide students in their work.

The Art Problem

When creating one-pagers, artistic students tend to feature more sketches, doodles, icons and lettering. Students wary of art tend to feature more text, and can be reluctant to engage with the visual part of the assignment at all.

It was this issue-the issue of the art-haters-that first drew me into one-pagers two years ago. I had seen some stunning one-pagers posted in my Facebook group, Creative High School English. But the comments that followed were always the same. "That's amazing work! But so many of my students don't like art...."

Those comments struck a chord with me. For years I had dealt with comments from some of my own students about their distaste for artistic materials when I would introduce creative projects. No matter how much I explained that it was the intention behind their choices that mattered, I always got some pushback if there were any artistic elements involved in a project.

Was there a way to tweak the one-pager assignment so every student would feel confident in their success?

Another problem was one of overall design: Though they knew they needed to hit all the requirements their teachers listed, students still seemed to be overwhelmed by that huge blank page. What should go where? Did colored pencils really have to be involved?

A Simple Solution: Templates

As I thought about the problem, I wondered if students would feel less overwhelmed if they knew what needed to go where. If the quotations had to be in the middle, the themes in the upper left, the images across the bottom, etc. I began to play around with the shapes tool in PowerPoint, creating different one-pager templates.

Then I began shaping my requirements, correlating each element with a space on the paper. Maybe the border could be the key quotations. The center would feature an important symbol. The themes could go in circles around the center. I developed a bunch of different templates for varied ways to respond to novels. Then I tried podcasts. Films. Poetry.

As I shared these templates with other teachers, I kept getting the same feedback: "It's working!"

That little bit of creative constraint actually frees students to use their imagination to represent what they have learned on the page without fear. They know what they need to put down, and where, but they are also free to expand and add to the template. To choose their own colors. To bring out what is most important to them through their creativity and artistry. And those super artistic students? They can just flip the template over and use the blank page on the back.

Beyond Novels

There are so many ways to integrate this creative strategy into your classroom. While one-pagers lend themselves beautifully to final assessments after reading independent novels, literature circle selections, or whole class novels, that's really just the beginning.

You can use them to get to know students better, as with a name tent or "about me" one-pager at the beginning of the year. One school used templates to have every student create a one-pager about their own lives, collecting them all into hallway displays as part of a project they called "Tell your Story."

You can also use them to help students focus in on the most important information in nonfiction articles and books. One EFL teacher in Croatia used the templates to have students share key takeaways from articles they read about social media. Not only did students have to analyze the text deeply to figure out what was most important, but the dual-coding theory suggests the process of creating the one-pagers will help them remember the information better.

Another great use for one-pagers is to keep students focused while absorbing media. When students are watching a film, listening to a podcast, or even attending an assembly with a guest speaker, they can be creating one-pagers as they listen, a kind of formalized version of sketchnotes.

Simple Steps for One-Pager Success

Whenever you're considering your options for assessment, throw one-pagers into the mix. The steps below should help you in creating an assignment for which every student has a roadmap to success.

1. Choose the elements you want your students to put onto their one-pagers. For example, quotations, key themes, literary elements, discussion of style, important characters or dates, connections to other disciplines, connections to their lives, connections to modern culture.

2. Create a layout using the shapes tool in PowerPoint or something similar (or grab a free set of templates here or here).

3. Connect your instructions to your layout. Make it clear which elements should go in which area of your template.

4. Create a simple rubric with the key categories you want your students to succeed with. With literary one-pagers, I use "Textual Analysis," "Required Elements," and "Thoroughness."

5. As you introduce the assignment, show students some examples of one-pagers to give them a sense for how they might proceed.

6. Give students time to work on their one-pagers in class so they can ask you questions. Consider providing some artistic materials if you can, or inviting students to bring them in. You can always let them complete the work at home if necessary.

7. Do a gallery walk of the one-pagers before you collect them, or have them present to each other in small groups. The students will learn a lot from seeing each other's representations.

8. Create a display after you grade the one-pagers with your rubric.

You can find more of Betsy's great ideas on her website, Spark Creativity.

Come back for more.
Join our mailing list and get weekly tips, tools, and inspiration that will make your teaching more effective and fun. You'll get access to our members-only library of free downloads, including 20 Ways to Cut Your Grading Time in Half, the e-booklet that has helped thousands of teachers save time on grading. Over 50,000 teachers have already joined-come on in.

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A Simple Trick for Success with One-Pagers

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These visual tools allow students to synthesize learning, but some kids don't think they're talented enough to make them. A bit of creative constraint helps.

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Learning how to take notes can be difficult, so these strategies guide students to work and learn together, easing the way.

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Taking notes in class is a standard expectation: Beginning in middle school, or earlier in some schools, students are expected to record information from a text or direct instruction and use that information for another purpose-to write a paper, create a presentation, take an exam, etc. Some students take to the process easily, some need some support, and others struggle.

And note-taking can be hard for some students because the process is really complex. As Paige E. Northern and colleagues write, good note-taking "involves multiple decisions, including determining which and how much information should be included... [as well as ensuring] the completeness and correctness of ideas."

The complexity of this process becomes even clearer when viewed through the lens of cognitive load theory, which says (essentially) that the brain doesn't multitask well, so expecting students to listen, understand, analyze, and synthesize all at the same time is a big ask. Students need to copy slides or information ( What did the teacher say?), understand ( What does this mean?), apply ( What does this mean in context?), analyze ( What ideas make up this idea?), evaluate ( Which of these ideas are important enough to record?), and create meaning or synthesize ( How do I represent these ideas in a way that will allow me to remember them?).

Finally, if students find that their note-taking efforts don't result in improved grades, they may feel that the task isn't worth the effort, decreasing what's known as the task value: Their intrinsic motivation to take notes drops with a perceived lack of results, leading to lower engagement and less effort, experience, and skill with note-taking. Ultimately they will have less confidence in their ability to take notes at all.

Sharing the Workload

Given these difficulties, it's clear that students need to be taught explicitly how to take notes-but teachers have another avenue for scaffolding this task, which is to have students work together.

Collaborative note-taking provides a way to decrease complexity, share the cognitive load, and increase the task value of the process. Unlike teacher-scaffolded notes, in which students are provided with outlines, slides, or study guides to fill in during the lecture, collaborative note-taking allows for opportunities for students to share their individual notes with a partner, a group, or the whole class, either during or immediately following the lecture, in order to check for understanding and revise, extend, or correct their notes.

3 Ways to Have Students Work Together on Note-Taking

1. Cocreated notes. In this option, the teacher and students work together to draft the notes, writes Rachel Jorgensen. "As the teacher delivers content, they utilize questioning and discussion to elicit connections and synthesis from the students," Jorgensen explains. "For example, rather than simply presenting a new vocabulary word, the teacher may ask students to share any background knowledge they may have as to the word's meaning and include a student-generated definition in the shared notes."

Asking all students to work together in one document is messy, but it allows students to ask questions as they arise. You can use one of the G-Suite options-Docs, Slides, or Jamboard-with everyone working in the same space. Mural, Lucidchart, and OneNote offer similar formats.

If the entire class works together to create a single document in real time, you'll be able to not only monitor the choices they make but also correct misunderstandings as they work. This strategy is an excellent way to scaffold collaborative note-taking and can be very useful in short bursts. It's also a great way to teach a specific note-taking strategy such as Cornell notes.

2. A trusted set of notes as backup to individual note-taking. With this strategy, Nikole D. Patson writes in Faculty Focus, students take individual notes, and two or three students are assigned to create a set of notes that are reviewed by the teacher and shared with the class. Have the assigned students take notes in a Google Doc that you create-that way, you can check students' understanding of the material while you're teaching.

3. Breaking things up. " Pause and partner" is a great way to use collaborative note-taking to break up a lecture. This updated approach to the familiar turn-and-talk and think-pair-share strategies provides opportunities mid-lecture-every 15 to 20 minutes-for students to compare and revise their notes. Pro tip: Provide a framing prompt like "Compare your notes about this concept, and highlight the differences in what you wrote down" to get students started.

As we noted in the Edutopia newsletter The Research Is In, "After confirming the previous finding that revising notes can boost student achievement, the researchers conducted tests to find the optimal revision strategy. That turned out to be having students revise their notes with a partner during a pause in instruction-the researchers found 'a modest partner effect-those revising with partners recorded more original notes than those revising alone.'"

Collaborative note-taking requires that students be willing to work together and know how to do so, which requires a strong learning community. Luckily, nothing builds community like meaningful work, so collaborative note-taking can be both an outcome and a supporter of a strong learning community.

To get started, assess your students' current note-taking skills and preferences, and engage in some reflection on what's working and what isn't. Next, talk to your students-present the ideas above and see what seems interesting to them. Try something, reflect together, and then make adjustments. Ultimately, you'll be teaching your students not just academic content but also how to collaborate on important work, a skill they'll use for a lifetime.

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3 Collaborative Strategies to Build Up Students' Note-Taking Skills

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Learning how to take notes can be difficult, so these strategies guide students to work and learn together, easing the way.

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This easy strategy, loaded with higher-order thinking, lets students get their hands on the content without further ado.
Sure, you've heard that we shouldn't just spoon-feed information to our students, but what exactly should we be doing instead?

One possibility is inductive learning.

Inductive learning takes the traditional sequence of a lesson and reverses things. Instead of saying, "Here is the knowledge; now go practice it," inductive learning says, "Here are some objects, some data, some artifacts, some experiences...what knowledge can we gain from them?"

A number of instructional approaches, including discovery learning, inquiry-based learning, and problem-based learning, could be considered inductive, and all of them are well-supported by research. If you're just getting started with inductive learning, take a look at the video below, where we break down a very simple inductive strategy, one that takes less time and requires less planning than something like a PBL unit. It's a method that can work with very simple concepts, like parts of speech, or more complex ones, like systems of government, and it would be appropriate for just about any grade level.

Dig it:

[Want to make videos like this? Learn more here.]

This strategy comes from a book I can't seem to get enough of: The Strategic Teacher , by Silver, Strong, and Perini. This is the fourth research-based teaching strategy we've studied up close.

Try it and let me know how it goes. Or if you've already used this strategy or something like it and have finer points to share with the rest of us, please do. Happy teaching y'all. ♦

Like what you've seen so far?
If this one spoke to you, I'd love to have you come back for more. Join my mailing list and get weekly tips, tools, and inspiration - in quick, bite-sized packages - all geared toward making your teaching more effective and joyful. To thank you, I'll send you a free copy of my new e-booklet, 20 Ways to Cut Your Grading Time in Half. I look forward to getting to know you better!

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How to Teach an Inductive Learning Lesson

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Instead of saying, "Here is the knowledge; now go practice it," inductive learning says, "Here are some objects, some data, some artifacts, some experiences...what knowledge can we gain from them?"

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Teachers in all grades can apply these strategies for presenting concise, appealing, student-friendly assignments.

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Motivating Students Through Effective Assignment Design

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Motivating Students Through Effective Assignment Design

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Motivating Students Through Effective Assignment Design

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Teachers in all grades can apply these strategies for presenting concise, appealing, student-friendly assignments.

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Explicit instruction is necessary, but the most effective explanations act as a springboard to launch students quickly into guided, and then independent, practice.

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Explicit instruction is necessary, but the most effective explanations act as a springboard to launch students quickly into guided, and then independent, practice.

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Providing multiple means of engagement, representation, and expression creates opportunities for all students to learn.

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Universal Design for Learning and Equity

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Universal Design for Learning and Equity

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Differentiated Instruction

Providing multiple means of engagement, representation, and expression creates opportunities for all students to learn.

Universal Design for Learning is a powerful framework to operationalize the right to education, supporting educators in maximizing desirable challenges and minimizing unnecessary difficulties (International Disability Alliance, 2021). UDL is a framework for designing learning experiences, so students have options for how they learn, what materials they use, and how they demonstrate their learning. When implemented with a lens of equity in a multi-tiered system, the framework has the potential to eliminate opportunity gaps that exclude many learners, especially those who have been historically marginalized. If we want all students to have equal opportunities to learn, we have to be incredibly purposeful, proactive, and flexible (Novak, 2021). UDL creates a learning environment that is the least restrictive and most culturally responsive and trauma-informed for all students.

Pause and Reflect: What is your familiarity with the Universal Design for Learning (UDL) framework? Differentiated instruction? Consider what you know about the frameworks already, and what questions you have. You can return to these questions at the end of the chapter to determine if your understanding of the frameworks has evolved.

The term "Universal Design" was coined by architect Ronald Mace in 1988 who defined it as the "design of products and environments to be usable by all people, to the greatest extent possible, without the need for adaptation or specialized design" (Center for Universal Design, 1997). Buildings where all people could not enter were deemed "architecturally disabling."

In Mace's (1998) last public speech, he shared more about his philosophy on UD. He said: "Universal design broadly defines the user. It's a consumer market driven issue. Its focus is not specifically on people with disabilities, but all people. It actually assumes the idea, that everybody has a disability and I feel strongly that that's the case.We all become disabled as we age and lose ability, whether we want to admit it or not. It is negative in our society to say 'I am disabled' or 'I am old.' We tend to discount people who are less than what we popularly consider to be 'normal.' To be 'normal' is to be perfect, capable, competent, and independent. Unfortunately, designers in our society also mistakenly assume that everyone fits this definition of 'normal.' This just is not the case."

UDL is based on research in cognitive neuroscience that guides the development of flexible learning environments that can accommodate learner variability. UDL is defined by Higher Education Opportunity Act (PL 110-135) as "a scientifically valid framework for guiding educational practice that (a) provides flexibility in the ways information is presented, in the ways students respond or demonstrate knowledge and skills, and in the ways students are engaged; and (b) reduces barriers in instruction, provides appropriate accommodations, supports, and challenges, and maintains high achievement expectations for all students, including students with disabilities." Given that inclusion of students with disabilities in general education settings is contingent on teachers' ability to use inclusive instructional strategies, wide-scale commitment to UDL will be critical in creating multitiered systems (Scott, 2018).

Before effectively implementing inclusive practice, we must embrace the concept of variability. As stated in UDL Theory and Practice, a book by two of the founders of UDL, "From one perspective, human brains are remarkably similar. But to neuroscientists, this similarity is an illusion" (Meyer, Rose, and Gordon, 2014, p. 29). All learners learn in ways that are unique to them. This is referred to as variability.

We want to caution that embracing student variability is not the same as designing instruction based on learning styles. An article in the Atlantic, "The Myth of Learning Styles," shares the pervasiveness of the learning styles myth (Khazan, 2018). More than 90% of educators in various countries believe in their presence and use them to design instruction. But spoiler alert-there is no such thing. This is not to say that we do not have a unique mix of strengths and weaknesses, cognitive variability, multiple intelligences, or preferred learning approaches. But our brains are not wired for a single "style" of learning.

If someone says,"I am a visual learner," or "I need to hear it, to learn it," this idea stemmed from the theory of learning styles. There is just one problem: the theory is not grounded in science. Multiple studies have proven that learning "styles" are no more than learning "preferences" and that a preference doesn't lead to better learning outcomes (Nancekivell, Shah, and Gelman, 2019).

If we cater to a student's "learning style" by giving the "visual learner" more visual information and more aural information to the "auditory learner" or more movement to the "kinetic learner," we will shortchange their learning process. This does not mean we can't embrace multiple forms of intelligence and provide numerous scaffolds and supports. We should provide visual, auditory, linguistic, conceptual, and sociocultural scaffolds, but not because of learning styles-because of variability.

Pause and Reflect: Did you ascribe to the theory of learning styles? If so, notice the cognitive dissonance you may be experiencing as you "unfreeze."

In UDL Now! A Teacher's Guide to Applying Universal Design for Learning, third edition (Novak, 2022), variability is unpacked in terms of interpersonal variability and intrapersonal variability. Certainly, as educators, we know that our learners are very different from each other. This is interpersonal variability. There are still models where "struggling readers" are placed in a different classroom than "advanced readers" because the student needs are different, but this doesn't embrace intrapersonal variability. For example, we may be in an "advanced" reader group. It is likely that our group will not receive options to listen to the audio version of the text or access sentence stems because we "do not need them." But what about days when we are exhausted and having a terrible day, or when we forget to wear our glasses, or when the most responsible thing we could do for our mental health is to take a more accessible pathway to find balance? Instructional groups, when they are used for placement, do not embrace intrapersonal variability. Our needs are always changing.

The lack of appreciation of learner variability, especially intrapersonal variability, causes many learning environments to be restrictive and disabling to students. According to Liz Hartmann, an adjunct lecturer on education at Harvard University and an expert in UDL (2015), "When teachers embrace the conceptual shift of the UDL framework and learner variability, they understand that severe disabilities are part of the natural diversity that is to be expected and embraced in classrooms" (p. 58). When this shift occurs, educators are much more likely to provide the options and choices necessary for students with disabilities to thrive in inclusive classrooms.

Once educators embrace variability, inclusion, and the promise of UDL, they adhere to three principles when planning learning experiences: provide multiple means of engagement, multiple means of representation, and multiple means of action and expression. Considering these principles removes the barriers that make curriculum and instruction "disabling" to learners, especially students with disabilities (Meyer, Rose, and Gordon, 2014):

Provide multiple means of engagement. Student engagement is equal parts attention and commitment. For students to pay attention, they need learning opportunities that are relevant, authentic, and meaningful. Since students are different from one another, and because they are dynamic and their needs evolve based on context, no one lesson will be authentic to everyone. To be committed to authentic learning, students need to learn how to maintain effort and persistence, cope when learning experiences are challenging, and self-reflect to help guide their learning. In a universally designed classroom, these skills are explicitly taught by providing students with opportunities to practice these skills in meaningful ways as they work toward their goals.

Provide multiple means of representation. When teachers present information, they often use a single representation and provide the same lesson to all students. This is often done in a lecture, by playing a video, conducting a lab, or presenting or demonstrating information, teaching vocabulary, and so on. Because there is significant variability in students, they differ in the information they need to gather before applying it in an authentic assessment. By providing multiple opportunities and options for students to learn information, students are empowered to personalize how they build knowledge and skills.

Provide multiple means of action and expression. Once students are interested in authentic learning outcomes and have learned the information by selecting the options that best meet their needs, they need to express their understanding in an authentic assessment.

When students participate in discussions and complete assessments, they are taking action and expressing their learning. If we want all students to have equal opportunities to communicate their learning, we need to design flexible pathways. To do this, it is critical to unpack our standards and ask, "How can we design opportunities where all students can share their progress toward the standards?"

The three principles of UDL support educators in creating multiple pathways for students to learn and express what they know while empowering students to make choices about their learning. Although this framework does allow students with disabilities to thrive in their classrooms, it also increases the engagement and achievement of all students (Scott, 2018). Understanding the three principles is the foundation for building learning experiences that work for all students and make effective inclusion possible. The three principles of UDL support educators in providing options and choices so students have pathways for how they engage with learning, learn, and share what they know.

Excerpted with permission from the publisher, Wiley, from In Support of Students: A Leader's Guide to Equitable MTSS by Katie Novak, Ed.D. and Kristan Rodriguez, Ph.D. Copyright © 2023 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved. This book is available wherever books and eBooks are sold.

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How UDL Creates an Equitable Environment for Students

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Experts on Universal Design for Learning share some details on how this framework promotes equity in the classroom..

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Group work can be challenging for students, but teachers can facilitate relationship building that leads to positive learning outcomes.

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Collaborative Group Learning in High School

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Collaborative Group Learning in High School

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Group work can be challenging for students, but teachers can facilitate relationship building that leads to positive learning outcomes.

Students engage in rigorous standards-based tasks while having deep discussions, participating in peer coaching, and working to assess themselves individually and as peers. Toth and Sousa say, "The brain that does the work is the brain that learns." Collaborative learning yields more work out of the student because they're engaging with the content rather than just receiving it. This article highlights work that my students and I have done and will continue to do to motivate each other. It has taken a lot of shifts in paradigms on my part to really facilitate collaborative learning.

Student Buy-in Is Key for Group Work

Many of us who are high school teachers have struggled with getting student buy-in for collaboration. In the past, I was worried about my "classroom being too loud" when I released responsibility to students. Now, I have to be creative in getting certain students to engage in group work. Some students simply aren't interested in working in a group, or they might feel anxiety about having to speak to someone in person. There are also times in groups when students struggle with focus because of their electronics.

Despite these reasons, I had success with collaborative structures in my classroom. I hope to have more this coming year-it's a work in progress. Students' ease with participation in groups was the result of my working with them on understanding the learning structures, being more autonomous in their learning through meaningful roles, and focusing attention on the tasks and others in their teams.

We need to be intentional about how we set up our classrooms. It's not just about students being compliant; it's about their being motivated. Putting students in a group and saying, "Hey, go do this," isn't going to work. Spending time working with students to plan the groups, learn norms and routines, and understand what it means to be part of the classroom culture is key.

Building Relationships Builds Teams

To have success with collaborative teams, it's important to understand that relationships hold them together (among the students as well as with me as the teacher). Last year, I did a one-word campaign where I asked students to choose one motivational word to work toward throughout the year. It was a great way for me to learn about my students. This year, we'll be writing a four-word mantra. This is a four-word sentence that they'll use for self-encouragement. Additionally, students will work together to build a team mantra.

In my experience, I've learned that learning about each other's working styles is helpful. This year, I'm initiating a compass survey with my students in order for them to learn about each other's strengths, and together we'll form the teams that they'll be working in together. Taking the survey and discussing it in teams will get students motivated to start having natural conversations. Then, we will create our norms with social contracts.

Additionally, students appreciate finding things in common with each other. This summer, I learned about hexagonal thinking for relationship building and understanding commonalities. Students will use this thinking process to answer questions about themselves and then discuss the similarities and the differences. These discussions can create organic connections.

Spend Time Directly Teaching Collaborative Learning Structures

My colleagues and I discovered that students just needed to get comfortable in the learning structures. Last year, we had student teams participate in short debates on topics in pop culture and others they found interesting. This activity lowered anxiety for most students and taught them how to have discussions in teams. Afterward, we held debrief sessions in a whole class setting to talk about the experience and how to improve discussions.

As we got better with conversations, we needed to improve group routines. Students became responsible for reading learning targets to the class and explaining them to each other, and they learned to get into their teams when necessary and quickly find their roles and tasks. They also had to get comfortable with self- and peer assessment.

Modeling is important when implementing a new learning structure. I sometimes used a quick pop culture reference or thought-provoking question to demonstrate what I expected a conversation to look like. Eventually, I got to a point where I would say "Back to Back, Face to Face," "Fish Bowl," or "World Cafe," and students knew what I meant.

When I saw that I needed to do more to support students in teams with understanding the scaffolds provided, I bought color-coded Jenga games. The colors on the Jenga pieces matched up with the colors of the language scaffolds I had in place for a team discussion. I posed a question for debate, and every time a student answered the question, they had to put a colored corresponding piece on the language scaffold I had in place for them. The discussions became more engaged and thought-provoking.

Provide Impactful Roles

All collaborative learning has to have meaningful roles. Keep the roles and their descriptions simple, straightforward, and aligned to the task. Make sure that roles are student selected. I hand the descriptions to students and invite them to select their roles. If a group is struggling, I coach them by asking them, "What role do you think is best for you? What skills do you have for this role?"

Roles need to be adaptable not only for working styles and students' personalities, but also for the product that students are creating. If the activity doesn't require research, don't include a "researcher" role. If the task doesn't require a drawing, don't include an "artist" role. For students who chose not to talk as much as others, I created the "scribe" role, where they worked as a note taker.

When we set up our classrooms this school year, it's critical that we put student needs, standards-based tasks, and classroom community at the forefront when considering collaborative group learning. Understand that it takes a lot of work to make this successful in the classroom, and don't give up if things don't go well the first time. It's a worthwhile journey for you as the teacher, as well as for your students.

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How to Motivate Students to Work in Collaborative Teams

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Collaborative group learning is an important part of the learning process in high school, and these tips can help teachers manage it well.

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Build community and connect to the work ahead.

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Maximizing Group Work With a Tactical Pause | Edutopia

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Maximizing Group Work With a Tactical Pause | Edutopia

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George Lucas Educational Foundation

©

2022

George Lucas Educational Foundation. All Rights Reserved.

Edutopia® and Lucas Education Research™ are trademarks or registered trademarks of the George Lucas Educational Foundation in the U.S. and other countries.

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Maximizing Group Work With a Tactical Pause

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Taking a time-out during group work allows you to celebrate or redirect students' work-or clarify the task you've given them.

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These strategies for using play-based learning with older students can get them more engaged with your course content.

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Reintroducing Playful Learning in High School

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Reintroducing Playful Learning in High School

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These strategies for using play-based learning with older students can get them more engaged with your course content.

By high school, especially 11th and 12th grades, most students have been trained to sit, stay, and listen at school. As education makes a much-needed shift toward learner-centered models, high school students need help reconnecting with the joy and play inherent in authentic learning.

By "play," I don't mean the strict definition of play-completely self-directed. I mean bringing the spirit of play to high school. High school can't be fun all the time, but a recurrent spirit of play can help ensure that it's not all drudgery, either.

We need to help students remember how to play. High school students are reticent about putting themselves out there, so we need to first create a safe space to explore ideas in "weird" ways, take risks, be vulnerable. They have to be able to see firsthand that yours is a space where judgment and criticism are reserved for growth-based feedback, not personal attacks.

Step 1: Create Authentic Conditions for Play

It can't feel forced. And playing a game just to kill time isn't as effective as meaningful play, which provides authentic learning that helps students process and present information and content.

I've designed freeze tag games with chemistry classes, done in-class improv operettas in English language arts, turned solo tasks into group relay races, but always connected them to key learning concepts, skills, and standards.

Step 2: Start Small-Really Small

Make it safe. For students who haven't "played" in some time, the shift to more dynamic play must be gradual and safe: safe to be silly without judgment and wrong without embarrassment.

The goal is to break down expectations in the classroom and open the door for more rigorous, creative play. At the beginning of a new class, semester, or school year, consider the following ideas.

Sit on the floor: Again, this is about shifting expectations, breaking the rules of high school. Sit in a circle. Read to the students. Pass objects around the circle and explain how they connect to key concepts. Have partners sit back-to-back on the floor with one student facing the board describing a concept until their partner gets it. Model for students that there are many ways of doing the same thing, and in this classroom, we're open to exploring.

Draw: It's safe-think posters with words and pictures; play Pictionary; draw symbols from math, science, literature, and use them as flash cards; capture moments, scenes, or concepts as well as "what's missing" in storyboards.

As students become more comfortable with discomfort and experience different ways to engage in their learning, gradually raise the stakes.

Make tableaux: Comprising silent frozen pictures or statue scenes, tableaux are a great way to physically represent content. In groups of two to five students, replicate photos, represent math concepts, or physically show a setting. Once students have done tableaux, you can add the option for one line of dialogue, one sound, and/or one shift or movement to further communicate meaning. Give groups steps in a process; they demonstrate their step, and after all groups have had a turn, they all have to put themselves in the correct sequence.

Team play: Two or more people physically represent and act as an atom; or students act as tour guides, historians, park rangers, etc., and explain what's happening in the picture, scenes, and tableaux created by peers.

Dance: Students create dance moves for vocabulary words or key concepts. They teach each other a few moves at a time and have a dance party. Turn on some music and call out a word; students do the dance move and shout back the definition.

Scenes or skits: Students act out a moment in history, create a skit showing the meaning of keywords, interview a character. And if doing these activities in class is too intimidating at first, have them start by doing this work via Flip and then build to live skits.

Step 3: Model Taking Risks

If you don't do it, they won't. Yep-you dance. You sit on the floor. You walk around. You admit when you've made a mistake or done something poorly and model how you plan to correct the error. The goal here is to demonstrate that silly is OK and the room is safe. You have to let go before they will.

This doesn't mean letting go of rules or expectations. I danced with students, climbed on furniture, played catch to connect concepts, and always had control of the room. Honestly, because we were creating a safe space for risk-taking, for failing, and for being silly, students were typically more well-behaved in my classroom than in others (as reported to me by a very surprised administrator).

Step 4: Tap Into Old-School Favorites

From Play-Doh to shaving cream, crayons to simple props, students can switch to play mode more quickly by repurposing old favorites.

Shaving cream: Spray on desks and do math problems or vocabulary activities, or draw scenes or important moments. Students start at their own desks, then rotate and add on to each other's shaving cream drawing.

Play-Doh: Create sequences of action, demonstrate concepts and physics, create a key symbol for a moment in time, character, or figure. Up the ante with stop-motion applications.

Snowball fight: Everyone writes a concept (math problem, vocabulary word or sentence, character quote, historical figure fact) on a piece of paper. Crumple them up into "snowballs." Throw them around the room. Everyone grabs a snowball and has to complete the problem, explain the quote, add another sentence, identify the next step to the sequence. Add on, throw again.

Bubblegum machine: A variation of snowball fight but with colored paper. Each color represents a different type of task, focus, or category. Think types of math problems, elements of writing, historical periods. Over the course of the class period, kids need to interact with at least one page of each color.

Step 5: Hand Over Ownership

As students embrace play, let them take the lead on when, where, and how to play with course content.

Student-led discussions: Students create and facilitate their own warm-up or review activity. This is a great way to see what they like and get ideas from other teachers or classes. Plus, it helps ensure that the discussion is about what they want to better know, understand, or do.

Scavenger hunts: Students set up experiments and experiences for each other, for other sections, for other grade levels.

If all of this feels silly or sounds like too much work, remember: Playing is learning. It's wiring information in our brains. The tactile experiences that play offers help students build connections to content and often to each other. Students need movement; you need movement. These activities help break up the monotony for everyone.

Finally, these playful activities foster joy. It will increase the laughter in your room. And what a gift: students excited to come to your room because they never know what they'll do next.

While play won't happen immediately for all students (and some students may never get on board), by using this play skill-building guide, you might foster authentic play in any classroom with any age of learner.

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Reintroducing Playful Learning in High School

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These strategies for setting up playful learning in high school can help get students more engaged in the content.

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Power Lesson: Note-Taking Stations | Cult of Pedagogy

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To take quality notes, students need to be taught how. This fantastic station-rotation lesson gets the job done, and it can be used with all kinds of other content as well.

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What is Sketchnoting? - Verbal To Visual

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What is Sketchnoting? - Verbal To Visual

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✏️ Start building your sketchnoting skills: https://verbaltovisual.com/ My name is Doug Neill and I'm passionate about helping others reach their full creative potential. I teach a skill called sketchnoting (also known as visual note-taking and graphic recording), which for me is a gateway to doing better work.

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Why Students Give You the Blank Stare, and What to Do About It 

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Why Students Give You the Blank Stare, and What to Do About It 

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Listen to the interview with Blake Harvard:
Sponsored by Listenwise and Khan Academy Kids

Please allow me to describe an all-too-common situation that has occurred in probably every teacher's classroom: You teach your heart out. Really just knock it out of the park: explaining, describing, providing examples, modeling ... you know, all the things we're taught to do during instruction. Then you ask what you believe is a simple question all students should know the answer to ... and ... nothing. Absolute crickets. You sheepishly look out into the abyss that is your classroom and you see it.

The blank stare.

It can be momentarily debilitating. What to do? Just restate the question again? Maybe they didn't hear the question. I'll just say it again. Yeah, that's it. (That, in fact, isn't it.)
Why aren't they answering my question? Why don't they know this content? I just taught it to them. They should know this.
Any of this sound familiar? I think, if we're being honest, all teachers have experienced a very similar scenario. What went wrong? Why don't they know this stuff I just taught? It can be very frustrating, sort of spinning your wheels and getting nowhere with student learning. Below are four possible explanations from cognitive psychology to explain this occurrence, followed by some possible solutions.

Explanation 1: Inadequate Schema Development

The students in your classroom are, more than likely, novices when it comes to this new content. Novice and expert learners experience and process information differently. Novices probably do not have a lot of background knowledge on the subject and, therefore, have a poorly developed schema for the content being taught.

I like to think of schema development like a spider web: The more connections to the information being taught, the more complex the spider web of knowledge. And, just like a real spider web, the more connections to the information, the easier to catch bugs (or, in our case, new information). Basically, it is much easier to add information to already established and understood information in memory. But when novice learners experience new information, they have a minimal spider web, so they struggle to 'catch' new content. So, even though you may have introduced the new material well, students may still struggle to process all of that new information.

Solution: Access Background Knowledge and Relevant Schemas

It always helps to access background knowledge in class. This is especially important when beginning a new topic. Any activities attempting to relate the content to the students is also an effort at accessing their 'spider web of knowledge' and gives them a better chance of 'catching' the new material. Unless students have direct knowledge of the information, they probably won't unconsciously or consciously think to themselves, "Oh, this directly/indirectly relates to a similar topic that I do know something about and I should view this new material through a lens of what I already know and understand." Explicit attempts in class to access that background knowledge and, consequently, the spider web will help with schema development and a better understanding of the new material.

I mostly do this in class through a quick pretesting of information, usually either a few questions or prompts about the content to get the students thinking about what they already know. I emphasize to the students that this pretest assessment isn't for a grade and is much more of a way to prime your memory for the new information. I invite any and all discussion and questions from students during this time. It appears pretesting prepares the brain for the upcoming lesson and accesses the spider web of knowledge they may already have in memory.

Explanation 2: Limited Working Memory

Following the same line of thinking as above, novice learners' working memory (which is a necessary but insufficient aspect of memory processing for long-term retention) is very quickly overloaded with information. When working memory is overloaded on the path to long-term processing, memory suffers greatly.

It's a bit like someone being given five tennis balls to carry across a room to place them in a box. Just five tennis balls? That may be fairly easy. But if I gave you fifteen to carry, you'd probably lose most of them while crossing the room. When the novice student is required to 'carry' multiple bits or chunks of content in their working memory at any one moment, it can become very overwhelming and they may not even process any of the information. More practically, this may show up in a math teacher showing students how to solve a problem with multiple steps. If the students are unfamiliar with the first steps, they will be overloaded with that information, probably become flustered, and either give up or have no chance of processing the steps further into the problem.

Solution: Chunk the Learning

Again, since the novice learner's working memory is easily overloaded with new material, it really helps to break down new content into much smaller chunks of information for cognitive consumption. And, while teachers certainly already know this to be true, I know I sometimes underestimate just how small those chunks may need to be. Research by Cowan in 2010 showed evidence that four chunks are about all we can process in working memory at any one time. That is quickly depleted, however, if we don't have well-established schemas for the material. So make sure those chunks are small and, with multistep problems and/or concepts, make sure students are assessing their progress on the first steps before attempting to move to the next steps.

Explanation 3: The Curse of Knowledge

Teachers are the best/the worst at displaying one particular cognitive bias: the curse of knowledge. Basically, the curse of knowledge rears its ugly head when someone assumes that others should know the same information they know. In the classroom, this occurs when teachers assume students should know and understand the content because they just told them about it in class or they discussed it yesterday in class. Even if they understood it yesterday, a lot of forgetting can happen in twenty-four hours.

Now, don't get me wrong. I have been in the classroom for eighteen years, so I completely sympathize and understand that students do not always pay attention in class and this will definitely lead to them not understanding material. However, I know that in the past, I have been guilty of thinking to myself, "Why don't they know this stuff? It makes sense to me." That is the curse of knowledge. Now, whenever I start to feel this way, I think about how many times I've taught this material and how sophisticated my schema is for this content. Most of my students are hearing this material for the first time. Of course, it seems logical that they would struggle a bit more than me.

Solution: Empathize with Students

The best way to overcome the curse of knowledge is to empathize with students. It helps to try to put myself in their shoes and think about how flustered and how foreign I would feel as a student if they were teaching me something that they care deeply about, like some new dance on social media or the nuanced meaning behind Taylor Swift's latest dis track about one of her ex-boyfriends. I wouldn't remember most of it and that's okay. It should also be okay for our students to not know or understand information in class after coming into contact with it for the first time. That empathy often helps me with being much more understanding with my students and I become more patient with reviewing material before moving on to newer content.

Explanation 4: Single-Modality Teaching

Probably, as a result of experiencing the curse of knowledge, teachers then also forget to provide instruction in multiple modalities for easier processing of information. (This is absolutely not a nod to teaching to preferred learning styles ... don't do that.) Again, if it seems easy to me, maybe a verbal explanation of the topic or concept will suffice for my students? That may not be the case. Spoken words may not be enough for students to hold that information in working memory long enough to really process the material. The content may need something to latch on to or it is in one ear and out the other.

Solution: Anchor Information with Dual Coding

Rather than simply talking through a lecture of new content, providing visuals is a fantastic way to assist learners with a kind of anchor for the material. In cognitive psychology, this is a kind of dual coding of information. Dual coding adds to the context of the material. Generally speaking, the more context that can be added to the instruction, the more connections can be added to that spider web of knowledge.

And whether the teacher provides a simple illustration or the students provide their own, don't worry with the 'but I'm not a good artist' excuse. The quality of the drawing or picture has nothing to do with its ability to help with processing. In fact, I tell my students that sometimes the drawing that is humorous in its execution can be better for remembering. I've heard students say that they remembered a concept because their drawing was so bad. That made it stick out in their memory and aided in the processing of the information.

And it doesn't necessarily have to be a drawing or illustration. Other memory aids - such as graphic organizers, mind maps, and hierarchies - all allow students to visualize the content and add context to the material, making it easier to mentally organize information in memory.

Are these solutions foolproof? Will they always account for every experience of 'the stare'? Of course not. As you well know, there are no silver bullets in education. Nothing works all the time with all students, and anyone who tells you so is either quite misinformed or is trying to sell you something. But understanding that learners are novices when experiencing new information and that impacts their ability to process that material is important. And knowing that just because the content is easily understood by myself does not mean it is comprehended and remembered by my students is also important.

The stare isn't fun for anyone in the classroom. Teachers don't like feeling like they've wasted their time with instruction and students do not like to feel like they're not learning the material. Identifying possible reasons for this happening and working to remedy them should decrease 'the stare' and help to create a more efficient, effective, and motivating classroom.

Come back for more.
Join our mailing list and get weekly tips, tools, and inspiration that will make your teaching more effective and fun. You'll get access to our members-only library of free downloads, including 20 Ways to Cut Your Grading Time in Half, the e-booklet that has helped thousands of teachers save time on grading. Over 50,000 teachers have already joined-come on in.

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Why Students Give You the Blank Stare, and What to Do About It

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You teach your heart out. Really just knock it out of the park. Then you ask a question students should know the answer to ... and nothing. What's going on?

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Why You Should Bring Podcasts Into Your Classroom

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Why You Should Bring Podcasts Into Your Classroom

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Listen to the interview with Lindsay Patterson, Monica Brady-Myerov,
and Marshall Escamilla (transcript):
Sponsored by Listenwise and Scholastic Scope

This post contains Amazon Affiliate links. When you make a purchase through these links,
Cult of Pedagogy gets a small percentage of the sale at no extra cost to you.

Imagine this scene in your classroom: Students are at their desks, completely engaged and attentive. But no one's talking. You're also quiet. Your students are not doing a worksheet. They're not watching a video. They're listening.

A podcast is playing from speakers at the front of the room. You can see how your students are caught up in the story. Every so often they laugh at a joke or gasp with surprise at a twist in the story. Their imaginations are alive. The words are turning into movies in their minds. Physically, they're in the classroom, but really, they're in another world.

That's the power of audio. And the best part? Just the act of listening to a good narrative helps your students become better learners. Podcasts are a screen-free, movement-enabling, ear-stimulating and eye-opening way to deliver content. Whether you are in-person, remote, hybrid, flipped or blended, podcasts can enhance your teaching in meaningful ways.

I've spent a lot of time thinking and learning about the benefits of podcasts for education. In 2015, I created Tumble Science Podcast for Kids, one of the first educational podcasts for kids. The following year, I helped put together a list of 8 Great Educational Podcasts for Kids for Cult of Pedagogy. I also co-founded Kids Listen, a non-profit organization advocating for podcasts for kids. And now, I'm the CEO of Tumble Media, a production company dedicated to creating children's educational audio. Through the years, I've interacted with teachers who have brought podcasts into their classrooms in incredibly innovative ways. I've done in-class demos and have seen students fall in love with podcasts. I wanted to share why using podcasts is so powerful in education. But there hasn't been a roadmap for how to bring audio into the classroom.

To build that roadmap, I teamed up with Monica Brady-Myerov, the founder and CEO of Listenwise, a platform for improving listening skills through podcasts and public radio stories. She's one of the pioneers of educational audio and author of the new book, Listen Wise: Teach Students to Be Better Listeners. Monica is an expert on the science of audio, the research behind it, and ultimately, how to use audio to enhance listening and learning.

In this blog post, we share what we've learned over years of immersion in educational audio-land, explore why podcasts are so great for education, and provide a roadmap for how to get started. Let's start with the science.

On the podcast, we talk with three leaders in educational podcasts (L to R): Lindsay Patterson, Marshall Escamilla, and Monica Brady-Myerov.

The Science of Listening

We are always listening. And yet a lifetime of hearing doesn't make us good listeners. We have to work at it. Years of research have proven the benefits of listening in education.

Listening Is a Critical Factor in Learning How to Read

Research tells us that better listeners are better readers. The Simple View of Reading formula developed by Gough & Tunmer shows that reading is a function of two key components: decoding and language comprehension. Listening is a key part of language comprehension. In the science of reading, the awareness of sounds that make up spoken words is critical. Listening to stories helps students hear grammar and syntax and understand how stories work. Incidental exposure to vocabulary through listening and reading together helps students learn the meaning of unknown words. Research shows listening while reading improves text reading rates and leads to higher comprehension.

As students get older, the importance of listening to reading doesn't disappear; it increases. Researchers found that, over time, the relative importance of listening comprehension increases as a child becomes a more proficient reader. Decoding is still important to reading comprehension, but it's less of a potential roadblock once kids have mastered it. In fact, by 8 th grade, literacy researcher Tiffany Hogan says " all of the reliable variance in reading comprehension could be explained by the listening comprehension factor."

In other words, introducing more listen-only content will benefit reading comprehension for years to come.

Listening Shapes Your Brain and Memory

Our brains make a mental imagery -the "movie in our minds"-of what we hear. When we listen, our ears aren't just passive absorbers of information. We are activating systems in the brains that are responsible for sight, sound, motor control and olfaction. "We imagine sounds using the same brain regions that allow us to hear real sounds," says cognitive scientist Benjamin Bergen.

Listening improves social-emotional wellbeing. Researchers found that when someone is engaged in a story, it's positively associated with psychological safety and negatively associated with social anxiety. And that connection actually improves your listening.

Listening Supports Multilingual Learning

For the English learners in classrooms, listening provides an equal opportunity to access content and hear authentically spoken language. While listening can occur at different speeds to improve comprehension, everyone is listening to the same text. Unlike reading exercises in which the text is leveled down to the reader's ability, listening-with the right scaffolding-has the same high level of academic language and content vocabulary.

In addition to learning about the world, listening is an excellent way to build background knowledge of the subject, a key element of listening comprehension, especially in learning a second language.

Why Podcasts Make a Great Addition to Your Classroom

Let's be honest: Audio has been lifting its weight in the classroom for decades in various forms. But podcasts have unique advantages. They feature authentic language, real conversations, and diverse voices. You can choose from a wide variety of topics-everything from stories, to history, to mindfulness, science, music, literature, and more-and some podcasters even make special episodes designed for the classroom. They're designed to catch the ear and hold attention in a way that feels almost magical. Best of all, podcasts fit any classroom budget: They're free.

Kids Love Podcasts

Podcasts aren't a tough sell for kids. They're a dedicated audience. One in 4 kids already listen to podcasts, according to Ipsos, a global market research firm. At Kids Listen, we found a variety of reasons behind this in our most recent survey of listening families. The top reason was that they are fun and entertaining (49 percent), followed by their educational appeal (33 percent). A host of other reasons included that podcasts build skills, calm kids, prompt family discussion, allow for multitasking, and provide regular new content. In one notable response, a teacher from Texas said, "One of the new TEKS for 4th and 5th graders is LISTENING. We listen most mornings in the classroom. The kids LOVE it."

When you introduce podcasts to your classroom, ask students if they have listened to podcasts, and which are their favorites. It may give you some ideas of podcasts to check out!

Podcasts are Portable and Mobile

A primary benefit of audio is that it doesn't tie students to a screen. That opens up a whole range of possibilities for creative educational experiences. This is highlighted by the most recent Kids Listen survey. We asked parents what activities children engage in while listening to podcasts. The majority of respondents (78 percent) responded that kids "just actively listen," they also did a variety of other things: Playing, working with art materials, getting ready for bed, doing chores, and other elements of their daily routine.

That flexibility at home translates to educational settings as well. Play a podcast while your students do classroom chores or creative activities that don't require mental focus. Cue up podcasts on their devices while they walk around the school, getting exercise while practicing their listening skills. Or combine podcast time with drawing-students can sketch scenes from the podcast as they listen. The list of things to do while listening is endless.

These ideas work for any podcast. But some podcasts are built around activity.

Mindfulness podcasts like Peace Out and Like You guide kids through meditation and movement.

Music education shows like Noodle Loaf and The Music Box encourage making music and moving around.

On Tumble, we've leaned into these audio advantages by designing episodes and audio courses that encourage active exploration. For example, our interactive episode "Solve the Case of The Sleeping Trees" leads students through making observations, asking questions, and making conclusions. The ideal setting to listen is outdoors, in nature.

Podcasts Are a Great Way to Explore Current Events

Most podcasts are designed to be evergreen; you can return to the same episodes year after year, and they'll still be relevant. But others are designed for the moment.

News podcasts are a great way to approach current events. Typically short, you can play episodes as a warmup for the day, or as a lead-in to larger discussions.

KidzNuz is designed for the classroom, with a quiz at the end of each daily episode to practice comprehension.

Published twice weekly, The Ten News clocks in at ten minutes: Each episode tackles the biggest headlines, followed by fun segments and trivia questions.

Newsy Jacuzzi is an international take on the news, hosted by a mother and daughter in India.

Listenwise curates daily current events for the classroom and gives you a bank of questions to spark conversation.

It's not just news podcasts that can help kids process current events and realities. At Your Level, hosted by an 11-year-old kid, did an episode on pandemic birthdays during the coronavirus lockdowns. Even fictional stories can take on elements of real life. For example, in the Stoopkid Stories episode "The BB Twins," the characters deal with the effects of their dance going viral on social media. Stories can also take on hot topics like The Imagine Neighborhood's 6-part series on Race, Identity, and Making Things Right.

Podcasts Come in a Variety of Lengths

Not only do podcasts provide a variety of content, they come in a variety of lengths. You can choose whether to make listening your main meal, or simply a side of your lesson.

Many educationally-minded podcast creators have consulted with teachers in order to develop special episodes that fit into classroom time.

Pamela Rogers, a school librarian and creator of the literature podcast Buttons & Figs, developed playlists of 5 minute interactive wordplay challenges for the classroom.

What Will She Do Next, a women's history podcast, creates 10 minute episodes in addition to their usual 20 minute episodes.

Timestorm, a serialized audio podcast for tweens and teens, creates 10 minute stand-alone minisodes.

Love Learning, which offers everything from poems to mediations for elementary students, clocks in episodes from one minute to 11 minutes.

Other short podcasts include the serialized fiction podcast Six Minutes, a personal growth podcast Five Minutes with Dad, African Folktales, and Two Whats and A Wow.

Other podcasters have found that 20 minutes is a great length for the classroom. Kitty Felde edits her episodes of Book Club for Kids and her series, The Fina Mendoza Mysteries, to that length based on teacher input. Eat Your Spanish, a language learning podcast, can serve as a full lesson at 20-25 minutes. From personal experience, Tumble's 15 minute episodes are frequently used in the classroom as well.

Listenwise offers a happy medium by editing longer podcasts and NPR stories into shorter versions. The audio stories are 5 minutes long and come with listening discussion questions, interactive transcripts and quizzes across a wide variety of subjects in ELA, social studies and science.

Podcasts Help You Meet Academic Standards

Aside from the fun benefits, there's a very practical one too. Listening now is an anchor standard of the Common Core. Even states that are not using Common Core standards include listening in their curriculum standards. Twenty-two states include listening in their high-stakes exam. If you are in California, Wisconsin or Indiana, a portion of your ELA exam is listening.

Practicing students' listening "muscle" for these tests makes sense, and you can build their listening stamina with a podcast. When they enjoy listening to podcasts, they'll be strong for the assessment audio. Following listening, asking kids to identify the main idea, make an inference or recall a specific detail from the story also addresses many other ELA standards. And if you listen to a podcast aligned with your curriculum such as an Earth Rangers episode on frogs and metamorphosis, you can also knock off some NGSS science standards.

Top 4 Places to Find Audio for Kids

Now that we've convinced you that adding audio to your instruction is an easy, fun way to build skills and knowledge, you're probably wondering where you find all this great audio? We've already mentioned a few shows and platforms, but here's a list of platforms for you to discover your favorite podcasts.

Kids Listen is a nonprofit organization that advocates for high-quality audio content especially made for kids, with over 130 member podcasts. The Kids Listen App (for iOs, Android, and web browser) organizes these podcasts by age, interest, and curated playlists. The Kids Listen Activity Podcast brings you episodes from different podcasts, paired with suggested activities for further learning. Kids Listen University is a place to find podcast-based lessons and curriculum.

This online platform brings NPR and podcasts to the classroom with easy-to-use podcast lessons and listening comprehension quizzes. The collection of 2500+ curriculum-aligned podcasts for grades 2-12 keep teaching connected to the real world. Free for teachers, a Premium subscription available for schools.

Librarians Pamela Rogers and Anne Bensfield write a regular column about "Kidcasts," exploring recommended episodes by themes like "Black Changemakers," "Podcasts to Encourage Mindfulness," and "Poetry." They created this handy poster with their top "classroom-ready" podcasts.

A paid subscription for teachers or parents who want ad-free streaming services for kids podcasts ages 3-13. PINNA is quickly producing new podcasts for kids so there is a lot to explore on this platform.

Additionally, I've written two kidcast recommendation articles for The New York Times: A Big List of Podcasts for Little Kids and A Big List of Podcasts for Bigger Kids.

More kids' podcasts are coming out all the time, so keep your ears open. With all these resources, all you need to do is go forth and listen!

Come back for more.
Join our mailing list and get weekly tips, tools, and inspiration that will make your teaching more effective and fun. You'll get access to our members-only library of free downloads, including 20 Ways to Cut Your Grading Time in Half, the e-booklet that has helped thousands of teachers save time on grading. Over 50,000 teachers have already joined-come on in.

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Why You Should Bring Podcasts Into Your Classroom

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Podcasts are a screen-free, movement-enabling, ear-stimulating and eye-opening way to deliver content. Learn the benefits and where to find great ones.

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Teachers can incorporate music in their classrooms in a variety of ways to enhance the cognitive processes that are essential to learning.

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Teachers can incorporate music in their classrooms in a variety of ways to enhance the cognitive processes that are essential to learning.

Maria Carluccio / The iSpot

Why is it easier to recall lyrics to a song than to memorize a poem? What is the power of emotional connections to some songs we remember years later? How does awareness of making progress in a musical instrument sustain academic learning effort?

In exploring the impact of music on learning, we find that when music is included and embedded across the curriculum, it can promote positive impacts on learning.

Music Provides Motivation and Improves Mood

Music gives opportunities for students who are having a hard time in school to experience the emotional highs of progressive achievement.

Knowing from the start that they will produce representations of the learning creatively can alleviate boredom in students and prevent them from giving low effort.

Information acquired with positive expectation and then mentally manipulated through the symbolic representations of music can link into expanded neural networks for creative insights.

Music can promote buy-in to topics of study, opportunities to recognize the power of effort to progress when learning a musical instrument, boost moods, provide memory-enhancing tools, and even expand the brain's creative potential. We'll explore some of the ways that incorporating music across the curriculum can impact mood, motivation, and memory:

Dopamine Increases Pleasure in Learning

The dopamine-reward system enhances the experience of pleasure, satisfaction, and increased motivation and memory. The desire to seek the pleasurable response to dopamine release can be enhanced by music to facilitate motivated learning and enduring memory.

Teachers can promote positivity and perseverance by tapping into the power of the dopamine reward cycle. Incorporating dopamine boosters such as choice, optimism, movement, positive interactions with peers, being read to, acting kindly, expressing gratitude, humor, and listening to or playing music can keep brains engaged and receptive to learning.

3 BENEFITS oF Music Incorporation

Music can boost interest about what is to come and bring greater enthusiasm to activities in which students participate.

Playing music that students enjoy as they move through many activities (such as creative writing, art, collaborative projects) encourages greater dopamine-enhanced experiences.

As students enter the classroom, provide music related to the upcoming topic, such as a Strauss waltz as they are about to study Austria or jazz before a discussion of The Great Gatsby.

Provide theme music from a game show, such as Jeopardy, before reviewing for a test.

1. Engagement/motivation. Incorporate music for joyful and powerful learning.

2. Practice makes progress. Share with your students the following concept: "A process called neuroplasticity is ready to work for you to make your learning stronger and more useful. Every time your brain practices a skill or reviews new learning, the memories and actions strengthen."

Awareness of their capacity to change their brains can be exemplified through past successes. Encourage students to reflect on their progressive success, such as when they learned to ride a bicycle, rapidly type on a computer or phone, or play a musical instrument. Explain that they actively practiced and that doing so improved their skills.

Teachers who understand the power of learners' awareness of their abilities can incorporate this insight and use appropriate corrective measures and supportive feedback to recognize gradual, ongoing progress to desired goals and musical skill building. These experiences promote their connections, competence, and confidence that they are capable of building their understanding and skills-and that they are changing their brains in positive ways!

From their awareness of progress in playing an instrument to recognition of increasing skills in remembering a song, students experience the dopamine-reward satisfaction and sustained motivation from recognizing that their effort supports goal progress. For example, students can learn to play the recorder for appropriately leveled tunes with increasing difficulty.

3. Extended memory and creativity. Just as it's easier to recall lyrics to a song than to memorize a poem and easier to recall those lyrics when you hear the music, students can increase their memory by putting information into a familiar tune, rhyme, or song. When movement, such as gestures, dance movements, or body position (turn left/right or moving to another place in the classroom), are used, they add another storage locker for the new information and further increase access to memory.

A study about the brain's increased interconnectivity during musical improvisation is compelling: Skilled musicians were placed in a brain scanner and given a keyboard with the request to improvise new music. When they did so, their fMRI scans showed wide-ranging activation and extensive interconnectivity during periods of improvisation far beyond that displayed when performing known melodies.

Additionally, multisensory experiences that include music can extend wider-ranging brain connectivity. When information is learned, practiced, or applied through different senses (hearing, seeing, touching, moving), the memories are stored in multiple regions of the brain. This extended network of the information can then be accessed by way of any one of the sensory experiences through which it was incorporated. Incorporating musical experiences as part of learning may increase memory and potentially extend the brain's interconnectivity of knowledge, promoting recognition of relationships that might not have otherwise been recognized-and in doing so promote creative insights.

What a wonderful opportunity we have to encourage students' engagement, memory, and even experiences of delight from moments of insight. Including music across the curriculum can enrich the pleasure of learning and enhance memory. Music can also motivate students to engage with learning more joyfully and successfully, potentially expanding their learning into creative discoveries and innovations.

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Using Music During Instruction to Support Cognition

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Teachers can incorporate music in their classrooms in a variety of ways to enhance the cognitive processes that are essential to learning.

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Culturally significant music can enhance lessons across several disciplines while building classroom unity.

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Using Music Traditions to Enrich Learning

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Using Music Traditions to Enrich Learning

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How Integrating Different Music Traditions in the Classroom Can Enrich Learning

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Culturally significant music can enhance lessons across several disciplines while building classroom unity.

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How to Use Backward Chaining to Differentiate Instruction

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How to Use Backward Chaining to Differentiate Instruction

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Listen to the interview with Melanie Meehan (transcript):
Sponsored by Pear Deck and Spinndle

This page contains Amazon Affiliate and Bookshop.org links. When you make a purchase through these links, Cult of Pedagogy gets a small percentage of the sale at no extra cost to you. What's the difference between Amazon and Bookshop.org?

If we want our students to learn as much as they can, ideally they should be presented with learning tasks that are right at their level, or slightly above, so they have to reach a little bit, but they can get there. Making this happen as a teacher-what we refer to as differentiating instruction-is really challenging, because within any group of students you'll find a huge range of abilities, background knowledge, and interests. To do differentiation well, you need lots and lots of tools. A few we've offered here are playlists, self-paced learning, and Universal Design for Learning.

Today we have one more called backward chaining. It's an approach that allows a student who struggles with a task to skip some of the early steps in order to experience the later ones. The strategy was shared with us by Melanie Meehan, a Connecticut-based elementary writing and social studies coordinator who has written three books about teaching writing and contributes to the phenomenal collaborative blog Two Writing Teachers.

Melanie Meehan

Although Meehan uses backward chaining to help students with writing, it's a strategy that can be used in many, many subject areas, so even if you don't teach writing, stick around, because you will likely find some ideas here for how you can use it in your own classroom.

What is Backward Chaining?

Backward chaining is a specific kind of scaffolding that has the student begin a task closer to the end, rather than starting it from the beginning. Where the starting point is depends on the student's particular needs. "There's no telling where the gum in the straw might be for somebody getting stuck doing something," Meehan explains. So finding it will require assessment and experimentation.

For example, if you are teaching a child how to brush their teeth, and that child doesn't quite have the fine motor skills to put the toothpaste on the brush, you'd do that step for them and have them start with the brushing itself. Eventually, as they build confidence with brushing, you'd have them move backward and add on the skill of toothpaste application.

While this strategy is frequently used in situations like the above- teaching life skills to young children or students with disabilities-it can be applied to any educational task where a student needs extra scaffolding or support.

"It's another way to give kids access," Meehan says.

The reasons a student may need a strategy like backward chaining can vary. It may be that their current skill or ability level would hold them up at an early stage of the task, or it might be that executive functioning is slowing them down. "So many of the kids that you might be envisioning at this point are kids who don't always see things to completion," Meehan explains. "To give kids a sense of completing a task is kind of a big deal."

Examples of Backward Chaining

Writing: If a student struggles to come up with an idea for a narrative piece, supply them with an idea (even give them three pictures of a basic sequence of events) and have them write the story of those pictures. Later, they may be ready to try again with their own idea.

Research: If a student needs to create a presentation or write a paper based on research, and they don't yet have the skills to find resources or take notes, you could supply them with pre-selected resources and pre-written notes on the topic, then just have them write the summary of the research. In the future, they can work on the research or notes part of the process until they get to the point of being able to do the whole thing from beginning to end.

Math: For complex problems, have the first few steps done and have the student take over from there until they are ready to work backwards with fewer steps done for them.

Cooking: Many people may be familiar with meal kit services like HelloFresh or Blue Apron, which supply pre-measured ingredients for specific menus and tell you exactly how to cook them, which puts you a few steps into the process of making the meal.

Tips for Using Backward Chaining in Your Classroom

Start with a task analysis. If you know you have an assignment coming up that some students typically struggle with, think through all the steps involved from start to finish. Doing this will give you options for different entry points for students.

Include the student in the process. Meehan recommends that teachers be transparent with students about the options available and let them choose where to start. For the research example above, she'll tell them, "If you feel like you're ready to have a text set that you can research yourself and take notes on yourself, I have those. If you feel like you need the notes, I'll give you the notes so that you can get straight to writing. And if you're like, no, I want to do the whole thing myself, I want to decide on my topic and find my resources and get myself set up, you can do that. It's kind of like where in the process do you feel like you're ready to start?"

Gradually move the starting point back. Backward chaining is not a permanent solution; the idea is that the student will eventually be able to move back to where they can do the whole task from the beginning. "Scaffolds by definition should be temporary and there should be a plan to take them away," Meehan says. "So I am intentionally and purposefully doing work for kids, but with the idea that they are going to build their confidence, they are going to build their competence, they're going to build their curiosity around the whole process, and they're going to become more willing to go backward in the process to an earlier step."

LEARN MORE

You can find more from Meehan on her website, melaniemeehan.com. She goes more in-depth about the backward chaining strategy and lots of others in her 2019 book, Every Child Can Write ( Amazon | Bookshop.org).

Come back for more.
Join our mailing list and get weekly tips, tools, and inspiration that will make your teaching more effective and fun. You'll get access to our members-only library of free downloads, including 20 Ways to Cut Your Grading Time in Half, the e-booklet that has helped thousands of teachers save time on grading. Over 50,000 teachers have already joined-come on in.

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How to Use Backward Chaining to Differentiate Instruction

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Starting a student a few steps ahead can help them experience a sense of completion that might otherwise be out of reach.

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Learning progressions allow teachers to differentiate content based on increasing levels of complexity.

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Learning progressions allow teachers to differentiate content based on increasing levels of complexity.

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This framework for offering students choices helps teachers personalize learning opportunities without creating separate lessons for each student.

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A Streamlined Strategy for Differentiating Instruction

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A Streamlined Strategy for Differentiating Instruction

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A Streamlined Strategy for Differentiating Instruction

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This framework for offering students choices helps teachers personalize learning opportunities without creating separate lessons for each student.

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Whether students are ahead of their peers or behind, differentiation should ensure that all learners engage in critical thinking.

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Using Differentiation to Challenge All Students

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Using Differentiation to Challenge All Students

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Differentiated Instruction

Whether students are ahead of their peers or behind, differentiation should ensure that all learners engage in critical thinking.

Imagine asking one of your students for advice about choosing a birthday present for a family member who's their age and shares similar interests. When they recommend what to get, could they also explain what options to avoid and why their suggestion is the best choice? Is it likely that any of your students could give gift advice in this scenario whether their academic success was high or minimal?

Their advice is critical thinking in action. They analyze the information about your family member's interests and evaluate the quality of the options, including their suitability as the best fit. How do we give all learners opportunities to engage in challenging content that is differentiated based on academic needs?

A common misconception is that an effective differentiation system for readiness (i.e., skill levels) can be based on the revised Bloom's Taxonomy or another framework, like Webb's Depth of Knowledge. The idea is that advanced learners get activities where they analyze, evaluate, and create, while struggling learners need to build knowledge and understanding through basic applications.

As a result, learners who struggle with a subject area are denied rich experiences that could help them see authentic uses of skills in the world outside of school. While they work on abstract school content, they see their peers engage in rich conversations, analyzing and evaluating concepts to create artifacts for a public audience. It's like watching a three-star chef prepare a savory banquet as you prepare to eat a white bread sandwich containing iceberg lettuce.

This oversimplified approach to differentiation denies struggling learners valuable experiences that are based on higher-order thinking, despite their capacity to analyze, evaluate, and create in their daily lives. But how do we give all learners opportunities to engage in challenging content that is differentiated based on academic needs?

Steps for Differentiating to Challenge All Learners

Start with the end in mind. Identify the core skills and concepts that make up the learning outcomes. Then collect information on your students' preparedness, from prerequisites and minor gaps to existing mastery. Combined with students' lived experiences, this data should inform you on how to revise and/or remix a planned complex activity.

Recorded readings. Oral understanding can aid reading material by improving access to the information.

Word journals. Provide a words/terminology bank for key concepts in the subject area. Students should routinely update and review their journals.

Collaboration teams. Use structured protocol strategies for learner groups to explore, process, and construct content.

Peer support. Other learners can serve as resources as the need arises.

Next, design the learning experience for all students to complete that includes a critical thinking challenge.

Learning stations. Have students participate in different stations where they work on prerequisite skills based on their current skill level. The teacher is one station to personalize support for students grouped by similar needs.

Independent work. Assign students work based on the prerequisite skills they need more practice with. The teacher meets with students for personalized support.

Remix the critical thinking activity. Review the activity and make a version that focuses on either fewer choices or fewer moving parts. Simplify without compromising the critical thinking experience. Or, create a version that focuses on the prerequisite skills without compromising the opportunity for critical thinking.

For students who can accomplish the skills with bridging supports,curate resources, guides, and tools that support learners' needs while focusing on the instructional outcome. Here are some examples:

For students who lack prerequisite skills or conceptual understanding,plan activities that include custom supports for skills and critical thinking experiences. Here are some examples:

For students who already meet learning expectations,introduce new knowledge, skills, and/or concepts that amplify their understanding. Add these elements into the prepared critical thinking experience for more seasoning and spice. This could be included in learning stations, independent work, and other activities.

Differentiation is about meeting needs for all learners through equitable critical thinking challenges.

If we routinely review and analyze student achievement data to monitor their progress, the information tells us the specific gaps or prerequisite skills each learner needs more practice with to learn. The steps shared above take that information and add adaptations or mirrored versions of the core assignment. A different series of learning activities do not need to be created-unless that is the direction you choose based on the learner achievement data.

Not limiting critical thinking opportunities for learners who struggle with the content helps them feel that they can do challenging work. This is an important goal for growing their self-esteem.

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Using Differentiation to Challenge All Students

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Whether students are ahead of their peers or behind, teachers can use differentiation to challenge all of them to think critically.

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This graphic organizer guides students to categorize information while they’re taking notes, leading to deeper engagement.

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A Critical Thinking Strategy to Improve High School Students’ Note-Taking Skills

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A Critical Thinking Strategy to Improve High School Students’ Note-Taking Skills

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This graphic organizer guides students to categorize information while they're taking notes, leading to deeper engagement.

Wavebreakmedia Ltd UC5 / Alamy

Close your eyes and imagine a classroom of students deeply engaged in critical thinking. My bet is that you are not imagining a lecture or anything that resembles a traditional sit-and-get learning environment.

This is unsurprising. As I travel across the country with thinkLaw, supporting teachers with strategies to integrate critical thinking into their daily instruction, I find that teachers are always eager for practical opportunities to get students collaborating, thinking deeply, and engaging in critical thinking.

It is less popular to admit an important reality about instruction: Teachers must plan for and ensure student learning of key vocabulary, procedures, algorithms, and other content-specific and context-specific topics. Even if the idea of the permanent sage on the stage has rightfully been largely discarded, the temporary sage on the stage still has an important place in the classroom. The quadratic formula is still the quadratic formula. The structure of a five-paragraph essay is still the structure of a five-paragraph essay.

Whether you are guiding students through content yourself or having students read, research, or watch a video, the WICK charting process gives students an easy-to-implement method to deepen their engagement during this portion of your lesson. Instead of being stuck in sit-and-get mode, they will shift into sit-and-get-and-scrutinize-and-discuss mode as they process the lesson.

Step 1: Creating your WICK

Have your students divide their notes into a graphic organizer with four quadrants labeled as follows: Weird, Interesting, Confusing, and Knew This Already/Kinda Like. Here is a completed sample WICK on the (not-so-exhilarating) topic of corn prevalence in the United States. The instructions for what goes into each box are straightforward.

Weird: List any facts or details that stand out as weird, strange, or out of the ordinary. This is where students place shocking statistics, surprising scientific phenomena, or "can't believe that works" shortcuts that simplify problems. Students should include anything they might want to fact-check here.

For example, students learning about the metamorphosis of a caterpillar to a butterfly may find it weird that the eggs caterpillars hatched from end up being food for the same caterpillar. It would be like chickens eating their own eggshell.

Interesting: Students should list any facts or details that intrigue them here. This includes information that speaks to their passions, interests, and curiosity. Information in this area of the WICK chart should include topics students want to explore for further research.

For instance, a student studying Shakespeare might find it interesting how dedicated this playwright was to iambic pentameter. Ten syllables in nearly every sentence? That's real commitment!

Confusing: Any facts or details that do not quite add up go in this area of the WICK chart. Include anything that seems contradictory, arguments that are not well reasoned, and ideas that feel flat-out wrong.

Students in racially homogenous schools learning about the Brown v. Board of Education case may find it confusing that their school is so deeply segregated decades after this decision ruled segregation unconstitutional.

Knew This Already/Kinda Like: Students can list any facts here that they knew already or that remind them of a fact, detail, or piece of information they previously learned. Any information that is "kinda like" other things they have learned in the past and can make a connection to goes here.

Discussing The Scarlet Letter in English? Here is where students might note that the protagonist's treatment reminds them of the Salem witch trials or the McCarthy-era hearings on communism. These kinds of connections are a personal way for students to engage in critical thinking.

Step 2: Discussing your WICK

After students have completed their individual WICKs, have them engage in discussion. Talking is simply thinking out loud, so the discussion part of the WICK process allows students to simultaneously integrate critical thinking and transform passive content.

When students discuss their WICKs, a one- or two-minute conversation is often enough to share some deep reflections. Depending on the context, students may not have every quadrant completed. One student's "interesting" could easily be another student's "kinda like," which generates even more opportunities for students to push each other's thinking.

You can also use WICKs to break up the typical "I do, we do, you do" pattern of instruction. If your direct instruction is set to last 10 minutes, consider pausing at the halfway mark to have students share their WICK responses so far. This way, the WICK serves as a helpful classroom management tool during the part of lessons that often leads to off-task behaviors.

In sum, the WICK process helps students critically analyze information as they learn it. Students will actually enjoy taking notes, and gain a deeper mastery of the content in the process.

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A Critical Thinking Strategy for Student Note-Taking

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This graphic organizer guides students to categorize information while they're taking notes, leading to deeper engagement.

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The Surprising Element for Empowering Your Students in Collaboration

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The Surprising Element for Empowering Your Students in Collaboration

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The Surprising Element for Empowering Your Students in Collaboration

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Collaboration is one of the most powerful forces in learning. Yet it can also be one of the hardest things to cultivate. Too often, students struggle to share ideas, listen to one another, or take