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Visual overviewing the framework.

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Overview - Let Bryan know if you'd like to read the book!

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Overview of AP Capstone inquiry process and skills framework.

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Brief writing prompts and responses help students in any discipline.

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Brief writing prompts and responses help students in any discipline.

A panicked student confronts a blank laptop screen late at night. A frazzled teacher sits in front of a pile of yet-to-be-graded essays the following evening. Long writing assignments can cause fear and anxiety for students and teachers.

Some educators avoid assigning writing, believing that they don't have the time to either incorporate such a project or grade it. Thankfully, writing assignments need not be long in order to be effective. If you don't wish to assign a potentially time-consuming project, try these short assignments to help students become better writers and thinkers.

Summarizing for Comprehension

Summaries are an easy way to incorporate writing into any subject. They are a valuable way to challenge students to concisely identify the main details, themes, or arguments in a piece of writing. The longer the reading assignment, the more demanding the process of writing a cogent summary.

Teach students how to engage the text in a conscientious manner, reading the material while noting its most important elements. I periodically ask my students to write a 50-word summary on a textbook chapter, an exercise that many of them find exceedingly difficult at first. Gradually they become more confident in distilling an author's main points.

Share the best work with the class, underscoring the components of particularly effective summaries. When students hear the summaries of others, they develop a greater understanding of how to construct their own.

Prompt with Questions

Part of our jobs as teachers involves giving students the tools to continue learning new information on their own, as well as equipping them with the desire and skills to challenge their own biases. All of this involves teaching young people how to craft incisive questions.

Review with students the importance of questioning, and introduce to them different question-writing techniques, pausing before calling on a particular student to encourage every student to think about the answer.

Have students write a single-sentence question in response to a piece of nonfiction or fiction writing. Then, assign students to answer each other's questions with another carefully constructed sentence. Each student should have a piece of writing-a question and an answer-that is roughly two sentences in length for teachers to review.

Consider employing question prompts such as Bloom's question starters. Teachers can tailor the complexity and specificity of these prompts to the needs of the student.

Encourage Creative Responses

Thomas Jefferson composing a three-sentence response to Hamilton's banking plan.

Theodore Roosevelt tweeting his opinions on modern antitrust investigations of Google, Facebook, and Apple.

A series of text messages between George Washington and Franklin Delano Roosevelt about whether the Lend-Lease Program is a harmful "entangling alliance."

Short writing assignments can also be more imaginative assignments. Consider, for instance, asking students adopt the voice of a historical figure:

English teachers, for example, may want to incorporate fictional characters into their creative-response assignments to require students to practice inferring a character's thoughts. English teachers can use these creative responses as brief, but powerful, assessment tools for reading comprehension.

Keep It Short

A student is never too old to revisit the basics of writing, and educators should not underestimate the importance of teaching students how to construct compelling and grammatical sentences.

Write a sentence-long summary of an article or book.

Describe the main idea of the piece in one sentence.

Complete a one-sentence story or memoir.

Any short writing assignment can be reduced to a single sentence. Some options include the following:

One-sentence assignments push students to meticulously choose the right words and structure to convey their points.

A Chance for Collaboration

Short writing assignments offer many opportunities for collaboration between disciplines.

Try incorporating vocabulary words or techniques that students are learning in other classes into a short writing assignment. A history teacher might ask students to write a summary of a reading using vocabulary from their English class. A history teacher could also integrate a book or short story from an English class. These techniques need not be limited to the humanities and social sciences. STEM instructors could assess informative or explanatory writing skills by asking students to compose a list of sentences outlining the steps they took to solve a problem or create something.

Mechanics Matter

Good writing on any subject demands proficiency in content and form. Short writing assignments allow busy teachers to pay attention to grammar and punctuation.

When assigning a short writing project, a teacher may wish to require some structural element ("incorporate a quote" or "use at least two compound sentences in your response"). Whatever the case, educators should stress the importance of grammar, punctuation, style, and syntax.

Mark Twain famously wrote, "I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead." Trying to get a point across in a few words or sentences is often more challenging than going on for many pages. Short assignments also require students to self-edit-a skill that is valuable throughout school and in their working life.

Short writing assignments allow for fun, quick, and stimulating ways of teaching valuable writing skills.

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Brief writing prompts and responses help students in any discipline. A panicked student confronts a blank laptop screen late at night. A frazzled teacher sits in front of a pile of yet-to-be-graded essays the following evening. Long writing assignments can cause fear and anxiety for students and teachers.

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K-12 Inquiry Process Skills Descriptors - Google Docs

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K-12 Inquiry Process Skills Descriptors - Google Docs

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Use these descriptors to evaluate student progress on inquiry process skills.

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When students are encouraged to think deeply about their writing processes, they become better writers.

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Making Metacognition Part of Student Writing

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Making Metacognition Part of Student Writing

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When students are encouraged to think deeply about their writing processes, they become better writers.

Writing conferences are a staple in many English language arts classrooms today. Teachers recognize the benefit of conversational feedback, allowing students to feel more agency over their own writing, and the power of building rapport that comes with conferences.

In my own classroom, I've been on the journey of incorporating writing conferences for over a decade, and they have changed drastically from when I first began. I've transitioned from doing most of the talking to students doing more and more sharing. Recently, my thinking on writing conferences has shifted again. After realizing that our conferences were primarily centered on a piece with little to no reflection on the thought process of writing, I added a new layer of complexity.

Metacognition is a term that describes thinking about one's thinking as a means of reflection. The goal is for students to think more about the process-how they approach writing, barriers to good writing, and strategies that help them write successfully-instead of focusing only on content or rubric requirements. Metacognitive reflection can awaken students to be more aware of their thinking during writing, resulting in a deeper understanding of who they are as writers and of how to transfer their knowledge to any genre of writing.

So what exactly does metacognitive thinking on writing look like, and how can teachers build this type of reflection into writing conferences?

A whole-class conversation about the importance of metacognition is a good starting place, since students are often focused on assignments rather than their thinking while completing them. These strategies can help students become aware of their thinking while writing and are easy to incorporate in assignments, providing students with opportunities to pause and think about their thinking while writing. Observations from these activities will enable students to talk about metacognition during conferences.

6 Activities to Encourage Metacognition

1. Keeping a journal. Encourage students to take metacognitive breaks of two to three minutes during writing to record their thoughts. Describe your process to this point. What was a barrier to your writing? How did you overcome this? What do you think you could do to prevent this from occurring next time? These breaks can and should occur at different points in the writing process.

2. Recording troubleshooting ideas. Encourage students to keep a list of strategies and ideas they have found successful in the past that they can use during writing to help them push through when they're experiencing difficulty.

3. Writing collaboratively. Provide opportunities for students to work on writing assignments together. The students can discuss why they are making the choices they make along the way. Thoughts can be addressed in comments in a Google Doc or on sticky notes placed on the student's paper.

4. Using graphic organizers. Graphic organizers can also serve as tools to guide students to think about their thinking while writing and to identify successful strategies. The object is not to fill the entire graphic organizer but to provide multiple entry points to think about their thinking while writing.

5. Highlighting papers. I often have students highlight papers for claims, evidence, and analysis, but this can be modified for any focus. This strategy adds a visual component to reflection and opens opportunities for students to think about what leads to strong components of a piece and why other components are weaker.

6. Recording post-writing thoughts. Writing a paragraph on the thought process during an assignment can be particularly helpful for the big-picture process. What would you do differently if writing again? Why? What would you keep the same? Why? What strategies did you employ that worked well that you can use for future writing?

What do you like best about this writing? Why do you think this section is strong? What did you notice as you were writing this section?

Where did you struggle with this piece? Why did you struggle with this section? How did you feel while you were writing this section? What could have helped you while writing this particular section? Let's review your list of troubleshooting ideas and strategies. What can you add to these?

Where is an area you took a risk or experimented with something new? Why did you decide to do something different here? Was it successful? Why or why not? If so, how could you incorporate this into other writing?

How do you feel about the piece overall? How did you feel about the overall process? How do you see yourself growing as a writer? Are there particular things in your learning environment or mindset that contribute to successful writing? Identify one or two concrete strategies to use moving forward.

The insights gathered from these metacognitive tools can carry over into writing conversations. In your next writing conferences, try adding some of the italicized questions to questions already commonly asked to gather insight and give input into the thought process behind the writing.

Metacognition is an important step in writing instruction and where the real magic happens in learning. Students do need feedback on specific pieces of writing but should be given the opportunity to think beyond the product. Providing students with opportunities for metacognitive reflection and the opportunity to discuss their thinking strengthens their writing not only in class but for years to come.

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Making Metacognition Part of Student Writing

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When students are encouraged to think deeply about their writing processes, they become better writers.

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Use this Design Thinking template to help students extend and apply their learning. 

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Link: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1R6yn_cbLqvAHTDVfq2EDFw8FDyRyzcIXV0nHZphYec0/edit?usp=sharing

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Inquiry Process Overview - Google Slides

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Inquiry Process Overview - Google Slides

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Overview of a basic inquiry process (online resources organized around these steps/products).

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5 Powerful Questions Teachers Can Ask Students | Edutopia

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5 Powerful Questions Teachers Can Ask Students | Edutopia

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Click HERE for a printable infographic of the questions.

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5 Powerful Questions Teachers Can Ask Students

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Many would agree that for inquiry to be alive and well in a classroom that, amongst other things, the teacher needs to be expert at asking strategic questions. With that in mind, if you are a new teacher or perhaps not so new but know that question-asking is an area where you’d like to grow, start t…

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Teachers can use insights from neuroscience to help ensure that learners stay engaged during class and are more likely to retain information.

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Teachers can use insights from neuroscience to help ensure that learners stay engaged during class and are more likely to retain information.

In this article, we'll touch on insights from neuroscience about the attention-getting system of the brain. Understanding this process informs teachers about specific techniques they can employ to capture students' attention as new topics are introduced.

The brain evolved to promote survival. Every second, millions of bits of sensory information from the receptors of the eyes, ears, internal organs, skin, and muscles make their way to the brain's attention entry gate, but only about 1 percent of it enters consciousness. The system that determines what gets in (i.e., what the brain attends to) is the reticular activating system (RAS). This primitive network of cells in the lower brain stem, through which all sensory input must pass to reach any higher regions of the brain, is essentially the same in your cat, your dog, your child, and you.

In the wild, an organism is well-served by an attention system that gives priority to things that are unexpected, changing, and different from the usual. This is the key to the RAS attention gate: Any perceived source of danger is prioritized. However, in the absence of threat, attention is directed to any changes in an animal's or human's environment.

CAPTURING ATTENTION IN THE CLASSROOM

Although survival in the wild isn't much of a priority for most humans today, the RAS is still programmed to attend to perceived threats and change. If students feel physically and psychologically unsafe in a school or a classroom, they're less likely to focus their attention on the lesson. As noted earlier, in the absence of perceived threat, our brains are particularly receptive to what's new, curious, or unexpected.

In school, the students' brains are always attending... just not always on the topics we're teaching! When students aren't attentive to a lesson or a textbook, the RAS isn't giving priority entry to the teacher's voice or words on the page, but to other more interesting or distracting sights, feelings, and thoughts.

In order to capitalize on the brain's selectivity, here are six practical and proven attention-getters you can use at the start of a new unit or lesson.

1. Surprise students

Since the brain is attracted to novelty, do something unusual or unexpected to arouse curiosity and open the RAS attention filter.

Examples: Wear something unique, bring in an unusual object, or play a song when students enter the room to promote curiosity, hence focus. Tell students that there's a link between your clothes, the object, or the words in the song and something in the lesson. Invite them to guess what it is.

At the beginning of a unit on negative numbers, or on past tense in language, a teacher enters the room by walking backward and then asks students to guess why.

2. Present odd facts, anomalies, or discrepant events

The brain is fundamentally a pattern-making organ. Constructing patterns enables humans to make sense of the world. However, when an established or expected pattern is broken, the brain is immediately aroused.

Example: A science teacher blows up a balloon, then slowly pierces one end with a sharpened wooden cooking skewer. To the amazement of students, the teacher pushes the skewer through the opposite side of the balloon without bursting it. Students are transfixed and want to see the demonstration again!

3. Invite students' predictions

The ability to make sound predictions is fundamental to survival, and the brain rewards successful prediction through its release of dopamine, a pleasure-inducing chemical. Teachers can provide opportunities for students to make predictions about the relationship of the curious sensory input or other novelty to the lesson. When this happens, students will seek information to help them make correct predictions and remain attentive as their brains seek to find out if their predictions are correct.

Examples: In a science lesson for first graders, ask children to predict which objects will float and which will sink in a tub of water. A high school psychology teacher can ask students to predict the results of a schoolwide student survey. In both cases, students are engaged and eager to find out if their predictions are correct.

4. Pose a provocative (hook) question

A stimulating question can be an "itch" in students' brains that they'll want to scratch.

Can what you eat prevent zits? Does a fart contain DNA? Is aging a disease? What superpower would you want?

The best hook questions are open-ended. They're meant to stimulate thinking and discussion and to open the door to further exploration. Give students a reasonable amount of quiet thinking time before they answer. Have them do a quick write about their thoughts and/or engage in a think-pair-share with another student. After this personal engagement, learners are likely to be more attentive to your teaching on the related topic.

5. Cite a current event or issue relevant to students

Students often have opinions about current events or controversial issues in their school, town, state, etc., and these can be used to spark engagement.

Example: For a unit on persuasive writing, a middle school teacher shows a newspaper article about a school board proposal in another district that would require students to wear uniforms. Students then discuss the pros and cons, state their position, and even switch sides to try to better understand different perspectives and develop rebuttals, all as an opening to the unit on persuasion.

Humor is a guaranteed dopamine booster and can serve as a great attention hook.

Example: A sixth-grade mathematics teacher begins a unit on ratio and proportion by presenting funny caricatures of celebrities. She asks students to describe why the pictures are funny, and they note that various physical features (e.g., eyes, nose, ears, head) of the characters are greatly exaggerated. Then, the teacher shows da Vinci's Vitruvian Man to illustrate idealized proportions of the human body.

Hook and Hold Attention

We recommend that you rotate your attention-getting techniques to avoid being predictable. The intent of using the techniques described above is to hook student attention, but the intent isn't simply to gain immediate attention for the moment. The longer-term goal is to hold that attention over time. There are numerous ways to capitalize on initial attention by employing active-learning strategies, including the use of authentic tasks and projects, inquiry-oriented instruction, cooperative learning, Socratic seminars, simulations and role-plays, and design thinking (e.g., using makerspaces, where students can create tangible products), and allowing students appropriate "voice and choice" options in assignments and performance tasks.

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Teachers can use insights from neuroscience to help ensure that learners stay engaged during class and are more likely to retain information.

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10 Strategies To Promote Curiosity In Learning

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10 Strategies To Promote Curiosity In Learning

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by Terry Heick

Curiosity is crucial to learning.

For years, education has responded by admonishing teachers to 'engaged' students with 'engaging content,' but engagement and curiosity are decidedly different. An engaged student may very well be curious, but such curiosity isn't necessary for engagement. Engagement is more than paying attention but doesn't demand an empowered thinker forging into new ideas with an open-mind through inquiry and questioning.

That's curiosity.

In 8 Strategies To Help Students Ask Great Questions , Terry Heick said:

"Questions can be extraordinary learning tools. A good question can open minds, shift paradigms, and force the uncomfortable but transformational cognitive dissonance that can help create thinkers. In education, we tend to value a student's ability to answer our questions. But what might be more important is their ability to ask their own great questions-and more critically, their willingness to do so."
Where Curiosity Comes From
The stages of curiosity come from the learner in an inside-out pattern.

This is a crucial distinction; It means it doesn't happen by dangling flashing, singing, and dancing carrots in front of students. Rather, curiosity stems from past experience and current knowledge, then leaps out as the neocortex seeks patterns it recognizes, then rewards itself with dopamine when it finds something it either understands or seeks to understand, branching out to new domains, applications, and opportunities for transfer.

"A good question can...force the uncomfortable but transformational cognitive dissonance that can help create thinkers."

But how does one 'cause' curiosity? This is the challenge of instructional design, lesson design, curriculum mapping, project-based learning templates, and a thousand other factors.

Any modern movement in progressive learning systems should at the absolute minimum be aware of what tends and does not to tend to stimulate curiosity, and how its surplus and absence can affect the learning experience overall. Curiosity can be seen as part of the student themselves rather than a kind of 'brain emotion': the student, their unique curiosities, and their patterns of self-direction as they seek to understand things because their brain wants to understand.
10 Strategies To Promote Curiosity In Learning 1. Model curiosity in its many forms.
Curiosity is a human instinct but like most instincts, it can be refined through observation and practice.

Example: Think-aloud while reading an illustrated picture book, watching a video, or even having a conversation. As long as you can 'pause' to 'think out loud,' you can explain how and what and why you're thinking what you're thinking, questions you have, things that pique your interest-and most crucially, the courage to follow that curiosity wherever it takes you.
2. Embed curiosity at the core of the instructional design process.
Example: An inquiry-based learning unit in which the lessons and activities 'don't work' without curiosity. One example could be a QFT session.
3. Analyze curiosity. Help students see its parts or understand its causes and effects.
Example: Consider using the TeachThought Learning Taxonomy in designing these sorts of tasks.

4. Reward curiosity. If you want a plant to grow, you feed it. Curiosity is the same.

Example: Gamification is one approach. While not intrinsically motivating, one under-appreciated effect of gamification is visibility. By identifying desired outcomes and visualizing progress and achievement towards those outcomes, those desired outcomes-including curiosity-can be developed and enhanced.

See How Gamification Uncovers Nuance In The Learning Process
5. Make curiosity personal.
Example: Require students to choose a topic for an essay, then refine that topic/theme until it's authentic and personal to them. You could start with a general topic-climate change, for example-and then have each student refine that topic based on their unique background, interests, and curiosity until it's truly personal and 'real.'

6. Let students lead. It's difficult to be curious if the learning is passive and the student doesn't have any control.

Example: Allow high school students to use our self-directed learning model-or one like it-to create their own project-based learning unit.

7. Spin content. Frame content like a marketer-as new, controversial, 'frowned upon,' etc.

Example: Teach a book that's been 'banned' from a book list somewhere.

Be careful with this one-use your best judgment and choose something that's going to draw interest and possibly agitate, but nothing that will cause problems for students or yourself.)

Being 'compelling' is required for many fields and industries, but is often simply 'encouraged' in education. While it's not a 'teacher's job' to entertain students, if you can't frame what you teach in a way that's interesting, every day you're going to be wadding up and throwing away a lot of opportunity for student growth.
8. Focus on questions, not answers.
Example: Questions are an excellent indicator of curiosity. Create a unit-entry lesson and give points for questions-quantity, quality, refinement, etc. The questions are not only evidence and practice of curiosity but can be used as an assessment tool as well. The quality of a question not only reveals curiosity, but background knowledge, literacy level, confidence, student engagement, and more,
9. Connect this to that.
Connect what students don't know with what they do. This approach can help them activate familiar schema to make sense of new ideas. The more approachable they feel content, projects, or other activities are, the more likely they are to be curious about it.

Example: Compare a historical disagreement between government leaders to a conflict between celebrities on social media, or even 'beef' in hip-hop or classic rock and roll.

10. De-school it. Let the content stand on its own.

Example: If there's a backstory, tell it. For example, on the surface, Arabic numerals (as a topic in and of themselves) don't seem inherently interesting, but if students understand that as a system it was 'adopted' from Hindu scholars by Arab mathematicians and its specific origin is somewhat up for debate, it suddenly becomes more interesting.

In school, we tend to 'schoolify' things so that they 'work' in a classroom. This often means that whole and full and interesting 'things' lose their heads and tails so that we can squeeze them into a timeframe, assessment form, or the like. By returning some content to its more natural 'state,' curiosity can be encouraged.

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10 Strategies To Promote Curiosity In Learning

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Questions are indicators of engagement and curiosity in learning. Just as usefully, they are evidence for what a student understands.

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In this quick warm-up that sharpens critical thinking, students wrestle with moral and ethical questions—while also gaining communication and writing skills.

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In this quick warm-up that sharpens critical thinking, students wrestle with moral and ethical questions—while also gaining communication and writing skills.

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Teachers can focus on relationship building and students’ sense of belonging as a way to increase their interest in course content.

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Boosting Interest in Learning by Focusing on Both Content and Students’ Needs

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Boosting Interest in Learning by Focusing on Both Content and Students’ Needs

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Boosting Interest in Learning by Focusing on Both Content and Students' Needs

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Teachers can focus on relationship building and students' sense of belonging as a way to increase their interest in course content.

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Exposing students to amazing things creates a classroom environment where they feel creative, engaged, and primed to learn.

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Engaging Students Through Wonder and Awe

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Engaging Students Through Wonder and Awe

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Cultivating Wonder and Awe in the Classroom

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Exposing students to amazing things creates a classroom environment where they feel creative, engaged, and primed to learn.

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Retrieval practice, spaced-mixed independent practice, targeted support (scaffolded practice)

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Retrieval practice, spaced-mixed independent practice, targeted support (scaffolded practice)

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High-level questions & student explanations, guided initial application with formative feedback, peer-assisted consolidation of learning

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High-level questions & student explanations, guided initial application with formative feedback, peer-assisted consolidation of learning

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These activities make reviewing content fun, so they can really motivate students to cement their learning.

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3 Retrieval Games to Try in Your High School Classroom

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3 Retrieval Games to Try in Your High School Classroom

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3 Retrieval Games to Try in Your High School Classroom

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These activities make reviewing content fun, so they can really motivate students to cement their learning.

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Spaced and retrieval practice help students retain content and give them a sense of what they know—and what they don’t.

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2 Evidence-Based Learning Strategies: Spaced and Retrieval Practice

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2 Evidence-Based Learning Strategies: Spaced and Retrieval Practice

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Spaced and retrieval practice help students retain content and give them a sense of what they know-and what they don't.

©Shutterstock.com/Monkey Business Images

I often say to my students, "If a test is the first time you're made to think about or with the class material, we've both probably failed." Learning is effortful and requires cognition. As their teacher, I need to ensure that I provide my students with opportunities for demonstration of learning in the classroom.

There are many ways to do this. Your methods can be traditional and require pencil and paper or more modern with a screen and other manipulatives. No matter the technique, students should be made to work with and think with the information or content in order to increase their retention of it.

Cognitive psychology provides evidence of specific learning strategies that are wonderfully applicable and adaptable to most classrooms, no matter students' abilities or grade level. Here are two strategies I discovered through The Learning Scientists and use in my classroom almost daily in an attempt to teach my students more efficient and effective study and practice habits and to maximize their retention of material.

Retrieval Practice

This very powerful strategy is quite easily applied to the classroom. Retrieval practice is the attempt to retrieve information from memory. This can take many forms in the classroom-low-stakes multiple-choice formative assessment, group discussion, open-ended essay prompts, etc.-and it can occur at the beginning of class, as a transition activity, or to end class.

I frame retrieval practice to my students as an efficient method of assessing their own learning. They're either able answer the questions or not. If they cannot, this should drive further review and practice of material. I stress that it's perfectly fine if they can't answer the questions at this point. Isn't it much better they attempt now (and subsequently have a better understanding of the holes in their learning) rather than attempting for the first time on the test?

Because retrieval is such an effective self-assessment tool for students, I always tell my students they should initially use only their brain to attempt to retrieve the information. If a textbook, peer, or notebook tells them the answer, they ultimately didn't know the material.

I usually begin by not providing any cues (word banks, for example) and prefer this be more of an open-ended activity. This alleviates students' false belief that they know information when they've actually just guessed correctly. Students are quite good at fooling themselves into believing they know something when, in fact, they don't. (This is true of all people, actually.)

Spaced Practice

Spaced practice can be defined as the opposite of cramming. It is literally spacing out practice over multiple days, weeks, months, etc. I explain to my students that they'll be more efficient and effective with their practicing if they study for 15 minutes each for three days rather than cram for an hour the night before a test. Easier said than done, I know-especially with adolescents.

I've created an activity to show very simply how they can incorporate this strategy into their study habits.
©Blake Harvard

1. I take some important information that usually confuses students and create a chart; in the example above it's Piaget's Theory of Cognitive Development.

2. To begin class, I ask the students to complete the chart only using their brain. They highlight all of their answers from this step in yellow.

3. Next, I have them use their notes to check their answers and complete any of the chart they didn't complete in the previous step, and highlight these answers in orange.

4. Lastly, they use their peers and/or the textbook to fill in any blanks they still have and highlight these answers in blue.

Now we grade their answers, and students have three different grades for this retrieval: one in yellow for what they knew using only their brain, one in orange for what they found using their notes, and one in blue for what they found through their peers or the textbook. The students keep their charts.

The next day or a few days later, we begin class with the same blank chart and follow the same steps. And we complete this activity one more time, usually about a week later. What students typically find is that on the second and third attempts at completing a chart, they have more yellow highlighter on their paper and less orange and blue, meaning they've remembered more with their brain and relied less on notes, a peer, or the textbook.

The spacing of practice has resulted in more long-term retention of material, and students now have a study practice that is much more effective than simple highlighting of notes or rereading their notes or textbook.

There are many more learning strategies (concrete examples, dual coding, interleaving, etc.), but simply adding these two learning strategies to my classroom has significantly changed my teaching and my students' learning. There's less anxiety about assessments since they occur so frequently. And students are much more accepting of getting questions wrong because that's simply part of the learning process and helps them to have a truer assessment of their learning.

All of this gives my students tools to be successful in almost any class they attend in middle school, high school, or college.

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Spaced and retrieval practice help students retain content and give them a sense of what they know-and what they don't.

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3 Common Myths About Learning | Edutopia

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3 Common Myths About Learning | Edutopia

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With a solid understanding of how people process information, teachers can use evidence-based strategies to guide student learning.

Benedetto Cristofani / The iSpot

Understanding how to best support students can be confusing and complex. To deal with this complexity, we develop naive theories and unscientific beliefs about what helps students learn. The science of learning has tested many of these beliefs, and evidence now shows that some of our most common beliefs about learners are wrong. These misconceptions about learning may cause us to waste some of our instructional time and effort-or, even worse, impair students' learning.

Below, I will describe three common myths about learning, debunk those myths, and reinterpret those ideas according to our most up-to-date evidence.

Myth 1: every student has a 'Learning Style'

Many teachers believe that students have individual learning styles and that students' learning is optimized when instruction is tailored to their style.

Learners often express a preference for a specific modality of encountering information. For example, some students may say that they are verbal learners, while others profess to learn best with visual information. Sometimes, people theorize learning styles even more broadly, including concrete or abstract learners; active or reflective learners; and analytic, creative, or practical learners. There are countless unscientific tests online that will assign students a learning style-schools can even purchase expensive tests that will divide students into different style categories.

Yet, no good evidence suggests that stable and useful learning styles of students exist. Furthermore, there is zero evidence that students learn better when information is presented in a way that meshes with their chosen preferences. According to research, trying to tailor teaching to match each learner's preferred mode of processing is a waste of time and resources.

Evidence-based concept: Instead, research suggests that students will learn, remember, and apply novel information better if they process that information in multiple different ways. Processing information in multiple and varied forms (including multiple senses, abstract and concrete representations, diverse examples, and varied activities) creates elaborated and detailed memories, which enhances the long-term retention and generalization of that knowledge.

Using it in the classroom: Students who learn fractions with math symbols, words, visuals, and kinesthetic experiences should master fractions better than students who only experience a single approach. Similarly, students processing French translations acquire the language better if they see, hear, touch, and taste food translations.

Myth 2: Testing should be used only to assess student learning

Teachers and students alike often view tests as a necessary evil-a means of assessing (both formatively and summatively) what students do and do not know. Indeed, tests are critical indicators of what students have mastered. But tests are useful for so much more!

Evidence-based concept: Numerous research studies now show that tests do more than just assess memory: Tests change memory. Tests exemplify a form of memory retrieval, in which students retrieve information from long-term memory to answer questions. Retrieving information from long-term memory changes the memory in a way that makes the information resistant to forgetting in the future. In fact, research shows that one of the best ways to ensure that you remember information is to repeatedly practice retrieving that information from long-term memory.

Beyond just helping students remember information, practicing retrieval helps students organize information in their minds, apply learned information to novel problems and questions, recognize what they have understood and what they haven't, and even learn more information from upcoming lessons.

Using it in the classroom: Teachers can prompt retrieval practice in countless and varied ways (which can also help teachers assess student mastery). Students can do a "brain dump," where they write down everything they remember at the end of a class, solve a start-up question from last week using just their memories, create a mind map from memory of a text, answer questions on personal whiteboards, draw an illustration of main ideas from the lesson from memory, and more.

Retrieval practice boosts learning whether it is graded or ungraded, whether corrective feedback is provided or not (but more feedback is better), and across many ages and disciplines. The only required feature is that students retrieve the information from memory (rather than rereading, repeating, highlighting, or recopying information). If we want students to be able to retrieve information in the future, it makes sense that they should practice retrieving that information now. Practice makes perfect, after all.

Myth 3: Concepts that are easily learned are easily remembered

Teachers and students typically believe that if ideas are quickly or easily learned, they will be remembered in the long term. This "easily learned, easily remembered" belief is widespread, and it affects teachers' and students' choices about learning activities. Learners choose study techniques that allow quick acquisition of new information, including rereading or recopying notes (rather than attempting retrieval), focusing on a single concept at a time (rather than mixing together similar ideas), and practicing an idea in a single learning session (rather than distributing practice across many sessions).

Evidence-based concept: Techniques that speed up the acquisition of ideas frequently speed up the forgetting of these ideas. In other words, research shows that easily learned often means quickly forgotten.

Using it in the classroom: Some difficulties during learning help students remember information in the long run. Slowing down learning by creating desirable difficulties can create better long-term retention than easier acquisition.

For example, practicing retrieval increases errors during learning and is more effortful than rereading or recopying notes, but it produces big learning benefits over time. Similarly, students who answer a series of the same type of math problem in a row (blocking instruction) make fewer errors during learning than students answering a mixture of different problems ( interleaving instruction). However, students who answer a mix of different problems ultimately remember more. Finally, studying a concept in a single session (massing instruction) feels easier and faster than spreading out that learning across smaller, distributed sessions ( distributed instruction). Even so, distributing practice across time is very beneficial in the end.

There are important caveats here, though. Struggle in and of itself is not useful. Introducing unnecessary complexity or withholding instructions increases students' struggle but does not support learning. In contrast, struggle during learning can be productive if learners are struggling over important aspects of the problem. For example, learning how to decipher between similar math problems is productive struggle because learning how to distinguish similar problems is important. Retrieving information from long-term memory is also productive struggle because we want learners to be able to retrieve information in the future.

To ensure that students appreciate the benefits of this extra effort during learning, teachers can help students interpret struggle to mean that they are learning and view wrestling with ideas as indicating growth (rather than as indicating a limitation of their abilities).

Supporting students' learning is a complicated challenge. We often develop intuitive ideas about what works best, but sometimes these intuitions can misguide us. Correcting learning myths and aligning our practices with evidence-based approaches can enable more effective and efficient instruction.

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3 Common Myths About Learning-and What Teachers Can Do Instead

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By exploring three common myths about how students learn, teachers can find find out more about how information processing and memory work.

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Teachers can increase student engagement by establishing relevance at the beginning of class and discussing the broader purpose at the end.

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Establishing the Relevance of Lessons for Students

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Establishing the Relevance of Lessons for Students

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Teachers can increase student engagement by establishing relevance at the beginning of class and discussing the broader purpose at the end.

"Why am I here?... like... what is the point of this?" Whether you are a teacher or an administrator, this question has no doubt reverberated through your mind during a staff meeting or professional development session. As adults, we value our time.

Children are no different. As members of a learning community, I believe, every child is entitled to ask, "Why am I here?" This is inquiry. More important, this question may be the only chance we get to harvest the attention of a student who has directed their curiosity elsewhere. We can do this by bookending class with the answer to the question of "Why?" At the beginning of class, instructors should establish the relevance of the lesson. At the end of class, establish the lesson's purpose.

Introduce the lesson by establishing relevance

My intention at the onset of class is fixed on a critical question: "Why does this matter?" I think of the introduction as my hook, so I always ask myself:

"If I am a student, why would I or why should I bite?"

Here, I try to think from the sight line of uninterested children. Not all students arrive in the classroom with high levels of conscientiousness-inherently responsible, goal oriented, persistent, ready to be challenged, and eager to learn. Most students need to be shown why they should develop those habits. The work of engagement begins with a succulent morsel (the bait), attractive to students, attached to a relevant instructional curiosity.

The easiest way to do this is by finding a theme or concept present in the lesson to connect with something relevant to the kids. For instance, in teaching middle school students to describe how characters change as the plot moves toward resolution-like Brian in Hatchet or Jonas in The Giver -I would begin the class with a set of pictures for the students to choose from, making intentional choices in representation of race and gender. I might offer Anakin Skywalker and Darth Vader or Miles Morales and Spider-Man or Shuri and Black Panther.

Students respond to the images because they help to create relevance. They might think: Why does Miles Morales matter to me? Because I just saw Spider-Man last week and I have not stopped talking about it with my friends-during class, no less. Why does Shuri matter to me? Because she's a strong Black girl, just like me, just like my sister.

Now, the instructional curiosity. This is where we can mess up a good thing by asking too specific of a question. We don't need to lead the students. We just need to nurture an environment that allows their brains to do the work. Personally, I am a fan of the See, Think, Wonder strategy whenever using pictures as a hook. I would prompt the students to choose one of the characters and answer the following questions:

"What do you think about what you see?"

"What questions do you wonder about as you look at the picture?"

After four to five minutes of writing, I facilitate student discussion to connect their observations to the lesson of the day. If students do not arrive at the ideas about character development you would like to explore, you can ask probing questions to get there. The discussion generated from this exercise will allow you to preassess student understanding of how a character changes in relation to the plot. It will also provide you with connective tissue between student context and the literature as you explore Brian's or Jonas's development, which will give meaning to the time spent doing so.

Close the lesson by providing purpose

Fostering purpose for each lesson begins by asking this question (again from the student lens), "How can I use this?"

Sometimes the answer is evident. When teaching students how to introduce a claim and acknowledge a counterargument, a simple close may involve asking a couple of quick questions at the end of class:

"How many people in the room like losing arguments?"

"How many of you would really like to finally beat a sibling or parent or caregiver in an argument?"

After giving one to two minutes for the class to share out, this closing provides a purpose for the preceding class period: "Well, if you use the steps we learned today, you will be able make a stronger case the next time you want to borrow your brother's hoodie or stay out past curfew. Have a great day, class. See you tomorrow."

Sometimes, however, the answer is not so evident. Consider the previous example of describing how a character like Brian or Jonas develops as the plot progresses. When the answer is not so straightforward, we have to be creative and think about the holistic nature of teaching. For example, as the class examines the relationship between a character's transformations and the circumstances of the plot, students may begin to think about shifts they see in themselves, friends, or family. You can ask questions like "Can you think of a time when someone you know began acting differently toward you? Are you comfortable sharing out?"

Again, after one to two minutes of sharing, we can close with a statement of purpose: "The next time I notice you are not the same today as you were yesterday, before I get upset or hurt, I can use what I've learned today: empathy. I can first ask myself or even ask you if something in the plot of your life has changed since we last saw each other. You can do the same. Until tomorrow, have a great day, class." This kind of close entrusts meaning to a time that many students have difficulty assigning concrete value to. (As a bonus, you can even weave in questions that connect the skill being taught to the takeaway during the meat and potatoes of the lesson as a trail of breadcrumbs leading to closure at the end.)

As you are planning your lessons this year, take the extra time to think about each introduction and closing. How can you make each of these moments meaningful for students who sometimes do not want to be in school? You can effectively increase student engagement by cultivating relevance at the start and connecting the skills and content of the lesson with purpose at the close.

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Bookending Lessons by Answering the Question 'Why Am I Here?'

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Teachers can increase student engagement by establishing relevance at the beginning of class and discussing the broader purpose at the end.

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Our brains are wired to forget things unless we take active steps to remember. Here’s how you can help students hold on to what they learn.

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3 Ways to Help Students Overcome the Forgetting Curve

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3 Ways to Help Students Overcome the Forgetting Curve

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3 Ways to Help Students Overcome the Forgetting Curve

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Our brains are wired to forget things unless we take active steps to remember. Here’s how you can help students hold on to what they learn.

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Effective retrieval practice strategies help students identify what they know about a given concept and retain that information for the long-term.

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Teachers are often concerned with getting vital information into students' heads, but it's just as important to give students frequent opportunities to externalize and manipulate recently learned materials. Simple retrieval activities like flash cards, "brain dumps," and low-stakes quizzes remain among the most effective tactics to move learners from a hazy recollection of something towards more clarity and "permanence," writes Ulrich Boser, the CEO and founder of the Learning Agency Lab, in a new post "The Five Things You Need to Know About Retrieval Practice."

Retrieval becomes even more impactful when teachers keep considerations like mental agility and the spacing of materials in mind. The practice of interleaving-mixing together two or more related concepts or skills instead of focusing on one at a time-keeps learners from relying on rote methods and forces them into a more productive "thinking on their feet" posture. Asking students to practice basic mathematical operations like addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, for example, tends to work better when you ask students to move between the operations, rather than practice each operation separately. Research also demonstrates that retrieving stored information at regular intervals-a practice called spacing-encodes the learning far more durably.

Finally, to connect recently learned material to prior knowledge and build more durable webs of student insight, teachers should consider "mapping exercises" like hexagonal thinking and concept maps. Here are some deeper dives into seven retrieval practices that work:

Low-stakes Quizzes

"One of the easiest ways to incorporate retrieval practice into learning and teaching is via low-stakes tests or quizzes," Boser writes.

Quizzes and practice tests help students gauge how well they understand recently learned material, and identify areas of strength and areas where they need to grow. Research shows that when students become too reliant on strategies like rereading or highlighting material they tend to develop a false impression of how much they know-quizzes close that gap.

To get the most out of quizzes, the research suggests that it's better to make them low-stakes-worth little or no grade-which can reduce test anxiety, prompt more honest reflection, and improve student focus and performance. Timing also matters: It's helpful to give a practice test right after a lesson, and then continue visiting the concept through review and quizzes throughout the school year. To make low-stakes quizzes part of your repertoire, you can try clickers to do quick checks for understanding, use engaging apps like Kahoot! Or Quizziz, or opt for free online alternatives like Poll Everywhere.

Brain Dumps

Giving students just a couple of minutes in class to stop and write down everything they can think of about a specific topic or question is a great way to test their knowledge.

A " brain dump " exercise can take five minutes or less, and even the simplest version of it can help generate knowledge and create longer term retention. But it can also be modified to include collaboration with other students, says Boser: Ask them to compare their work to identify gaps, similarities, and differences, for example-and if large enough gaps and misconceptions are apparent, have them research the answers together.

Flashcards

Despite the ubiquity of flashcards, to make the most out of them requires explaining to students how they should be used-and might even require some modeling in the classroom.

For example, students should understand that for information to really stick, they should go through their card deck multiple times, and attempt to verbalize as much of the information on the back as possible before flipping them. Boser suggests that students keep cards in their deck until they are able to successfully retrieve the information by saying it out loud-in its entirety-at least three times.

Hexagonal Thinking

Hexagonal thinking is a mixed retrieval and elaboration strategy that uses hexagonal cards, paper, or even programs like PowerPoint or Google Slides to investigate how ideas and concepts are connected. For example, students who have just finished learning about World War II might generate a list of historical events and forces-treaties, battles, and more-and then write each of these items on hexagons before beginning to arrange them in cause and effect relationships.

When students work in a small group attempting to connect the hexagons, they inevitably come up with different combinations and different rationales. The proposed connections can be explained using arrows and an attached, written document and then shared with the whole class. An example of students exploring the forces involved in global warming is below:
Courtesy of Betsy Potash / Cult of Pedagogy Courtesy of Betsy Potash / Cult of Pedagogy
Concept Maps

Concept maps are visual tools that help students organize and articulate what they know about a given concept or topic. Important concepts are generally enclosed in a circle or box and then connected to other concepts by a line that might include explanatory phrases to define the relationship. Examples of linking phrases are typically things like "begins with", "includes", or "aids."

An example map about specific types of bacteria could look something like this:

To facilitate the activity, students can be presented with a guiding question, such as "How is ice formed?" and use the question as a springboard to help them map out their understanding of the physical process.

Research shows this strategy is far superior to rote memorization because it encourages students to make rich, meaningful connections within a topic. Writing for Edutopia, educator Dr. Kripa Sundar said the strategy can be easily adapted for early learners by replacing words in the concept maps with pictures.

Jigsaw Method

You can use the Jigsaw Method to help students retrieve information, process it again, and then practice teaching it to their peers. After splitting students up into small groups of four to six, each should be assigned to specialize in one "chunk" of content related to a topic or lesson, as seen in Cult of Pedagogy's excellent video tutorial.

For example, a history teacher focusing on an overview about the various forms of government could divide the content into chunks such as democracy, dictatorship, monarchy, republic, etc. After each chunk is assigned to an individual student in the group, they go off to read and study their chunk independently. Later the group will reconvene, and each student will teach from their special knowledge base. Consider ending the activity by directing tough questions to each group, or letting the groups quiz each other.

Think, Pair, Share

Similar to brain dumps, "think, pair, share" is a low-stakes retrieval activity that's relatively easy to set up. Ask students to dwell on a particular topic or question you're already covered and get them to come up with as many facts or important ideas as they can. Once they have a list-you might want to specify how many items are ideal-the students then pair up with a partner to talk out what they know, compare notes, and help each other identify gaps in their understanding.

According to Rosie Reid, a high school English teacher in California, tweaking this activity to " write, pair, share " can help "improve the quality of the conversation" students have with each other. It can also help teachers get real time feedback on students' understanding of the material as they walk around the room during the writing portion and do a check to see how many students are having trouble coming up with points.

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Teachers are often concerned with getting vital information into students' heads, but it's just as important to give students frequent opportunities to externalize and manipulate recently learned materials.

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Simple strategies you can use to have kids teach each other—a research-proven path to better learning

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3 Ways to Maximize Peer-to-Peer Learning

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3 Ways to Maximize Peer-to-Peer Learning

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3 Ways to Maximize Peer-to-Peer Learning

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Simple strategies you can use to have kids teach each other-a research-proven path to better learning.

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From concept maps to flash cards to Pictionary, these activities help students reflect on—and remember—what they’ve learned.

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15 Quick (and Mighty) Retrieval Practices

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15 Quick (and Mighty) Retrieval Practices

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15 Quick (and Mighty) Retrieval Practices

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From concept maps to flash cards to Pictionary, these activities help students reflect on—and remember—what they’ve learned.

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When it comes to finding ways to get big wins in the classroom, it’s sometimes the approaches that feel a little unconventional that are the most successful.

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6 Counterintuitive Strategies to Boost Student Learning

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6 Counterintuitive Strategies to Boost Student Learning

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6 Counterintuitive Strategies to Boost Student Learning

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When it comes to finding ways to get big wins in the classroom, it’s sometimes the approaches that feel a little unconventional that are the most successful.

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The brains of kids who are teaching peers go into overdrive—boosting retention and understanding. Here’s how to leverage this effect in your classroom.

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Big and Small Strategies to Harness the Power of Peer-to-Peer Teaching

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Big and Small Strategies to Harness the Power of Peer-to-Peer Teaching

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Big and Small Strategies to Harness the Power of Peer-to-Peer Teaching

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The brains of kids who are teaching peers go into overdrive—boosting retention and understanding. Here’s how to leverage this effect in your classroom.

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Retrieval practice is one of the most effective ways to strengthen learning. Here’s a collection of our best resources to use in your classroom today.

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The Essential Retrieval Practice Handbook

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The Essential Retrieval Practice Handbook

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The Essential Retrieval Practice Handbook

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Retrieval practice is one of the most effective ways to strengthen learning. Here’s a collection of our best resources to use in your classroom today.

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Putting the onus on students to generate solutions sends a clear signal that learning is ultimately the student’s job.

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Feedback Strategies that Lead to Independent Learning

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Feedback Strategies that Lead to Independent Learning

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More than Criticism: Feedback Strategies that Lead to Independent Learning

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Putting the onus on students to generate solutions sends a clear signal that learning is ultimately the student’s job.

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By reframing your questions slightly, you can create more opportunities for students to think deeply, reflect, and engage.

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3 Strategies for Asking Better Questions

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By reframing your questions slightly, you can create more opportunities for students to think deeply, reflect, and engage.

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Teaching students effectively means helping them advance through the moments of discomfort they experience when faced with challenging questions.

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Mastering the Pace and Tone of Your Questions to Students

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Mastering the Pace and Tone of Your Questions to Students

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Looking out at a sea of silent, glum faces after asking a probing question can make any teacher second-guess their choice of profession. In the moment, understandably, educators often lose their nerve and begin to do things that author and education researcher Harry Fletcher-Wood argues only hinders student thinking.

They might call only on raised hands; quickly fill dead air with their own voice; or rush to "round up" partial or incomplete answers-by rephrasing and thus correcting an unsatisfactory answer-in an attempt to swiftly move past any "discomfort and social awkwardness."

Writing for Improving Teaching, Fletcher-Wood argues that the "instinct" of many teachers during question-and-response activities "is to avoid children feeling bad." But effective teaching requires helping students to advance through moments of discomfort to find learning on the other side: "The job of a teacher is to push students beyond what they think they can do," Fletcher-Wood writes, and that means some discomfort, anxiousness, and uncertainty should be expected-and tolerated.

Instead of relying on instinctual strategies that can deprive students of think time, short-circuit consensus building, or defer to the "most confident or interested" students in the room, educators can use strategies like cold-calling, extending wait times before jumping in to provide their own answers, or redirecting students who respond incorrectly. These tactics might pull us out of our collective comfort zones, Fletcher-Wood writes, but they'll also likely lead us to the desired result: That "every student [is] thinking when a question is asked."

Here arefive strategies teachers can use to accomplish this mindset shift.

In Defense of Cold-Calling

Calling on students who haven't raised their hand can seem harrowing to early-career teachers; they're especially reluctant to make students feel uncomfortable, and they want to avoid the perception that a student is being targeted. But Fletcher-Wood writes that the alternative-to call on students who raise their hands voluntarily-leads to poor outcomes. Your motivated students learn more, but inevitably "less confident and less motivated students are left out."

When done right-and used strategically- research suggests that cold calling can elicit more class participation, create a more equitable learning environment, and result in richer, more productive classroom discussions. Although critics of the strategy fear cold calling induces fear and shame in students, a 2022 study suggests that when teachers employ cold calling in an "encouraging and engaging" manner, they are more likely to create classrooms where students feel "safe to take risks."

Using inviting prompts to set up cold calling-phrases like "I'd like to hear some ideas"-can also help reduce feelings of anxiety, research shows, and take the sting out of incorrect answers. It's also helpful to emphasize "effort over correctness" when calling on students, employing phrases like: "I don't expect you to have a perfect answer, I just want to hear your thinking on the topic" or "This is a challenging question and I just want to get a feel for where the class is on this."

Indeed, when used as a method of surveilling students or interrogating them, cold calling can be an insidious approach. A 2013 study, for example, found that using an "aggressive or condescending" tone of voice when calling on students, or making grimacing facial expressions or alienating body language can "erode students' sense of safety and self-worth."

Extending Your 'Wait' Time-By a Lot

In 2018, educator John McCarthy reviewed the research and concluded that teachers, on average, only pause for about 0.9 seconds after asking a question. According to McCarthy, "there is a real need to increase the time granted to students to process what they know and to make sense of what they do not understand."

How long should you wait? Research points to a threshold of at least three seconds, an interval that results in a positive impact on learning- as well as greater participation rates, more elaborate student responses, and an increase in the number of follow-up questions posed by students. McCarthy likes to push it a bit further, advocating for wait-times as long as 15 seconds. "I count in my head to 15. Most times, I get responses by 10 to 12 seconds," McCarthy wrote. "If you don't get responses within 15 seconds, you can call on students, instead of asking for volunteers."

If you want to vary your approach, you can also give students a minute or two to reflect on a topic that you are about to ask them about. This could take place in a journal or during turn-and-talk partner discussion, McCarthy writes. "Giving such chunks of time honors the work being asked of students."

Meanwhile, best-selling author and former teacher Doug Lemov writes that extending wait time after a question can also create better conditions for cold calling. More wait time allows all students to do the work of thinking about the question, retrieving stored knowledge, and formulating a response-not just the student who you eventually call on.

Cultivating Cross-Talk and Turning Half-Answers Into Gold

To create a classroom where all students are sharing their ideas and insights with one another, you'll need to deploy other strategies, too.

Shannon McGrath, a K-8 instructional coach, writes that after asking the class a tough question, turn-and-talk or think-pair-share can be used as tools to "encourage cognitive struggle" and "get students doing more while you say less." It can also reduce the pressure when they're called on later. Turning to a partner to ask each other "What do you think?" allows them both to generate ideas, identify their best thinking, and then synthesize their thoughts before sharing it with the whole classroom.

Inevitably, students give partial or inaccurate answers, and having a strategy to turn those responses into gold is crucial. Raquel Linares, an elementary school teacher in the Bronx, New York, says that many learners benefit from creative activities to give them the tools they need to get started in a peer discussion. She suggests using participation cards, a simple ring of index cards with prompts like "I agree with you because..." "I disagree with you because..." or, "I need more information because..." that can provide useful sentence-starters.

Similar phrases can be deployed to redirect partial or inaccurate answers. For example, Fletcher-Wood suggests phrases such as, "That's helpful, but can you add to that while mentioning..." or "That's not quite right, can you try again? I'm sure you can do it." Tori Filler, an elementary school teacher in Brooklyn, New York, writes that you can also pivot from incomplete answers into a productive classroom discussion by asking things like: "Can anyone build on this?" or "Do we agree? Disagree? Why?"

Teachers sometimes underestimate how much scaffolding is needed during student-centered activities. A recent study reveals, for example, that student drawings of recently learned material are improved when teachers begin the sketches themselves, and allow students to complete them. Similarly, redirecting students by rephrasing a question or asking them what they already know about a topic-or even providing a hint-can help connect them to their prior knowledge and boost engagement, further research confirms.

To engage students who might be more introverted and less likely to participate in verbal discussions, teachers can change up how they collect responses through the use of widely-available technology, suggests education professor Katy Farber.

Google Docs, for example, can be used as a discussion tracker that allows students to post questions and answers to their peers during or after class. Teachers can choose to read some questions and answers aloud, or ask students to do so, and avoid some of the stress introverts might struggle with when they are called to respond on the spot to a question.

"This technique allows a teacher to see a student's level of understanding-through both their questions and answers-without waiting for them to speak in class," Farber writes. Padlet, she adds, can similarly be used as a "digital brainstorming" tool for students to collect their ideas and solutions in a space that can be seen by all students.

Stephanie Toro, an assistant professor in the School of Science at the Universidad de los Andes, writes that tech tools can also be used to create surveys and polls that allow students to share their thoughts anonymously, something that she argues can be useful to coax out thinking from introverted students. By participating anonymously, Toro writes, students can see their "ideas represented without any anxiety of being recognized."

Apps like Socrative, Poll Everywhere, or Survey Monkey can be used to collect anonymous answers. Once you have all of your responses, Toro writes that you can highlight a couple to share with the whole classroom. Even though the responses remain anonymous, Toro writes, the students responsible for them know "they are contributing in a valuable manner."

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Mastering the Pace and Tone of Your Questions to Students

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Teaching students effectively means helping them advance through the moments of discomfort they experience when faced with challenging questions. Teaching students effectively means helping them advance through moments of discomfort when faced with challenging questions.

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Vocabulary instruction, strategy instruction & modeling, visualizations & concrete examples

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Vocabulary instruction, strategy instruction & modeling, visualizations & concrete examples

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To get kids wielding academic and discipline-specific vocabulary, they need to observe words in context as they read, talk, and write about topics and concepts—and receive explicit instruction.

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3 Ways to Help Students Master Academic Language

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3 Ways to Help Students Master Academic Language

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Teaching students academic and discipline-specific language in the classroom isn't about getting them to stockpile "big" words. Rather, researchers concur, when students know the contextual meaning of words in academic or informational texts, it allows them to unlock new and difficult materials-in the process making them better readers, which in turn exposes them to even more high-level vocabulary.

Experts tend to think about vocabulary in tiers, says Todd Finley, an English education professor at East Carolina University. Tier one includes basic, everyday words that students hear often in conversation. Tier-two words, often referred to as academic vocabulary, aren't commonly used in conversations but they're likely to show up across content areas, making them important to teach. They include words like "summarize," "hypothesize," and "analyze." Third-tier words-vocabulary students will encounter in discipline-specific textbooks, informational passages, and assignments-are especially important to deliberately teach because they're critical for understanding key concepts in a text. "No student comes to school adept in academic discourse-thus, thoughtful instruction is required," Finley writes.

Adapting strategies that work well for English learners can be a highly effective way to teach all students academic vocabulary, suggest educators Tan Huynh and Beth Skelton, authors of the recently published book Long-Term Success for Experienced Multilinguals. "To succeed in all subjects, students need additional scaffolding to understand the unique vocabulary, phrasing, and conventions of those disciplines," Huynh and Skelton told The Cult of Pedagogy. "When teachers intentionally design instruction and assessments with academic language support in place, they unlock those worlds for students and give them the tools they need to thrive."

Here are three ways to deepen students' understanding and comfort level with academic and discipline-specific language in your classroom.

Spotlight Key Vocabulary

In middle and high school, Finley suggests starting with "high-frequency, general instruction" tier-two vocabulary. These arewords "learners need to know to complete an activity but that are not a lesson's primary learning objective," and can help prime students to make the transition to more sophisticated language, Finley writes.

High school English teacher Jason DeHart kicks off vocabulary learning with his whole class. "I say [the words], have students say them, and then have them discuss the words in groups," he writes. These discussions focus on linking new vocabulary to words students are already familiar with, and coming up with personalized, easy to remember definitions of the words, rather than the "rote" ones they'll find in textbooks.

When choosing specific words to focus on, DeHart identifies not only the "high-currency" ones Finley suggests, but also mixes in more advanced words like "ambience" and "hyperbole," so students begin to familiarize themselves with language that they'll encounter more frequently in future lessons.

Because research shows that students need repeated exposure to words to move them into long-term memory, DeHart recommends word walls to reinforce key, discipline-specific words you'd like them to begin deploying in their discussions and writing. Similarly, Huynh and Skelton recommend unit-specific word banks -written lists of key subject-specific words or sentences students can consult during assignments-that can be swapped out as kids move from unit to unit.

To further scaffold vocabulary learning, post discipline-specific sentence stems around the room, suggests Dr. Kate Kinsella, professor of education at San Francisco State University. Example frames include: "The key factors leading to _________ can be traced back to _________, " or, "The concept of _________ is essential because _________."

Blend New Language into Writing

To give students opportunities to practice using new words, writing activities should focus on producing discipline-specific styles of writing that help them analyze and synthesize knowledge like real-life practitioners in a given discipline, writes ReLeah Cossett Lent, a former teacher and literacy consultant.

Science writing, for example, should use precise vocabulary, be composed in a passive voice, and favor exactness over elaboration, Cossett Lent writes. Writing in history class should prioritize efficiently synthesizing information from multiple sources, organizing ideas, facts, and evidence, and writing in an argumentative manner. Cossett Lent likes to draw on literacy strategies to reinforce discipline-specific writing, for example asking students to pause and consider what they know about a given topic or concept. In science class, this KWL strategy becomes, "observe, infer, and conclude," and in math class it can evolve into "deconstruct, solve, apply."

To give students enough time to practice this type of writing, Huynh and Skelton suggest weaving discipline-specific writing into everyday classroom tasks. A lesson related to focal points and convex lenses in physics class, for example, can end with an exit ticket asking students to use precise vocabulary or phrases to explain what they learned about both topics.

Additionally, consider inserting explicit language requirements-and brief explanations of those requirements-into writing assignments, Huynh and Skelton suggest. For example: "Compare the social inequality in nineteenth-century France to the reality of the twenty-first century Western society using comparative language (both, just like, another similarity, etc.)" or "Predict what will happen to the main character in the next chapter using conditional language such as might or could."

Get Them Talking

Thoughtful and engaging academic discussions are another way to help students bridge the gap between abstract terms and concrete understanding. To ensure discussions are productive-and that they feature the specific phrases and terms you'd like them to adopt-students need explicit support, writes Boston district-level literacy leader Gwen Blumberg.

One way Blumberg likes to scaffold academic discussions is by using a " Progression of Talk " framework created by educator Cynthia Satterlee. The strategy is designed to provide prompts and sentence stems to help keep comments relevant, build on what was said by peers, and make room for clarifying arguments, disagreements, and elaboration.

Similarly, Catherine Paul, an eighth-grade language arts teacher, uses " talk moves"-which are brief prompts that she tapes to students' desks that remind them to ask clarifying questions during discussions, like "I think what you mean is..." or questions that get peers to expand on thoughts, like "Can you explain more about..." Paul says the practice pushes kids "out of their comfort zone of social conversations," and encourages them to adopt a more "professional and academic kind of register."

In high school, meanwhile, rubrics can quickly clarify discipline-specific language students are expected to use during discussions. Rubrics might define, for example, specific vocabulary words for a science or math classroom-words like "hypothesis", "variable", or "derivative"-and an expectation that students should use them fluently and in the correct context during their discussions of a specific topic related to the terms. Peers can be brought in during fishbowl discussions to observe and use the rubrics to track how well students are sticking to these goals-as well as to provide useful, low-stakes feedback at the end.

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3 Ways to Help Students Master Academic Language

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To get kids wielding academic and discipline-specific vocabulary, they need to observe words in context as they read, talk, and write about topics and concepts-and receive explicit instruction.

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Engaging games support student understanding of subject-specific vocabulary and help ensure retention of content knowledge.

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5 Vocabulary Games That Build Content Knowledge in High School

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5 Vocabulary Games That Build Content Knowledge in High School

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Engaging games support student understanding of subject-specific vocabulary and help ensure retention of content knowledge.

Subject-specific vocabulary goes hand-in-hand with a deep and meaningful knowledge of content. It allows us to engage with that subject, unlocks understanding, and promotes clear and precise communication.

At the end of a topic or unit of work, I like to encourage my students to play with the words they've learned. I use five different word-association games that get students to recall, describe, explain, listen, and verbalize the subject-specific vocabulary from that topic or unit of work. In my experience, the lighthearted nature of these games provides students with a fun, safe, and low-stakes environment where they feel more confident to just have a go.

Although the examples I've given are specific to my subject (biology) and age group (high school), I hope these games are also applicable to other subjects and student ages and provide engaging ways to help students master vocabulary.

How it works: For this five-to-eight-minute game, students work in small groups (two to four) and have to write down a word related to a topic for every letter of the alphabet. For example, if the topic is cells, "A" might be "apoptosis," "B" might be "binary fission," "C" might be "cytoplasm," and so on. For many topics, students might struggle to find a word for every letter (and sometimes you will too). You can support them and/or allow them to get more abstract or silly.

This is great as a starter activity for a lesson that falls at the end of the topic. I like to keep it visible and accessible throughout the lesson for students to add to if inspiration strikes them later on.

2. Articulate

Based on the popular board game Articulate, this 10-to-20-minute game (depending on the size of your class) gets students to describe and define key terms.

How it works: Prepare a number of cards containing four words related to a topic or subject and one silly or unrelated word. Students will work in teams of three or four. When it's the first team's turn, one student from that team stands at the front. The teacher gives that student a card, and the student has to describe the word to their team without ever saying the word, or variations of the word. I usually allow each team one free pass per round. The number of points that the team gets is equal to the number of words that the team guesses in 30 seconds. Teams rotate and continue until every player has had a turn.

The aim of this 15-to-20-minute game is to get students to make connections between key vocabulary words.

I first played the Just One game with my family and then modified it by making cards specific to vocabulary in my subject so that I could use it in my classroom.

How it works: Prepare a number of cards with five words related to a unit, topic, or subject (sometimes I reuse the ones I use in Articulate). Three to seven students work in a group. One student chooses a number between one and five and turns around, facing away from their classmates.

The first card is shown to the other students in the group, and without conferring, they write down one word (on a mini whiteboard) that relates to the corresponding word on the card. For example, if the clue is "muscle," possible related words might be "movement," "skeletal," or "tissue." All of the students reveal their mini whiteboards to their group-all except the first student.

If two students have written the same word, both words get erased (this encourages students to think beyond the most obvious links). Finally, the first student turns around to view the remaining words and has one chance to guess what the original word on the card was. Repeat the process with a new student guessing and a new card until everyone has had at least one turn. You can appeal to students' competitive natures by giving them a score to aim for. So, for a group of five, everyone has two turns, and the aim is to achieve a total score of 7 or more out of 10.

4. Telephone Pictionary

For this 20-to-30-minute game, students use diagrams to explain key vocabulary.

How it works: Create groups of about six to eight students, ideally sitting in a circle. Each student is given a note card or piece of paper with a different phrase or term on it (examples I have used include "human evolution," "the kidneys" and "cell membrane").

The student has 30-45 seconds to sketch a picture to represent the phrase or term and then paperclips their sketch over the word so that it isn't visible to the next student. This picture gets passed on to the next student, who (on a new card or piece of paper) writes a phrase or term that they think was given to the student before them based on the picture drawn. Then they use their sketch to cover the previous one. This continues around the group, alternating between drawing and writing until it returns to the original student.

This is happening simultaneously for all students-so everyone is always doing something. Once the cycle returns to the original student, they lay out all the cards, reveal the original phrase or term, and choose a winning contributor for their round-usually either the most accurate or the funniest one.

This two-to-eight-minute game gets students verbalizing and making links between vocabulary words. It works well at the end of a lesson when you have a couple of spare minutes.

How it works: Students are put into pairs, and on the count of three, they say a word related to a given subject or unit. For example, in the topic "cells," one student might say "cellulose," and another student might say "eukaryotic." On the count of three, they then simultaneously say another word that they think matches the two words just said. Now, one might say "plant" and another might say "cell wall." This keeps going until both students say the same word at the same time. Words can't be repeated at any time.

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5 Vocabulary Games That Build Content Knowledge

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Engaging games support student understanding of subject-specific vocabulary and help ensure retention of content knowledge.

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Openers matter and set the tone for the lesson that follows. Here’s how to start strong when you need to.

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How to Engage Students the Moment They Enter the Classroom

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How to Engage Students the Moment They Enter the Classroom

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Openers matter and set the tone for the lesson that follows. Here's how to start strong when you need to.

The first few moments of class, like the opening lines of a novel, are critical. For teachers, they're the starting gate for the lesson that follows and "the key to enlivening-or extinguishing-student interest and learning," writes Curtis Chandler for MiddleWeb. Making sure that your warm-up activity is both substantive and highly engaging, or even downright fun-drawing students into the classroom and the lesson-takes practice and some trial and error, but veteran teachers say it's worth the effort to get it right.

"The battle against student disengagement and disinterest is winnable when we work to infuse the opening minutes with experiences designed to pique student interest, activate prior knowledge, have some fun, and prepare them for the day's learning," writes Chandler, a professor at Brigham Young University-Idaho and former middle school teacher.

Class warm-up strategies aren't new-but they can get less attention than they should, especially when the focus for teachers is on moving quickly into the content. Middle school math teacher Jay Wamsted says he began his 8th grade math class the same way for more than a decade: with a warm-up problem on the board and the expectation that students immediately get to work solving it. Except, he writes, that's not how things went most days.

"What really happened was that out of 30 students, maybe five of them would diligently engage in the problem. The rest would delay with tactics ranging from pencil sharpening to grabbing a few extra winks," Wamsted writes. After greeting his students at the door, he says he'd have two choices: "Go over the warm-up problem for less than 20 percent of the class-typically the 20 percent that didn't need it in the first place-or waste time for the on-task students by giving the less proactive students a few extra minutes."

How can you do better? Some days, of course, you'll opt for keeping things low-key with a traditional warm-up activity, but other times, you might want to change it up. Here are seven warm-up activities, sourced from Chandler, Wamsted, and our Edutopia archives, designed to build connection, activate prior knowledge, and be engaging enough to pull kids into the content.

LINK TO WHAT THEY KNOW
Taking a few moments at the beginning of class to help kids connect what they already know to new content-a strategy known as previewing-helps create more durable learning, "especially for students with limited background knowledge," Chandler writes.

Bait and switch: Begin by briefly discussing common misconceptions students may have about the topic of the day's lesson, Chandler writes. For a lesson about oceans, for example, everyday misconceptions might include statements like "all oceans have the same salinity," or "nothing lives in anoxic mud." Have students take a quick true/false quiz focused on statements that "all seem plausible but are all false," he suggests, before revealing to the class that all the quiz statements are in fact false-and that they're about to learn why throughout the lesson.

Informational hooks: Designed to get kids interested in the lesson ahead, informational hooks can be any type of short, targeted media: videos, clips from a podcast, news headlines, photos. Even a great anecdote might work. To vet relevant hooks, Chandler suggests considering the following questions:

What concepts or skills will the hook highlight?

What is "truly unique, novel, or useful" about the hook?

Will the hook grab their attention-but not distract from the lesson?

Productive failure: Inspired by the research of learning scientist Manu Kapur, consider occasionally designing a short problem-solving activity, perhaps focused on crucial target concepts, as a warm-up exercise before jumping into instruction.

The problem should be just beyond students' reach and designed to activate prior knowledge, motivate them, and surface what they do and do not know. Explain to students that the exercise is designed to be confusing and frustrating and that struggling is normal-even expected. Though a regular productive failure exercise might take 30-40 minutes, a warm-up is clearly much shorter. Allow students to wrestle with a problem for a few minutes, and then step in and build off their ideas and solutions, comparing and contrasting, and then teaching how to correctly solve the problem.

Vocabulary splashes: Present key vocabulary terms and concepts, along with brief definitions, and ask students to sort the words in ways that make sense to them. With a partner, or in small groups, have them discuss their sorting rationales. "The teacher then leads a discussion of how the terms and concepts are related to each other," Chandler writes, and connects them, if possible, to students' "interests and prior knowledge." Consider closing out the lesson by having students sort and explain the words once more.

Rapid review: Have students partner with a classmate, discuss what they learned during the previous class, and then present to the group. It's a quick, effective way to "get students active, and helps the teacher know what actually 'stuck' from the previous day's lesson," Chandler writes.

OR, MAKE IT CHATTY
Sometimes, warm-ups don't need to be overly complicated and a few minutes of chatting about things unrelated to content can be enough to get class started. In Wamsted's math classroom, he's found that "just about any investment in actual conversation-whether it's about doughnuts or spiders or the ramifications of this being the one-year anniversary of the U.S. pulling out of Afghanistan-will pay off mightily in the long run," he writes.

Cold opens: Remote learning pushed Wamsted to reevaluate his staid warm-up routine and now that he's pivoted to a new approach where "we hit the ground running," once math class begins, he writes. "All I've missed is the time when I used to wheedle them to 'do the warm-up problem, please.'"

At the start of class, students see a playful message on the board that's designed to start conversations: "Wednesday? Wow! Halfway through!" or "Test next week? Probably!" for example. He then briefly shows the day's agenda on the board and follows up by showing a slide of some type of non-sequitur-he calls it his "cold open"-designed to generate more chatting: "It might be a picture of my dog. It might be a trivia question about the top five fastest land animals," he notes.

Attendance questions: Once the chatter dies down, Wamsted introduces an attendance question. "At its best, the attendance question connects to the cold open. ... It lets me share something about myself and opens the door for my students to share a little bit with me," he says. If he showed a photo of a dog during the cold open, his attendance question-inspired, he notes, by Jessica Kirkland, a 9th and 10th grade ELA teacher-might involve asking about his students' pets, for example.

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How to Engage Students the Moment They Enter the Classroom

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Openers matter and set the tone for the lesson that follows. Here's how to start strong when you need to. The first few moments of class, like the opening lines of a novel, are critical. For teachers, they're the starting gate for the lesson that follows and "the key to enlivening-or extinguishing-student interest and learning," writes Curtis Chandler for MiddleWeb.

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Middle and high school teachers can build activities that foster students’ executive functioning skills into their daily routines.

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4 Ways to Promote Executive Functioning Skills

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4 Ways to Promote Executive Functioning Skills

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Middle and high school teachers can build activities that foster students' executive functioning skills into their daily routines.

As single-subject teachers in middle and high school, our planning focus is generally on creating engaging and meaningful lessons aligned with our curriculum and content. But where are the opportunities for students to build executive functioning skills? To what subject does that learning belong?

Many of our students, particularly during and after the pandemic, are managing an influx of stress, anxiety, and health challenges. Executive functioning skills aren't inherent for maturing preteen and high school students, and the added challenges they're facing further disrupt their ability to build these skills.

Underdeveloped executive functioning in our students has a domino effect that leads to academic challenges and higher needs for intervention, and it ultimately necessitates more-individualized support from teachers.

While executive functioning skills aren't innate and aren't taught in one explicit lesson, they're foundational for the academic and personal success of our students. So how can teachers build executive functioning supports and routines into classrooms without losing valuable lesson time?

1. Pomodoro technique: time management

Developed by Francesco Cirillo, the Pomodoro Technique is a way of breaking work into predictable intervals of 25 minutes of work and five minutes off. This often creates greater productivity and improves time management skills for students. Teachers can incentivize the breaks appropriately for their students with options such as allowing device use, outside time, quick games, etc.

Using visual timers can help support students engaging in this kind of interval work and internalizing periods of time. Teachers can further benefit from this method by modeling it in their own teaching, offering themselves and students short breaks during times of direct instruction.

2. I-Plan Strategy: organization and planning

Students utilizing a planner will write down assignments and due dates but often miss the key skill of translating that into action. Organization and planning don't come naturally for students, and the "I-Plan Strategy" is a way to scaffold their development of this skill. It's simply a tool that offers students more agency and self-management of the organization of their time by allowing them to plan it out themselves.

For assignments that aren't due the following class, such as long-term projects, reading schedules, packets, presentations, etc., offer students the opportunity to "I-Plan." Students can work individually or as a group to outline their project benchmarks. When students have a shared deadline to finish a novel, for example, offer the class an opportunity to break down the reading schedule together.

For individual assignments, such as presentations, offer students benchmarks and give them time to map out their own individual due dates. A shift happens when you give students the agency over their benchmark dates and move beyond a due date into an actionable and progressive plan.

3. Personal Road map: self-reflection and goal-setting

As teachers, we know the importance of goal setting and reflection. For many of us, it's built in as part of our own professional development and pedagogical practice. When you offer the opportunity to engage in goal setting and reflection in the classroom, students connect more with their own growth and progress.

Teachers can work in goal setting and reflection opportunities by using and adapting the Personal Road Map, a single sheet of paper that students interact with throughout the year. Begin your school year by having students define and set their own personal success goals for your class on a Personal Road Map.

Each grading period, allow students five minutes to reflect on their progress in class and how it aligns with their goals. These road maps encourage a growth mindset that may lead to more active engagement in the course. Teachers can utilize this resource themselves when conferencing with students or their grown-ups, or even when considering growth-based grading.

4. Positivity Partners: working memory and social interaction

Students thrive when they're part of a positive support system that enables them to feel comfortable in their social interactions. Positivity Partners are teacher-assigned student partners who rotate throughout the school year at the teacher's discretion. Teachers can build in time for Positivity Partners to interact and reflect on the class, allowing space for students to practice navigating a variety of low-stakes social interactions.

The last two minutes of a class period can feel frantic, and students can lose information in the bustle. Positivity Partners is a system designed to close each class period routinely and positively. For the last two minutes of class, Positivity Partners meet with one another to do one of the following: summarize what they learned in class, review the homework or upcoming due dates, or commend one another on something done or said in class. Not only do Positivity Partners build classroom community and closure routines, but they offer students an opportunity to integrate working memory into a social interaction and maybe even receive some positive praise.

Supporting the growth of executive functioning is a practice that buoys the lifelong learning of all students. By building opportunities for this growth into daily lessons and routines, teachers support real-world skill development that yields successful outcomes for students and teachers alike.

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4 Ways to Promote Executive Functioning Skills

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Middle and high school teachers can build activities that foster students' executive functioning skills into their daily routines. As single-subject teachers in middle and high school, our planning focus is generally on creating engaging and meaningful lessons aligned with our curriculum and content. But where are the opportunities for students to build executive functioning skills?

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Retrieval in Action: Creative Strategies from Real Teachers

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Retrieval in Action: Creative Strategies from Real Teachers

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Retrieval in Action: Creative Strategies from Real Teachers | Cult of Pedagogy

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These nine strategies make it quick, fun, and easy to build retrieval practice into any lesson.

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Download Our Free Resources – Retrieval Practice

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In our free resources, written by cognitive scientists, we condense research on teaching strategies, why they enhance learning, and how to implement them in the classroom.

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Writing improves learning by consolidating information in long-term memory, researchers explain. Plus, five engaging writing activities to use in all subjects.

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Why Students Should Write in All Subjects

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Why Students Should Write in All Subjects

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Why Students Should Write in All Subjects

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Writing improves learning by consolidating information in long-term memory, researchers explain. Plus, five engaging writing activities to use in all subjects.

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By building relationships and centering student participation, teachers can create a community where curiosity and inquiry are valued.

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How Teachers Can Guide Students to Ask Great Questions

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How Teachers Can Guide Students to Ask Great Questions

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By building relationships and centering student participation, teachers can create a community where curiosity and inquiry are valued.

A seed cannot grow if there are no nutrients in the soil. Analogously, students can only begin to be curious if the conditions are right. On the first day of school, I was excited to begin the year with questions and curiosity. I showed my senior statistics students an image that displayed a subset of integers from the Mayan number system.

I asked, "What does this make you wonder?"

Not a single question emerged from the room. Immediately students began trying to "solve the problem." They searched for patterns and some quickly exclaimed,"I get it! I figured it out." I gently reminded them that the goal wasn't a solution. The goal was questions.

For me, this activity cemented the idea that our education system doesn't teach students to value questions and curiosity. We teach them to strive for answers, in particular, correct answers. While there is absolutely nothing wrong with seeking a solution to a problem, we can't make any progress or have new ideas without asking the right questions.

You might say that my students had learned to squelch their curiosity over time. I needed to help them realize that asking questions is an active process that they could get better at. They could re-learn to wonder. It's also possible that my students didn't know how to ask a question.

Sara Lev works with four- and five-year olds and says that, despite the fact that young students are naturally curious, they are often more likely to make statements than ask questions when prompted to wonder. For example, after playing a podcast, Lev asked her class, "What questions do you have about making a podcast about outer space?" One student stated,"It should be about the sun!" Sara took the spirit of his statement and helped him turn it into a question, "Oh, are you wondering what the podcast should be about?" and that becomes the question,"What topics should we talk about?"

Even in upper grades, students tend to articulate thoughts and opinions more easily than questions. To get students asking, we can help them reframe those ideas as curiosities and things they should wonder more deeply about.

If you are asking, "Why aren't my students asking questions?" it could be that their curiosity was squelched, they are scared, or that they just don't know how. In what follows, we'll explore several ways to kick start the process and plant the seed of wonder.

How Do I Create a Safe Environment for Wondering?

My dad was not the typical "star student." He was one of seven and school was not the family's top priority. The lessons he remembers from school came from Sister Loretta: "Don't waste any food" and "Be respectful and don't talk out of turn." At the same time, my dad is and always has been a deeply curious person. He spends his free time tinkering, taking apart old radios, record players, and vintage dirt bikes. He tweaks them and puts them back together, better than before. He once showed me a model he drew in high school of an electric go-kart, long before Elon Musk or anyone else had talked about such a thing. I asked him about his experience in school and whether he asked questions. "Never! I was scared. I was scared of the teacher, but also of what my classmates would think of me."

Imagine a classroom environment where my dad would have been comfortable voicing his curiosity, where his questions were celebrated, and most importantly, where other students admired him for his creativity. Perhaps he would have spoken up more, asked how generators work or had an opportunity to do a project to learn more about batteries. Maybe he would have even built the electric go-kart he dreamed up in his sketchbook.

Traditionally, school has been a place where teachers test their students with questions and students prove their worth with answers. "Knowing things" is valued and "not knowing" is penalized by low grades and loss of privileges. What student would want to ask a question in this environment? Their question would indicate a lack of knowledge and diminish their worth in a system that rewards answers.

Our first step towards creating a space in which students are willing to ask questions is to build trust in our classroom communities. This is a prerequisite for students to feel safe enough to take the risk of admitting that there is something they do not know.

Small changes in language can go a long way toward shifting the culture around questions. André Sasser noticed this in her first few years of teaching. When she began, after a lesson she would ask, "Are there any questions?" Students rarely voiced any. She adjusted her language to, "What questions do you have?" or "Ask me three questions." With these prompts, students began to stir.

This simple tweak made queries the expectation; students rose to that expectation and their questions flowed. They were fearless and asked questions that may have come off as too basic or obvious in a room that didn't value such risk-taking. Simply using careful language to normalize and solicit questions can begin to change the culture.

My dad was primarily afraid of how other students might perceive him if he asked a question. Normalizing the act of asking, like Sasser has, sends a message to all students in the class that questions are to be valued, not mocked. In the next few sections, we'll discuss more strategies for helping all students in the class to see the value in questioning rather than seeing it as a weakness.

Helping your students get to know each other can also have an impact on building trust in your classroom community. You likely have noticed this in your own experiences. Some groups of students know each other well and have been in classes together for years. They are comfortable with each other and are willing to open themselves to the vulnerability associated with asking a question. Other groups of students, who have not built relationships with each other, will be quieter and less likely to admit when they don't know.

Imagine a new student entering your class for the first time. This likely changes the dynamic for everyone. The new student often feels like they need to make a good impression and accordingly will answer questions they know the answer to but be less likely to take a risk by asking a question. Students who have been in your class may also be more cautious when it comes to speaking out in class, wanting to make a good impression on the newcomer. Over time, as relationships grow, lively inquiries and class discussions return.

Fortunately, teachers can actively help students build relationships with each other. One strategy is to provide students the opportunity to work collaboratively toward a common goal. Review games and team activities give students time to socialize with each other with enough structure to bypass the awkwardness of being in middle school. Healthy competition motivates students to engage with each other. Further, these activities reduce stress levels which helps the students feel more open to each other.

Another key strategy for helping students become comfortable with one another is to reduce your impact in the classroom. It's all about giving students ownership of the content by honoring their thoughts and giving them time at the board to teach each other.

One powerful play is to invite students to present their work at the board every day, while you take a backseat, sitting off to the side somewhere. This physical action, ensuring that the presenting student is the only one standing, demonstrates that the student is in control of the room (Rowe, 2022, personal communication). By giving students the opportunity to control the room, they feel special and valued.

Excerpted from Creating Curious Classrooms: The Beauty of Questions by Emma Chiappetta. Published by ConnectEDD Publishing.

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By building relationships and centering student participation, teachers can create a community where curiosity and inquiry are valued.

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These research-backed strategies have the capacity to help students learn and retain more information.

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These research-backed strategies have the capacity to help students learn and retain more information.

monkeybusinessimages / iStock

No parent sends their child to school to develop stress, experience anxiety, or lose their self-esteem. Every educator aspires for their students to learn what they are being taught. Yet, both teachers and students, albeit for different reasons, had to teach themselves to learn. This is not a criticism of our education but instead a nod of understanding. More can be done to ensure that each student and teacher is set up to succeed. This is inclusive of improving each student's ability to learn and curiosity for learning rather than ranking them against each other or attributing their struggles to poor habits.

Successful educators constantly refine how they teach by utilizing evidence-based instructional practices and scientific discoveries about learning.

Learning is complex. It depends on a myriad of cognitive skills, emotions, and behaviors alongside prior knowledge. Fortunately, the field of cognitive science has accumulated a rich body of evidence of how we learn (science of learning) and how to teach to promote learning (science of teaching). Unfortunately, this mountain of evidence remains mostly trapped within academia, siloed from professional development, and primarily absent from where it is needed most: in our classrooms. Here are some tips for applying this knowledge in your classroom.

1. Prime the brain for learning. While tests are commonly used to measure performance, they are also powerful tools to foster learning. What does the science of learning say about testing before we even teach the material? It helps students learn the material better because it signals to their brains what is important and forthcoming. This is referred to as priming. Look for opportunities to incorporate priming questions into already-established classroom routines.

Realize that only a fraction of what you teach is actively being processed, and more information is processed when you engage students with the material you are teaching. Capture your students' attention with prediction, purposeful novelty, and cues that denote importance.

3. Preteach jargon to avoid cognitive overload. Teaching often involves new terms. Cognitive multimedia theory teaches us that students learn better when the terms are introduced in advance of the content. This helps avoid cognitive overload, which occurs when new content is paired with new terms that prevent the student from effectively grasping both simultaneously. Consider using flash cards at the start of a unit instead of waiting until the end.

5. Alternate between subjects after moderate review of one. We are used to working in a blocked fashion. Our textbooks are designed this way. We study this way by cramming, and we often teach this way by introducing material sequentially; these methods aren't as helpful to learning. Interleaving challenges the conventional approach to teaching and learning with a far more effective approach. As you might suspect, it requires the opposite.

When tasks or skills are mixed within a single class period or study session, the brain must work harder, and memory associations are strengthened. The key here is alternating after moderate review; avoid switching too often. How much is too often? There is no formula that is universally appropriate across age groups, subject matter, and cognitive profiles. Generally speaking, consider interleaving no more than two to three topics per session and switching topics roughly every 15-20 minutes.

6. Prompt students to actively generate information. Students are often tasked with answering questions that can be found in the text or other content provided. Elaboration, another type of retrieval, asks students to look beyond what is provided by describing using many details. It works by activating and making connections to prior knowledge. Create opportunities for students to make connections between different ideas and concepts and consider what makes them similar or different.

These strategies only scratch the surface of the daunting tasks that many teachers and students have faced and continue to face today. By studying cognitive science more closely, teachers can become experts on how to teach (science of learning) and on what they teach (academic content). The science of learning supports the important work that is already being done by so many.

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6 Evidence-Based Instructional Practices Drawn From Cognitive Science

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These research-backed strategies have the capacity to help students learn and retain more information.

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10 Creative Ways to Teach Vocabulary - Spark Creativity

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10 Creative Ways to Teach Vocabulary - Spark Creativity

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067: 10 Creative Ways to Teach Vocabulary - Spark Creativity

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Vocabulary is something that's often added to English classes as a bit of an afterthought. Something to get done randomly, in between all the other work. Alongside the lessons on grammar, literature, writing, speaking, debate, ethics, career studies, research skills, media literacy, love of reading, etc.!

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Retrieval Practice: The Most Powerful Learning Strategy You're Not Using

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Retrieval Practice: The Most Powerful Learning Strategy You're Not Using

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Listen to my interview with Pooja Agarwal ( transcript):

Sponsored by Raymond Geddes and Kids Discover

We've talked about retrieval practice two other times on this site: First in 2015, when we read the book Make it Stick. Then in 2016, I interviewed cognitive psychologists Megan Smith and Yana Weinstein about the Six Powerful Learning Strategies You Must Share with Students.

In both cases, I noticed that although we were discussing collections of techniques, retrieval practice was at the core of both groups. Because it's such a powerful technique, I would think that by now it would have really taken off, that I'd hear teachers talking about it and see the term crop up in lots of education spaces, but I don't see that happening.

So I wanted to give it one more push by carving out a designated spot for it here. My goal is to help retrieval practice become a regular part of classroom practice and part of our common vocabulary as teachers. To help with this cause, I interviewed Pooja Agarwal, Ph.D., cognitive scientist and founder of RetrievalPractice.org.

What is Retrieval Practice?

Retrieval practice is the act of trying to recall information without having it in front of you. Suppose you're studying the systems of the human body-skeletal, muscular, circulatory, and so on. You could do retrieval practice by attempting to name those systems without looking at the list. Once you've listed all you can remember, you'd open up your book or notes and check to see if you got them right.

You might be thinking, This is nothing new. The whole concept of flashcards is built on retrieval practice, and flashcards have been around forever, right?

What's new is the research: In recent years, cognitive psychologists have been comparing retrieval practice with other methods of studying-strategies like review lectures, study guides, and re-reading texts. And what they're finding is that nothing cements long-term learning as powerfully as retrieval practice.

The Research

Agarwal and her colleagues studied the effects of retrieval practice with students in a middle school social studies course (McDaniel, Agarwal, Huelser, McDermott, & Roediger, 2011). Over the course of a year and a half, while the teacher continued teaching as normal, students were regularly quizzed on the material with no-stakes quizzes, meaning they wouldn't count against their grades. These quizzes only covered about one-third of what was being taught. The teacher left the room for every quiz, so she had no knowledge of what was included in the quizzes.

On end-of-unit exams, students scored a full grade level higher on the material from the quizzes than on any of the other material. The other concepts had been taught and reviewed by the teacher as they normally would; the only difference was that some things also appeared on the no-stakes quizzes, and those were the concepts students retained more fully when tested on the exam.

The very act of being quizzed actually helped students learn better.

Here's what this means for teachers: When we teach something once, then want to do something else to help students learn it better, instead of just reviewing the content, we're much better off giving something like a quiz instead. In other words, if we do more asking students to pull concepts out of their brains, rather than continually trying to put concepts in, students will actually learn those concepts better.

To read about other studies on retrieval practice, click here. For now, let's look at some ways you can incorporate retrieval practice into your instruction.

Ways to Use Retrieval Practice in the Classroom

Think-Pair-Share
This quick, low-maintenance strategy can be used at any time to have students recall information, then share it with a partner. You can use think-pair-shares with single-answer questions, or make them more open-ended, like "Think of one thing you learned yesterday about cells." Be sure to have students think on their own before turning to a partner. "It's important for students to retrieve individually as much as possible," Agarwal advises. "If you jump right into pairs, then we all know as educators that some students are retrieving and some may not be." One way to make sure all students retrieve is to have them jot responses down on paper before sharing them with a partner.

Low-Stakes Quizzes
These can be given on paper, in a Google Form, with an individual response system like clickers, Plickers, or Poll Everywhere; or by using a game like Kahoot or Quizziz. It's important to note that these quizzes are a learning strategy: Ideally, students wouldn't get scores on them at all, but if you must give some points, make them an almost negligible part of students' overall class grade.

Brain Dumps
Have students get out a sheet of paper and, within a certain length of time, write down everything they know about a topic of study. This can be done at the beginning of a unit (similar to how you'd use a K-W-L Chart), partway through as a way to reinforce learning, or near the end of a unit. Once students have completed theirs, they can exchange them in a think-pair-share or use them to compile a whole-class brain dump. Then they can return to their texts to see what they missed or what needs correction.

Flashcards
These can be a powerful retrieval tool in class or at home, but students need to be taught to use them correctly:

Once a card has been mastered, keep it in the deck a while.
Research has shown that students tend to "drop" cards out of their decks too soon after they have mastered them (Karpicke, 2009). Ideally, a fact should be successfully retrieved three times before a student moves on from it.

Actually retrieve.
Karpicke's research also found that when students see a familiar prompt on a flashcard, they have a tendency to tell themselves they know it, then flip it over to see the answer, rather than taking a few extra seconds to actually recall the answer-and ideally, say it out loud-before flipping the card over. The difference in timing is subtle, but important: Students will not get the same benefits from flashcards unless they actually retrieve the answer before seeing it.

Shuffle the deck.
Keeping the cards in the same order makes them predictable. Once a deck has been gone through a few times, it should be shuffled to make it more challenging.

For more tips, take a look at College Info Geek's excellent post on effectively using flashcards.

Tips and Cautions

Retrieval practice is not the same thing as assessment.
Although some retrieval activities might allow you to formatively assess student understanding, remember that retrieval practice is a learning activity. Again, if you must assign points for practices, make sure they will have a very low impact on student grades.

Space your practice.
Retrieval practice is even more effective if it's done in short bursts over time, rather than in a single long session. This spacing causes students to forget some of the material, and the struggle involved in trying to recall it strengthens their long-term learning.

Include feedback.
If students retrieve the wrong information, the practice won't be much good unless they find out the right information, so be sure to give them feedback as they go. This can be as simple as providing the correct answer or letting students check their texts after they have attempted to retrieve. "Part of that isn't just so students know if they got their answer correct or incorrect," Agarwal says, "but it adjusts students' metacognition," helping them get "better at estimating or judging what they know and what they don't know."

Match your practice to your assessment.
If your summative assessment for a chunk of content will be basic recall of facts, then the retrieval practice can be that simple. But it you're going to include some higher-order questions as well, then be sure to ask those same types of questions in retrieval practice.

Does it Fit with Inquiry Learning?

If your classroom is built around more hands-on, inquiry-driven approaches to learning that don't prioritize retaining specific content-structures like Genius Hour and project-based learning -you might wonder whether retrieval practice is relevant to your teaching.

Consider this: Within any of those frameworks, students still have to learn and retain discrete information. Take, for example, a student who has decided to learn Arabic as his focus for Genius Hour, or students who are studying soil pH as part of a gardening project. Both students will need to study and remember concrete information in order to make progress, so even if your instruction isn't set up in a traditional way, understanding how retrieval practice works can help you help your students learn better.

A Little Goes a Long Way

Agarwal's final piece of advice is to start small. "If a student just writes down two things or one thing they learned, and then you move on, that's okay," she says. "You'll still get benefits of retrieval without spending five minutes in a classroom discussion."

It can be a bell-ringer. An exit slip. A sponge activity. Something you do while students stand in line for lunch. Don't overthink it. Agarwal advises teachers to ask themselves this: "What is one way we can flip from reviewing information to students retrieving information? What can we do tomorrow?"

What will you do tomorrow? ♦

Learn More

Dr. Agarwal and her colleagues have put together this comprehensive guide to using retrieval practice. Visit RetrievalPractice.org/download to get a free copy for yourself. And be sure to follow Retrieval Practice on Twitter at @RetrieveLearn.
References:
Karpicke, J. D. (2009). Metacognitive control and strategy selection: deciding to practice retrieval during learning. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 138(4), 469.

McDaniel, M. A., Agarwal, P. K., Huelser, B. J., McDermott, K. B., & Roediger III, H. L. (2011). Test-enhanced learning in a middle school science classroom: The effects of quiz frequency and placement. Journal of Educational Psychology, 103(2), 399.

There's a lot more where this came from.
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 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. Come on in!!

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Retrieval Practice: The Most Powerful Learning Strategy You're Not Using

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Nothing cements long-term learning as powerfully as retrieval practice. Learn how to incorporate it into your classroom.

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So you just taught your students something new. Maybe it's a math operation, a bit of music theory, or the conjugation of an irregular verb form in Spanish. Now you're ready to get them practicing. One standard approach is to assign written exercises. Fine. That's perfectly fine. Except when it's not, because you do it every day, and students are dying to interact more, move more, talk more, do something else.

Last fall, I showed you how to take written exercises and build in more movement and interactivity with Chat Stations. Now, I offer another alternative: Reciprocal Learning, a cooperative structure that takes "working in pairs" up a notch.

It goes a little something like this:

Every pair consists of a "Student A" and a "Student B."

Each student has their own set of problems or exercises to work on. Here's the twist: Student A has the answers to Student B's problems, and Student B has the answers to Student A's problems.

Students take turns coaching each other through the problems, not giving the answers, but helping their partner reach the correct answer on their own.

This arrangement, if done right, will help students become more self-directed, increase academic gains, and improve the quality of social interactions.

Here's a quick demonstration:

Reciprocal Learning is one of twenty research-based strategies outlined in Silver, Strong, and Perini's excellent book, The Strategic Teacher: Selecting the Right Research-Based Strategy for Every Lesson ( Bookshop.org | Amazon).

The book also describes two variations on this strategy. The first is Peer Reading, where students take turns answering response questions to a long piece of text. The second is Peer Problem Solving, where each person has a single, complex problem to solve. What's cool about this variation is that all the "A"s and all the "B"s meet beforehand in a "coaches' meeting" to work through the steps of their partners' problem and strategize for the best ways to coach their partners through it.

If you like Reciprocal Learning, take a look at my overview of Concept Attainment, another strategy from this book. Although many of the techniques in the book have simple-sounding names - which makes people think they understand the strategies without really studying them - they have much more structure and complexity than their names imply. For teachers who are visual or kinesthetic learners, reading the book's description of the techniques sometimes doesn't quite get the job done, which is why I'm putting these videos together: The strategies are too good to go unused.

Try it out and let me know what you think - and as always, if you have tips to share or questions to ask, add them in the comments section so we can all learn together. ♦

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 the Reciprocal Learning Strategy

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This cooperative learning strategy takes the idea of "working in pairs" up a notch.

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Blended learning allows teachers to use data to personalize instruction while supporting student agency.

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5 Blended Learning Strategies to Try in Middle and High School

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5 Blended Learning Strategies to Try in Middle and High School

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Blended learning allows teachers to use data to personalize instruction while supporting student agency.

Blended learning is a formal education program in which a student learns at least in part through online learning with some element of student control over time, place, path, and pace. Students should also learn in part within a supervised brick-and-mortar location away from home, where each student's learning path within a course or subject is connected to provide an integrated learning experience.

The blended learning model contains pillars focusing on the design or creation of learning environments and lessons. Pillars include but are not limited to data-driven instruction, personalized learning, student agency, relationships, rigor, and relevance. Each subsequent strategy supports at least one or more of the pillars.

Using models like backward design, a teacher can easily identify the appropriate structure of a blended learning lesson. Teachers should identify the desired results, determine acceptable evidence, and then plan the learning experience. Not every strategy aligns with the outcomes you seek, so choose carefully. Also, remember that the learning task may necessitate some prerequisite skills for students to succeed. Use caution when estimating the readiness of your students to complete a task independently.

5 Powerful Blended Learning Strategies

1. Utilize goal setting. When goals are cocreated with students, they are more likely to commit and achieve success. Students who set goals, identify specific actions to reach them, and track their progress toward those goals have greater agency and will have the skills to help them succeed throughout life. Teachers who plan regular cycles of one-to-one conferences with students to monitor progress and goal achievement are highly successful.

A best practice for goal setting is focusing on one or two goals at a time so that students and teachers can manage them easily. A well-written goal is specific, measurable, achievable, and relevant, and has an element of time length.

This strategy supports the blended learning pillars of personalized learning, student agency, relationships, rigor, and relevance.

2. Apply standards mastery mapping. Standards mastery mapping is closely tied to goal setting, and student benefits are maximized when they are used together. For example, when discussing with individual students about their progress, a visual representation is a powerful tool to see if they are progressing in a skill area or need to redouble their efforts in another. Similar to an "I can" tracker but organized by standard, this strategy can be digital or on paper.

Allowing students to take part in maintaining the map is a way to support accountability and agency. Standards mapping can take on a variety of scopes, such as a range of individual micro skills out to the broader concepts in a unit.

Depending on the maturity of your students and their readiness to comprehend levels of analysis, customize your maps based on need and effectiveness. Some maps include a bar graph with percentages where students can track their progress by coloring in progress as they grow. Another effective component of mastery mapping is allowing the student to reflect on their performance.

This strategy supports the blended learning pillars of data-driven instruction, personalized learning, student agency, rigor, and relevance.

3. Provide pre- and post-testing with real-time feedback. Providing a pre- or post-test with real-time feedback can be as simple as a Google Form using the feedback feature after every question; the student will see a canned response indicating if they were correct or not. More-sophisticated assessment platforms, such as Raz-Kids or DreamBox Learning, can provide real-time feedback through adaptive software, which offers a customized learning pathway.

The power to address misconceptions immediately is ideal, albeit rare and sometimes expensive. Pre- and post-assessment allows teachers to identify specific needs and prioritize each student's instructional time. Educators who teach the same content and grade level from year to year have insight into the challenging skills within each unit. When coupled with individual data that pertains to current comprehension, lesson design is even more informed. Online tools give students and teachers immediate feedback.

Real-time, specific, and accurate feedback helps teachers identify and reteach needs and allows students to own their learning by tracking their progress and identifying their strengths and weaknesses. The pre- and post-assessment strategy combined with standards mastery mapping and goal setting creates a trifecta of powerful teaching. Start with one and add another deliberately and strategically.

This strategy supports the blended learning pillars of data-driven instruction, personalized learning, and student agency.

4. Introduce choice boards and menus. Essential considerations for choice boards and menus are tasks that students can choose from or paths they can take to arrive at a similar destination as all other classmates. They may or may not be digital and should include online and offline activities. Based on the outcomes you want your students to produce, the choice board should take a unique form to enable differentiation and personalization for all levels of mastery.

Choice boards and menus allow teachers to organize instructional materials for students to access at any time or place and have some control over their path and pace. The distinguishing feature of choice boards is the flexibility to engage in learning tasks satisfying students' interests and readiness. Some tasks may be required, while others may be optional or extension activities.

This strategy supports the blended learning pillars of personalized learning, student agency, rigor, and relevance.

5. Establish peer tutoring. When students verbalize, they internalize. In the right classroom conditions, peer tutoring is an effective teaching practice. Considerations for successful peer tutorials include protocols, explicit expectations, and potentially modeling what an effective tutoring session is.

Also, teachers must strategically pair students based on several key variables, such as personality, mastery level, and readiness to participate and contribute. This strategy has the potential to support a variety of student needs that can lead to a high degree of success and growth, but it can also be a source of extreme frustration if not planned and implemented correctly.

Some benefits of peer tutoring include reinforcing concepts, providing leadership opportunities, and building confidence. Recipient students may learn new ways of solving problems from peers. Students benefit from pragmatic language and social interactions.

This strategy supports the blended learning pillars of student agency and relationships.

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Blended learning allows teachers to use data to personalize instruction while supporting student agency. Blended learning is a formal education program in which a student learns at least in part through online learning with some element of student control over time, place, path, and pace.

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If high school students were never taught how to study, they’re going to keep being frustrated by using ineffective studying methods. Here’s how to help change that.

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Many educators assume that at some point, students have been taught how to study effectively, but I've been a high school teacher for nearly 20 years, and I've learned that that is typically not the case.

When students rely on ineffective studying methods like highlighting and rewriting notes, they sometimes come to believe that "studying" doesn't work. By the time they reach my class, I need to break down these misconceptions before they can adopt more effective strategies. That's why I make a point to explicitly teach study strategies to my sophomores, juniors, and seniors.

In the first month of the school year, I spend a significant amount of class time in my AP Biology course emphasizing study skills that challenge typical study strategies. Although I'm a veteran teacher, every year I'm anxious about students' performance on their first unit exam; the success or failure on this assessment often sets a tone for my credibility with my classes.

If a student follows my guidance but doesn't achieve the result they hoped for, I risk losing their trust. Success, on the other hand, is transformative-they will be more likely to adopt these strategies across their classes. The exam feels like a pivotal moment, shaping how hard I'll need to work to get everyone to trust the process as the year unfolds.

Study strategies that work

For about half of my students, AP Biology is the first class that demands significant preparation and study. To prepare them to meet this challenge, I teach study strategies that are backed by cognitive science research. The study strategies I focus on come from the Learning Scientists, a collaborative of cognitive scientists whose mission is to put their research into action in classrooms. Here is a list of their six recommended high-impact study strategies.

Retrieval practice: actively bringing memories from long-term memory into short term memory.

Spaced practice: offering shorter, more frequent study sessions instead of cramming into one long study session.

Dual coding: combining words and pictures.

Elaboration: asking and answering questions to increasing detail.

Interleaving: switching between related topics or problems.

Concrete examples: collecting a variety of examples to build meaningful understanding, especially important for abstract ideas.

In subsequent lessons, as I begin biology content, I incorporate dual coding, retrieval practice, spaced practice, and elaboration into class activities. Each time we use one of the six strategies, I explicitly point it out. For example, I will use a strategy from Mark Enser based on the BBC Radio 4 show Just a Minute. In partners, students are given a topic that they must speak on for one minute without hesitation, repetition, or deviation. This is a great activity that utilizes spaced practice, retrieval, and elaboration.

Daniel T. Willingham's book Outsmart Your Brain: Why Learning Is Hard and How You Can Make It Easy has been a helpful resource for developing how I approach study misconceptions with students. I model how to read a college-level textbook, stressing that reading for learning is different from reading for pleasure. Reading for learning requires a more intense level of concentration and interaction with the text, utilizing strategies like elaboration and concrete examples while note-taking.

To assist students in making reading a more effective learning experience, I ask them not to highlight or recopy the textbook or their own notes. This practice gives a false sense of security, making students overly confident with their knowledge of the material, a concept known as familiarity.

"The familiarity trap" is something I revisit throughout the year because it's the most common mistake students make when studying for exams. When I conference with struggling students, I often find that this is what's holding them back from reaching their potential.

As we approach the end of our first content unit, I teach a mini-lesson on reorganizing notes and revisit the concept of mistaking familiarity with knowing. Reorganizing notes involves students combining their notes from different sources, readings, and lectures. As they reorganize, they look for holes and develop questions. This can help students make connections between topics that they may have not noticed on their first pass at the content.

One way of reorganizing notes is creating a visual representation of the cognitive architecture of their brain; this taps back into the concept of dual coding. Concept mapping allows students to spatially represent their thoughts on paper, ultimately reinforcing what is already in their brain. I model this with students and give them an activity to create their own, such as this example activity. Students begin with the vocabulary word microtubules and connect it to ribosomes with an arrow, writing above the arrow how the two words are connected in their mind. I slowly give students one vocabulary word at a time as they build their concept map. When the activity is complete, students share their connections with classmates.

Inevitably some students will not be happy with their score on our first summative exam. To assist them with reflecting on their own study habits, I have students do test corrections, using only their written notes to help them correct their wrong answers.

As students correct questions, they code their answers, using a list of specific study mistakes derived from Outsmart Your Brain. An example might be, "I was familiar with the topic, but I didn't memorize it." This helps students to be specific about how their study practices worked or didn't work rather than just saying, "I didn't study enough." My students report that this activity is one of the most powerful that we do because it helps them to reflect on both their content knowledge and their approach to preparing for assessments.

There is never a point in the year when I stop talking about the learning process, intentionally teaching and reinforcing effective study techniques. Guiding students to trust the process is about more than helping them succeed in AP Biology; it's about equipping them with the skills and confidence to tackle challenging material in all areas of their education. Preparing for a difficult summative exam is never easy. However, it is highly motivating for students when the hard work they put into learning results in success.

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If high school students were never taught how to study, they're going to keep being frustrated by using ineffective studying methods. Here's how to help change that.

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Student Self-Reflection Strategies After Finishing an Assignment | Edutopia

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Student Self-Reflection Strategies After Finishing an Assignment | Edutopia

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Last year, I had a student who, according to our classroom learning data, was thriving. Over the course of several writing assessments, this student's growth was substantive; by March, they had earned one of the highest scores in the entire class.

After I gave the student encouraging feedback on that high-scoring essay, I read their self-reflection. "Dang," they wrote later that day. "I really thought I did better this time. Sometimes I have a hard time taking feedback, and this is one of those times."

I realized there was a disconnect between how I saw this student's learning journey and how they saw their own journey. This led to a fantastic in-person conference with the student's family. We discussed how the student was doing and what success looked like to them. They ended the year feeling much more secure and confident.

That intervention and conversation never would have happened without our classroom system of self-reflection, which allows for a more authentic understanding of how students perceive their progress. Any step in the direction of more student reflection is a win-for you as a teacher and for your students as learners.

Below are three self-reflection strategies I regularly use to make sure I have a solid grasp on how my students are doing and what I can do to further assist them. They're listed in order from least to most comprehensive. Each strategy works great on its own, but utilizing one doesn't preclude the use of another.

Strategy 1: End-of-Task Confidence Scale

This scale is remarkably simple to add to your teaching practices, and it's also surprisingly transformative.

All it entails is inserting one final question into daily assignments or tasks that you're having students complete. The question is as follows: On a scale of 1 to 5, how confident do you feel about your performance? Explain.

Adding this question gives teachers immediate feedback while reviewing student work. There are two major takeaways from student responses:

1. How close is student confidence to student performance? For example, do you have lots of students who are marking higher levels of confidence (a 4 or 5) but not demonstrating a mastery of their learning?

2. What are the overall confidence levels of the class? In some cases, you may find that students are less confident than what their performance would suggest.

Along with supplying important information to teachers, this simple question helps students hone their metacognitive reflection skills. Almost like a well-designed speed bump for a driver, the confidence scale offers students a chance to pause and consider their own perspective and thoughts about a task before moving on to something else.

Strategy 2: Strength and Growth Area Reflections

When it comes to slightly weightier summative tasks, I like to have students reflect on, then identify, both a strength and a growth area before submitting their work.

Similar to the end-of-task confidence scales, these reflections add an extra step that compels students to think metacognitively about their performance. For students who are already stressed with other classwork or responsibilities, it can be tempting to just click "Submit" and advance to the next item on their list. I really try to create time in class for students to go through the final reflection process, so it's given the space and importance it deserves.

I've found that self-reflections are invaluable in helping me move through my own feedback process, where I'm assessing what students prioritized in a lesson plan, compared with my own intentions around what they should prioritize.

One example: As an English teacher, I've noticed that students sometimes focus too much on things like conventions ("I know I struggle with comma splices") and end up missing bigger-picture priorities like developing an argument or establishing a line of reasoning across their writing. Once I've identified a misalignment, I can have important conversations with students about what I'm seeing and how we can get closer to the same takeaways. On the other side of the coin, I love to celebrate with students when their self-reflections match my own feedback. A strong, precise understanding of one's writing strengths and growth areas is a major asset into adulthood.

Strategy 3: Build a System of Reflection

The last step I've taken in recent years is to design a complete system through which students can collect their reflections over the entirety of a course.

At the beginning of the school year, I create a Google Doc for each student and share it with them so they can add to it. The document has a row for each major summative assessment, with a column for students to reflect on their process (before they get my feedback) and takeaway (after they've read through my feedback).

This document becomes a ritual of sorts in our classroom. On the day students submit their work, they add to their process reflection box and discuss with classmates how they felt at that point. There's some overlap with the strength and growth areas reflection strategy, but only slightly-these process reflections are more about working through the challenges and feelings that often accompany a major writing assignment. Then we repeat the same steps on the day that students receive feedback from me; they break down how they're feeling about their grade and my notes, as well as how my notes compared with their own initial thoughts and sentiments. The purpose here is for students to spend time considering what they want to take away from their overall experience as learners.

Though it takes some setup work on the front end, I really have fallen in love with this system for three reasons:

1. Having student reflections in one place is really helpful for teachers. At any point in the school year, I'm a few clicks away from understanding how students see their own growth in our course. This lens is critical, I'd argue, in obtaining a more holistic view of a student's learning journey, rather than simply relying on traditional quantitative measures like grades and test scores.

2. It creates a one-stop shop for student learning. Students hyperlink their work into the Google Doc, which means that they can access all of their significant learning tasks along with their own reflections about how they did for each task-a very helpful "portfolio" for future years, too, to make sure the learnings stick.

3. It's a great entry point for conversations. When family conferences begin, this Google Doc is often the first thing I pull up. Students lead off the discussion by reading aloud from the document, recapping how they feel about their learnings. I've also found that spending time with these reflection documents makes for a great space of closure at the end of each semester.

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

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3 Student Self-Reflection Strategies After They Finish an Assignment

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A high school teacher explains how he uses a variety of student self-reflection strategies to gauge their confidence and growth.

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It’s not either/or: Rather than choosing direct instruction or inquiry-based learning, educators strategically use both methods.

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Direct Instruction or Inquiry-Based Learning? | Edutopia

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Direct Instruction or Inquiry-Based Learning? | Edutopia

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Direct Instruction or Inquiry-Based Learning?

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It’s not either/or: Rather than choosing direct instruction or inquiry-based learning, educators strategically use both methods.

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Applying studying methods that strengthen the brain’s ability to retrieve information can help students learn more effectively.

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Teaching Middle and High School Students to Use Evidence-Based Studying Strategies

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Teaching Middle and High School Students to Use Evidence-Based Studying Strategies

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Teaching Students to Use Evidence-Based Studying Strategies

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Applying studying methods that strengthen the brain’s ability to retrieve information can help students learn more effectively.

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Activities with built-in differentiation and high engagement are an effective way to get elementary students into a learning mindset.

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Using Rolling Starts in the Classroom to Support Student Focus

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Using Rolling Starts in the Classroom to Support Student Focus

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Activities with built-in differentiation and high engagement are an effective way to get elementary students into a learning mindset.

The bell rings, and the teacher says, "OK, class, let's begin." The students act like the teacher isn't there, continuing their conversations and moving around the room. Some students are still walking into class. This scene makes my heart race and my hands clammy. What will the teacher do to get their attention? How will the next 45 minutes of class go if it starts like this? Thankfully, I've had many classes that were very easy to start, but early on in my career I realized that I wanted more certainty about the start of class.

Bell ringers-short, independent, simple assignments that students complete as soon as the bell rings have been one solution to this problem. However, I've used rolling starts with great success-independent, open-ended, high-engagement, low-demand activities that students begin as soon as they enter the classroom.

What is a Rolling Start?

Taking cues from the work of teacher trainer Harry Wong, a rolling start provides a positive activity for the students to do as soon as they enter, rather than leaving them wondering what to do and/or starting a negative behavior.

Whenever students enter a space where we want them to be focused on a particular task, we can offer them an activity that will focus them toward that task. This activity is open-ended, and students can participate at different levels of engagement and skill. It's a high-engagement, low-demand activity that students want to participate in so there is a "reward" for being on time (or early). These activities aren't graded but give the teacher valuable information about the support that certain students may need throughout the class.

The idea of a rolling start comes from auto racing. In a rolling start, cars take a few laps at a lower speed since some cars (especially in early racing) take more time and effort to fully engage their engines. This might sound familiar, as some students take more effort and time to get focused and fully engaged than others. The rolling start allows a flexible preparation time before the main objective (whether racing or learning). In a classroom, a rolling start provides flexibility so that if one student is having trouble getting going, it's less likely that other students will be affected.

4 Ways to Get Started

1. Simple instructions. If students believe they will be participating in a desirable activity, they're more likely to get started. Additionally, you can use simple instructions to set up the activity in order to engage students. When I taught a series of music workshops to Chinese students, I created short instructions, translated in Chinese, on the board.

I don't speak Chinese, and the students spoke limited English, but I could tell that when they came in for class, they were talking about what the game would be and wondering what music I would choose. When I was ready to start, I simply played the music, and the class began smoothly (and silently, which is often necessary at the beginning of most classes).

Online games like Kahoot and Quizlet Live already have rolling starts built into their interface and work well as bell ringers. Students log in as soon as they get into the classroom and then are "rewarded" with extra activities to do while they wait. In Kahoot, students can personalize their avatars. For Quizlet Live, students can review the words they will be quizzed over.

2. Puzzles. Puzzles and word games are written on the board for students to solve or talk about as they come in. When they solve a puzzle or game, they generally enjoy keeping the solution to themselves and giving hints to their classmates. In a jazz unit, I wrote phrases like "Do Kelly Ton" and "Elle Laugh Fits Chair Old." The students worked together to sound out the words, listening to each other to discover that these were transliterations of "Duke Ellington" and "Ella Fitzgerald."

3. Exemplary student work. I often have exemplary student work, such as a video project, playing on the board as students walk in. As soon as the students recognize what they are looking at, they begin talking to their neighbors about the work. This offers a very smooth transition to working on their own projects later. To keep the focus positive, I instruct students (either orally or on the board) to focus on aspects that worked well and they would want to use in their own work.

4. Open-ended questions and videos. Pair these together to keep students focused on the topic at hand. I think the videos need to be highly engaging, but not the type that students need to watch from beginning to end to understand. Music videos work well for this activity.

For example, when students were studying simple machines, I started class with the OK Go video for " This Too Shall Pass," which features a Rube Goldberg machine. You can instruct students to be ready to talk to their neighbors about the simple machines and energy transfers whenever the video is paused. I make sure to pause the video in a critical spot and let students know that I'll only go on when I feel like everyone has shared and listened.

Real-World Applications

Classes and assemblies at school are some of the few instances where participants are expected to go immediately from not focusing on a topic at all to complete concentration (most of the time silently).

Many types of gatherings-large conferences, weddings, athletic events-have "rolling starts" utilizing music, visuals, and even games and surveys. Organizers don't want to have to rely on loud noises or stern commands to get the event started. This makes for a smoother start for the leaders and the participants. Teachers can do the same.

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Using 'Rolling Starts' at the Beginning of Class

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Teachers can use rolling starts-engaging, low-demand tasks to complete as soon as students arrive in the classroom-to prime them to learn.

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Reading, writing, and thinking in the disciplines

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Get access to files anywhere through secure cloud storage and file backup for your photos, videos, files and more with Google Drive.

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Three strategies for helping students become self-motivating and take charge of their learning.

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Helping Students Check Their Understanding of Course Content

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Helping Students Check Their Understanding of Course Content

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A Metacognitive Strategy to Help High School Students See Their Progress in Learning

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These activities, with adaptable worksheets, help high school students check their understanding of course content quickly.

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How to Use ChatGPT as an Example Machine

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How to Use ChatGPT as an Example Machine

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Sponsored by Listenwise and Wipebook

This post was co-written by Sarah Levine.

Editor's Note: This post takes a pragmatic approach to ChatGPT while acknowledging some of the problems that have already arisen with the tool. Other ethical issues with the tool's development have been brought to light in recent weeks that are not mentioned here. It is our belief that teachers are most effective when they are informed and empowered, so we urge you to stay mindful of these complexities when making decisions for your own practice.

You have probably already heard about or tinkered with ChatGPT (the "GPT" stands for "generative pre-trained transformer"). ChatGPT is a chatbot (or "bot") powered by artificial intelligence (AI). You can have a conversation with it, prompt it to write essays, create recipes, make medical diagnoses, mimic famous authors, and code software. Its outputs are impressively human-like. In just five days, it gained one million users, a milestone that took Facebook ten months to achieve.

ChatGPT comes with risks: Students can now copy and paste a school writing assignment into the bot's dialogue window, and the bot will spit out an essay in a couple of minutes. Also, because ChatGPT gets most of its content and genre knowledge from the web, it can generate sexist, racist, or blatantly false information, all in an authoritative tone. For example:

The prompt entered for ChatGPT:
"Can you put seven blue balls and two red balls into a tube that holds eight balls?"

Text response generated by ChatGPT:
"Yes, it is possible to put seven blue balls and two red balls into a tube that holds eight balls. The total number of balls is nine which is less than or equal to the capacity of the tube."

As literacy researchers and former high school teachers, we recognize these risks. BUT: we don't think we can avoid ChatGPT and its family of AI tools. It is not just a future vision of learning; it is already here. And we are only scratching the surface of what AI will do in the next five to ten years. So this post is about one particular way that teachers can use ChatGPT to support kids' learning: Using ChatGPT as an example machine.

ChatGPT's ability to quickly produce a lot of examples of different kinds of texts makes it uniquely suited to learning strategies like concept attainment, inductive learning, or one that we'll focus on here called contrasting cases.

Why Multiple Examples Are So Important in Learning

The basic idea behind strategies like contrasting cases or concept attainment is that one example is not enough to help people learn about a thing (like an idea or a process). People need to compare multiple, contrasting examples.

Not coincidentally, ChatGPT is built on a similar type of machine learning. For example, for a computer to recognize an image of a dog, it has to process thousands of images of dogs - but also needs to process images of "not dogs," like cats, foxes, and wolves - to accurately construct a general definition and model of dog. In other words, to know what a dog is, you also need to know what it is not.

Across disciplines, teachers use multiple contrasting examples to help students develop mental models of processes and concepts. Social studies teachers provide examples of different types of governments, English teachers provide examples of different literary interpretations, and science teachers give examples to illustrate different types of energy. Students can sequence, rank, or categorize these examples in ways that help them understand underlying concepts.

But developing these examples can take a lot of time. ChatGPT can generate any number of contrasting examples in a few minutes. Then teachers can revise and perfect those examples, and have more time to dedicate to other creative lessons.

How to Get Good Examples from ChatGPT

To use ChatGPT as an example machine, teachers first need to know how to prompt it effectively. ChatGPT will do exactly what it is prompted to do and nothing more, so it's important to give it precise instructions. Here are steps to a general approach we have been using to prompt the bot:

1. Establish criteria: Think about the elements that define a strong example of the thing you want kids to learn about (You can draw from your rubrics or final assignments to do this).

2. Prompt: Prompt ChatGPT to create an example of whatever concept, process, or phenomena you are trying to teach.

3. Review and adapt: Review the bot's output and adapt it as you see fit.

4. Prompt for contrasting cases: Prompt it to create several non-examples, incorrect examples, or ambiguous examples. These are your contrasting cases.

5. Review and adapt: Review the outputs again and adapt them as you see fit.

Here's an example. With this one, our goal was to help students learn the underlying principles of kinetic and potential energy. We used ChatGPT to generate a range of different examples of kinetic and potential energy. Kids could sort these examples into categories and then explain their choices. In the screenshots below, the text next to the yellow icon is our prompt, and the text next to the green icon is ChatGPT's response. Following the process we introduced earlier:

Step 1 - Establish criteria: We wanted students to know that potential energy is energy that is stored, and kinetic energy is energy in motion.

Step 2 - Prompt: We asked ChatGPT to generate a list of five real-life examples of kinetic energy. (Click images for a larger view.)

Step 3 - Review and adapt: These examples looked pretty good. The fifth one - waterfall cascading down a cliff - might be a good example of both kinetic and potential energy. We could keep this one if we think our kids are ready for some ambiguity in the sorting exercise.

Step 4 - Prompt for contrasting cases: Next, we asked ChatGPT to generate examples of potential energy. These serve as our contrasting cases. (When prompting ChatGPT, you can basically talk to it as you would a person. For the most part, it remembers your previous prompts.)

Step 5 - Review and adapt: These examples also looked pretty good. We decided that we want to add one more ambiguous example that will increase the complexity of the contrasting cases. So we prompted ChatGPT:

We revised that example to simply read: "A car moving down a hill." That way, when we included it in our sorting exercise, students would have to do the work of defining the kinds of energy represented in the example.

Reviewing the outputs again, we noticed that three examples were very similar: a car moving down the highway (kinetic), a roller coaster at the top of the hill (potential), and a car moving down a hill (both). The similarities made these three examples a great illustration of contrasting cases, because students would need to come up with a nuanced rationale for why they represent different types of energy.

We could now mix up these examples on a Padlet or Google Slide, or we can print each one out on a separate piece of paper. Then students can debate with one another about each example, categorize them, and explain their choices. In their explanations, they would be constructing criteria that characterize each type of energy.

Using the example machine for different learning goals

Here are some ways to use ChatGPT to generate contrasting cases to help students understand underlying conceptual principles and build mental models. We have organized our examples based on three common learning goals: learning about processes, concepts, and arguments.

Examples to Explore Processes

Students learn about processes in many subjects. For example, they learn the steps for balancing chemical equations, solving mathematical inequalities, describing mitosis, or explaining how a bill becomes a law in the U.S. One way to help students learn the underlying logic of different processes is to generate contrasting cases of correct and incorrect sequences.

In the example below, we ask ChatGPT to provide a few contrasting cases to teach young students about the life cycle of a seed.

Step 1 - Establish criteria: First, we considered the steps we wanted students to understand.

Step 2 - Prompt: We prompted the bot to generate an accurate representation of that cycle. We also prompted the bot to write at the level of a five year-old, so we could ensure the explanation was accessible.

Step 3 - Review and adapt: We checked the bot's output to make sure it was accurate. We liked the initial result, so we kept it without revision.

Step 4 - Prompt for contrasting cases: In process learning, students need to know both what happens, and in what order. A logical activity is for students to have to move the steps from incorrect to correct order. Normally, we would re-organize the steps manually, but ChatGPT can do it faster.

We decided we also wanted a second contrasting case, so we asked ChatGPT to describe the seed's life cycle using the correct order, but leaving out steps. Now students would have to figure out what steps were missing: sprout growth and seed production. Again, this was something we would typically do ourselves, but giving the task to ChatGPT saved us some time.

Step 5 - Review and adapt: We liked these examples and decided to keep them without revision.

Just as with the activity about potential and kinetic energy, we could now present these contrasting cases to students either digitally or on paper, ask them to identify the most accurate representations, and then explain why. In doing so, students will start to develop "rules" about both the events in a seed's life and their order.

Using slight prompt modifications, teachers can change the order, accuracy, and completeness of the contrasting cases to deepen students' thinking about complex processes.

Adaptations for other subject areas:

Social studies: sequence historical events

Math: sequence steps in an approach to solving a proof

English: sequence key plot points in a novel

Examples to Explore Concepts

Teachers can also use ChatGPT to teach students to articulate principles that underlie complex concepts like authorial style, statistical variance, or separation of powers.

One of ChatGPT's coolest tricks is its ability to adopt the style of different writers or historical figures. It can also write in the style of different genres, like a cover letter, advertisement, or movie trailer. Creating contrasting cases with combinations of these outputs can make for a powerful teaching tool. In the example below, we wanted students to understand how different literary elements can contribute to authorial style, and to consider how those elements might affect their emotional responses to texts. We asked ChatGPT to produce texts in the style of different authors - all authors that were familiar to our students.

Using these contrasting cases, we could then ask students to match the review with the author, point to and name specific features of the writing that helped them identify the authors' styles, and then talk about the effects created by those different styles.

Step 1 - Establish criteria: We wanted students to understand that an author's style includes a combination of word choice, sentence structure, and attitude toward a topic. We wanted the examples to have different emotional effects.

Step 2 - Prompt: It would be easier for students to focus on style if the content of the text was similar. So we asked the bot to write about something students would be familiar with. We decided on a review of McDonald's in the style of three authors.

Step 3 - Review and adapt: In this review, ChatGPT used phrases like "dreary and tempestuous" and "wandering," which work well to represent Poe's language. The bot also did a good job creating a mood of gloom and foreboding. But we realized we wanted to emphasize Poe's punctuation (lots of exclamation points, for example). So we adapted our prompt.

Well, the bot went a little overboard with the exclamation points, so we might revise one more time.

Step 4 - Prompt for contrasting cases: Next, we wanted to generate our contrasting cases, so we asked ChatGPT to rewrite the reviews in the style of other authors that our students have read. We started with Sandra Cisneros.

Step 5 - Review and adapt: We didn't think Cisneros' characters would moralize about McDonald's, so we asked the bot to revise. We also realized that a lot of Cisneros' work is written in present tense. Making the change to present tense would give our students another element of style to consider and analyze. We prompted the bot again.

We might go for another round of revision, but we think this one is beginning to capture the style of Cisneros' narrators.

We tried for another example, this time turning to Zora Neale Hurston and Their Eyes Were Watching God for our model.

We thought some of the phrasing was a little obvious, and when we compared this example with some of Hurston's prose, we noticed that Hurston sometimes includes short, simple sentences in between longer ones. We adapted our prompt.

Now, here is another example where we prompted ChatGPT to provide some contrasting cases. This time, we used the bot in the context of a social studies unit on forms of government. In the example, ChatGPT's first response was pretty good. In this example, we will show you one way that we had to revise our initial prompts to generate more useful responses.

Step 1: Establish criteria: We wanted students to know that in a representative democracy, citizens vote in free and open elections to choose government leaders. In representative democracies, the rule of law applies equally to all citizens.

Step 2: Prompt:

Step 3: Review and adapt: In our first attempt, ChatGPT wrote a pretty accurate description. However, since we ultimately wanted students themselves to identify the types of government described in each example, we needed ChatGPT to remove the term "representative democracy." We also wanted it to add the criteria that rule of law applies to all citizens. So we had to revise our prompt.

Step 4: Prompt for contrasting cases: Next, we needed ChatGPT to generate contrasting cases. In other words, we wanted it to describe other types of governments besides representative democracy, including monarchy and communism. Importantly, because we wanted students to understand representative democracy, we also wanted a contrasting case that showed a different type of democracy. So, we prompted ChatGPT to include a description of direct democracy. Having learned our lesson in our last prompting attempt, we also prompted the bot to leave out the names of the governments themselves.

Step 5: Review and adapt: We liked these examples, but after reading them through a few times, we decided that they might be boring for kids. We decided to revise them so that each offered a specific scenario that students could connect with different forms of government.

We could print these examples on cards, give them to students, and ask them to identify the kinds of governments described in these examples. We could also go a step further and ask students to rank the descriptions based on the degree of power given to people in each example. This would require students not only to identify the characteristics of representative democracies but also understand its relationship to other forms of government. There are many variations to these types of sorting activities, and using contrasting cases will help students build rich mental models. ChatGPT magnifies our ability to use contrasting cases by creating useful examples more quickly than we could by ourselves.
Adaptations for other subject areas:

Science: "Write a description of the gaseous planets but do not use the term "gaseous." Now do the same for the ice giants and terrestrial planets."

Math: "Make up a math problem about rate, time, and distance, and then, using a character named Sam, describe three different ways that Sam tried to solve the problem. Have two solutions be correct, and one solution be incorrect."

Examples to Explore Arguments

One of the most important skills taught students learn in all subject areas is the ability to evaluate and construct arguments. In English class, students might write essays about whether Troy, from August Wilson's Fences, is a sympathetic character; in social studies, they might consider multiple causes and effects of World War I; in biology, they might make their case for whether a virus is a living organism. We can use ChatGPT to generate examples of arguments with contrasting structures or types of evidence, then students can evaluate each argument's effectiveness. For such a lesson design, we would use the five steps we described earlier:

1. Establish criteria for strong argument

2. Prompt

3. Review and adapt

4. Prompt for contrasting cases, including weaker or stronger evidence, or different structures

5. Review and adapt again

We could also use the bot to address a long-standing problem when it comes to teaching students to build arguments: Sometimes we ask students to write an argument about a text, but we do not give students anyone to argue with. In this case, ChatGPT can provide a contrasting case for a student to push back against.

For example, imagine that a high school class has just finished reading Fences. The teacher would like kids to consider the role of the fence as a potential symbol in Wilson's play. Instead of asking students to write an argument about the role of fences in the play, the teacher could offer students a ChatGPT-generated argument that students could respond to.

This argument in itself becomes a contrasting case for students to reflect on and respond to. They can agree with some of the interpretation, build on some parts of it, and refute other parts. In this way, their argument becomes more authentic. They might even direct their response to the bot.

We might also offer students an opposing argument about Fences:

With these two arguments in hand, we could ask students to debate the merits of each, search the text for supporting evidence, and write about perspectives beyond just these two. Doing so would help students consider multiple interpretations of complex texts and develop and refine their own arguments.

Adaptations for other subject areas:

Science: Generate summaries of competing scientific theories

Social Studies: Generate different arguments explaining cause and effects of historical events

Before ChatGPT, teachers might spend hours searching for or writing suitable examples of arguments like these. Now, we are learning how to prompt ChatGPT to generate these arguments to suit our teaching purposes.

What's Next?

There's so much more this example machine can do to help us save time and employ our creativity so that we can better serve our students. Here are a few additional prompts that create other kinds of examples:

Rewrite this paragraph at a 6th grade reading level

Use more complex vocabulary

Translate this sentence into Spanish, and then Vietnamese

With all of its possibilities in mind, a reminder: There are lots of ways that ChatGPT can create problems for teachers. The technology is still young, and it does not know when it is wrong. For instance, when we first asked ChatGPT to generate interpretations of Fences, it made up lines from the play. When we asked it to talk about the short story "Linoleum Roses," by Sandra Cisneros, it added characters that do not exist in that story, and offered unsupportable interpretations of the text. Part of our job now is to help students understand both what the tool can do and what it can't.

Want some ideas for what to DO with these examples once you have them? Three instructional strategies that would work beautifully with multiple examples like these are contrasting cases, concept attainment, and inductive learning.

Come back for more.
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How to Use ChatGPT as an Example Machine

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To learn any concept well, students need to experience multiple examples of that concept, and ChatGPT can help you generate those examples fast.

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When students begin to plan, monitor, and evaluate their learning, they develop self-regulation and can set more ambitious goals.

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How to Get K–12 Students Thinking About Their Own Learning

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How to Get K–12 Students Thinking About Their Own Learning

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When students begin to plan, monitor, and evaluate their learning, they develop self-regulation and can set more ambitious goals.

Davor Pavelic / Ikon Images

As a special education teacher and K-12 tutor, I found that students were often told what to learn but were rarely taught how to learn, which had the potential to leave them stuck, anxious, and disengaged. My desire to teach students strategies they could use to develop their own agency and independence led me to write my book, The Independent Learner.

Metacognition refers to a student's knowledge of their own thought process. A metacognitive thinking process allows students to self-regulate and direct their thoughts, behaviors, and actions toward their goals. As early as kindergarten, teachers can instruct students in how to build their metacognitive skills through a process of planning, monitoring, and evaluating their learning. Once students reach third grade, they can begin to use these strategies with increased choice and independence.

When students begin working without a plan, they become easily confused and overwhelmed by the task. They may give up, get distracted, or become off-task very easily. Taking time to plan can help students avoid these issues. Planning can include previewing the task, setting goals, deciding how to approach the task, and connecting to previously learned information. The following strategies help students to plan.

Building prior knowledge: Teachers can help students build prior knowledge by connecting new information to what students already know. This might look like having students brainstorm in groups to answer a question, watch a short introductory video clip or demonstration, or look at and discuss pictures or objects related to the topic that will be studied. A strong foundation of background knowledge can help students to accurately make predictions and prioritize information during the lesson.

Goal setting: Having students set goals and track progress is linked to a 32 percent increase in achievement. Teachers can help students to set short-term goals related to the skill they are learning as well as the student's long-term personal goals and values.

Planning the process: We have all had the experience of setting goals, only to lose the motivation and follow-through necessary to make them a reality. Teachers can help students think about the changes they need to make in their daily behavior and habits in order to get from where they are now to where they want to be. Students can make a plan or checklist and use this to monitor their daily progress or the baby steps toward their goal.

Students who are having trouble monitoring don't know when to seek help or may be overly dependent on the teacher to make sure they are doing their work correctly. They may lack a sense of self-efficacy or the belief that their efforts affect their actions or fail to change their approach when it is not working. When a student is monitoring their learning, they are assessing their level of understanding and trying to determine whether the strategy they have selected is working. The following strategies help students monitor.

Metacognitive talk: When students are learning a new skill, the teacher can model thinking aloud to make the thought process visible for students. This helps them to develop the complex thinking skills necessary for that subject area. The teacher can encourage students to use discussion to construct knowledge instead of just participating to display what they know. Strategies like think-pair-share or visually explaining the steps of their thinking help students to understand that there are many ways to approach a particular problem or task.

Analyze, prioritize, summarize: Students can be taught various methods of summarizing information and isolating key facts, details, and keywords. One method that students enjoy is a one-pager.

Diversify: When approaching a new learning task, it is important for students to know many ways to solve a problem or approach the skill. Strategies that mix verbal and visual information make learning more memorable. When students are familiar with many strategies, they have the tools necessary to exercise their own agency in selecting what works best for them.

If students are not evaluating their learning, they often do not understand how to use strategies in other contexts or for future problem-solving. They may know that they got something wrong but are not able to tell you why or what they should do differently next time to avoid that same issue. To evaluate their learning, students consider whether the strategy they chose worked and what they would change for next time. The following strategies help students to evaluate.

Assess: Testing should be used during learning, not just once learning is complete. Students can create their own practice tests or test questions, or teachers can use pre- and post-tests with clickers to find out what students know, help students to prioritize important information, and assess learning during the lesson.

What am I working toward?

What progress have I made so far?

Where do I go from here?

Seek feedback: In the classroom, the teacher acts as a coach to students, providing information about learning goals and progress. Successful feedback should not shame students or focus on personal qualities but instead should answer these questions:

Reflect and revise: After assessment, self-assessment, or feedback, students reflect on whether the strategy they are using is working. Then they decide what changes they need to make. Students may also consider areas where they need to seek out help. When they revise, students consider what did not go so well and fix it. They should be able to explain their mistake or what did not work and then select a strategy to correct their work. As you might notice, this starts the metacognition cycle back at the planning stage.

The only way to make learning truly relevant to each student is to teach the tools and strategies they will need to take a more active role in their learning. Incorporating metacognitive skills and self-regulated learning strategies has helped my students to become more independent, engaged, and capable of exercising their own agency.

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How to Get Students Thinking About Their Own Learning

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When students begin to plan, monitor, and evaluate their learning, they develop self-regulation and can set more ambitious goals.