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John Hattie- Effect Size

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Hattie effect size list - 256 Influences Related To Achievement

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Hattie’s updated effect size list of 256 influences across all areas related to student achievement.

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Regie Routman: Discussion Before Writing

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Regie Routman: Discussion Before Writing

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I first became aware of the power of storytelling through my grandmother.

Although she never got beyond a sixth grade education, she had a gift for regaling me with fascinating stories about her life - growing up in a crowded apartment as one of seven sisters, choosing to marry for money instead of love only to lose that financial stability during the Great Depression, using her creative talents to design and make hats and jewelry as a way to support herself well into her 80's.

These stories and others captivated me as a teenager; she was not just my beloved grandmother; she was storyteller extraordinaire!

There was also the large cardboard box of her written stories, mostly jottings on scraps of paper, that she secreted away in a bedroom closet and would take down to share with me whenever I visited overnight. She hoped one day to publish those stories but lacked the confidence, repeatedly telling me, "I'm not a real writer." But, of course she was! Like our students and us, she just needed someone to encourage her that those stories mattered, not just to her but also to others.

Storytelling - speaking, writing, hearing, and appreciating our own and other's stories - can be an equalizer for ensuring all students' lives are respected, honored, and recorded. Storytelling increases student engagement and hope which, in turn, increases their efforts and involvement in school.

With a renewed focus today on supporting the growth of the whole child, personal storytelling is uniquely positioned to support that social-emotional growth that plays a pivotal role in preparing students for life readiness, whether that be college, career, or some self-chosen endeavor.

The story of Crystal

I will never forget getting to know Crystal, a ninth grade student struggling mightily with literacy and life issues. I met her through her remarkable language arts support teacher, Mary Beth Nicklaus, who was having great success encouraging students to write their life stories in their chosen genre as a way to improve their reading abilities.

With Crystal's permission, Mary Beth began sending me some of Crystal's poems, which were haunting yet beautiful. I felt so moved I wrote to Crystal expressing deep sadness and grief for all she'd been through but also noting that she wrote with "an unflinching heart and mind," that her writing "reveals a very thoughtful, courageous young woman," and that "You have a way with words; you are already a writer. Your honest words express clarity and great emotion."

So began an extensive correspondence and caring relationship between a student and a learner-teacher. Crystal's responses to my emails included, "I'm actually crying tears of joy" and "I have never been the one people talk nice things about." When I said I'd be sharing one of her poems (with her permission) at a literacy conference, she wrote, "I can't believe you are doing this. It's like I walked into an alternate universe."

Mary Beth remarked how Crystal had changed over the course of the school year: "Her writing and speaking grammar are improved. The way she carries herself and the way she speaks compared to when I first met her last year is awe-inspiring. I'm discovering she has a sense of humor and there is this grace that is coming through in her interactions that wasn't there before."

Stories lead us into new possibilities

When I wrote Literacy Essentials: Engagement, Excellence, and Equity, it was important to me to integrate personal and professional stories into the text, to make stories as necessary to the text as they are to living a full and happy life.

For our marginalized students and students from poverty, like Crystal, stories are a way in to "seeing" and "seeking" new possibilities in school and in life. That is as true for us as teachers and adult learners as it is for our students. That's why I include professional stories that are also personal - such as, how I came to feel "smart" and my journey from a compliant teacher to becoming a knowledgeable and outspoken advocate for all learners, especially our underserved ones.

It took me a long time to believe my stories mattered, but my grandmother's storytelling voice was whispering in my ear, "You can do this." And you can do this too! No one has told your story in your own voice, speaking your truths. Our lived experiences and those of our students matter - a lot.

To make sure that "The Stories" maintain a special place of honor with the book Literacy Essentials, I recently proposed to Stephen Hurley, amazing educator and radio host who is also a valued colleague and treasured friend, that we collaborate on a Stories podcast. It was my good fortune that Stephen enthusiastically agreed and beautifully produced "Literacy Essentials: The Stories."

You can find a description and listen to the series of 13 stories at this website or access them wherever you get your podcasts. Like Literacy Essentials itself, "The Stories" are divided into three categories: Engagement, Excellence, and Equity. For an example of one story in Engagement, click on the book image below and listen to "What is He Good At?"

Stories help us know our lives matter

My hope is that listening to my stories will encourage you, your students, and your families to tell and write your own stories. Stories validate us, humanize us, help us make sense of our lives, and show us what might be possible. Telling our stories is an act of bravery, celebration, and hope.

Let the storytelling begin! You might even try podcasting in your classrooms and school as a way to share and honor stories and build closer relationships with those you work with and care about.

For some terrific ideas and inspiration on storytelling, see, listen to and read:

Award-winning author Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche, TED Talk, "The danger of a single story." Found here.

Dave Isey, founder of Story Corps, TED talk, "Everyone around you has a story the world needs." Found here.

The Moth: Visit this international storytelling project for stories and education ideas. Also see this article about Seattle's Moth Story Slams and the secrets of great storytelling.

I've now had the privilege of spending a lifetime teaching, leading, mentoring, coaching, and learning alongside students, teachers, and leaders in underperforming schools across the United States and Canada. I've learned that trusting relationships are vital, that joy in our work is possible and necessary, and that literacy and life essentials are inseparable.

I've also learned that teaching must be a responsively human endeavor; we teach readers, not just reading; we teach writers, not just writing. The content we teach and the texts students read and write must be relevant, rich, culturally inclusive, and connected to real-world issues and first-rate literature and resources.

Standards, testing, and programs will continue to challenge us, but if we are professionally knowledgeable, we can be steadfast in prioritizing students' strengths, needs, and interests before any mandate.

Students - and all of us who live and breathe - need to know that our lives matter, that we are uniquely human, and that change is possible. Telling our stories acknowledges who we are as we speak truths to our setbacks and our successes, our heartbreak and our hopes.

In so doing, we affirm and celebrate our past, current, and future selves with heightened self-awareness, courage, and dignity. Storytelling is distinctively suited to these worthy ends. And to new beginnings.

______________________________________________

Regie Routman, author of the 2018 Stenhouse book, Literacy Essentials: Engagement, Excellence, and Equity for All Learners, is a mentor teacher, coach, and author who works side by side with teachers and principals in diverse schools and districts. For more information about her work and her many books and resources, see www.regieroutman.org.

Here at MiddleWeb, Literacy Essentials has been reviewed an unprecedented four times by our contributors. Check out reviews by teacher and curriculum leader Sarah Cooper, literacy coach Pam Hamilton, improvement specialist Deana Jones, and principal Rita Platt.

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Storytelling: The Heart of Teaching and Learning

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I first became aware of the power of storytelling through my grandmother. Although she never got beyond a sixth grade education, she had a gift for regaling me with fascinating stories about her life - growing up in a crowded apartment as one of seven sisters, choosing to marry for money instead of love only to lose that financial stability during the Great Depression, using her creative talents to design and make hats and jewelry as a way to support herself well into her 80's.

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OVERVIEW

The jigsaw classroom is a research-based cooperative learning technique invented and developed in the early 1970s by Elliot Aronson and his students at the University of Texas and the University of California. Since 1971, thousands of classrooms have used jigsaw with great success.

The jigsaw classroom has a four-decade track record of successfully reducing racial conflict and increasing positive educational outcomes such as improved test performance, reduced absenteeism, and greater liking for school.

Just as in a jigsaw puzzle, each piece - each student's part - is essential for the completion and full understanding of the final product.

If each student's part is essential, then each student is essential; and that is precisely what makes this strategy so effective.

JIGSAW IN 10 EASY STEPS

The jigsaw classroom is very simple to use. If you're a teacher, just follow these steps:

STEP SEVEN

Bring the students back into their jigsaw groups.

STEP EIGHT

Ask each student to present her or his segment to the group.

Encourage others in the group to ask questions for clarification.

STEP NINE

Float from group to group, observing the process.

If any group is having trouble (e.g., a member is dominating or disruptive), make an appropriate intervention. Eventually, it's best for the group leader to handle this task. Leaders can be trained by whispering an instruction on how to intervene, until the leader gets the hang of it.

STEP TEN

At the end of the session, give a quiz on the material.

Students quickly come to realize that these sessions are not just fun and games but really count.

ABOUT ELLIOT ARONSON

Elliot Aronson is currently Professor Emeritus at the University of California in Santa Cruz. He has long-standing research interests in social influence and attitude change, cognitive dissonance, research methodology, and interpersonal attraction. Professor Aronson's experiments are aimed both at testing theory and at improving the human condition by influencing people to change dysfunctional attitudes and behaviors.

Professor Aronson received his B.A. from Brandeis University in 1954, his M.A. from Wesleyan University in 1956, and his Ph.D. in psychology from Stanford University in 1959. He has taught at Harvard University, the University of Minnesota, the University of Texas, and the University of California. In 1999, he won the American Psychological Association's Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award, making him the only psychologist to have won APA's highest awards in all three major academic categories: distinguished writing (1973), distinguished teaching (1980), and distinguished research (1999).

MORE ABOUT
ELLIOT ARONSON

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The jigsaw technique is a cooperative learning approach that reduces racial conflict among school children, promotes better learning, improves student motivation, and increases enjoyment of the learning experience.

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First 6 minutes

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Bran the Broken got the crown-  Lord Tyrion the hand of the King (S08E06) BEST SCENE,UNEXPECTED

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What if taking notes could put a smile on your students' faces? Just imagine if you could get your kids excited about an exercise in higher-order thinking. Picture your students begging to take notes because it involves gel pens and doodles. Enter, sketchnotes in the classroom.

The sketchnotes phenomenon is the brainchild of designer Mike Rohde, and it is rapidly spreading beyond the design world. Now we're seeing sketchnotes in the classroom on a regular basis. For instance, a student might use it to process information visually, use bold lettering for key points, making containers or boxes for special points-the list can go on and on. Basically, you can use it for anything that makes the information pop off the page and stick to the brain. Here are 8 examples from Instagram with ideas of how you can use sketchnotes in the classroom. Give it a try.

1. Sketch an event.

You'll see a whole new level of engagement if you assign students to take sketchnotes when you have a guest speaker or your class attends an event.

Source: @overflowstorylab

2. Sketch without boundaries.

Sketchnotes can be any size, so invite your students to cover your whiteboards with everything they've learned in a unit as a form of pre-assessment review. Then let them walk around and study the gallery of learning.

3. Sketch to organize.

This professor has used sketchnotes to organize her own thoughts before a lecture, and you could do the same by sharing the idea with your students before they give oral presentations.

Source: @profdiberjones

4. Sketch for research.

This could relate to many lessons and classroom ideas. Invite students to do research sketchnotes before writing a paper or creating a video.

5. Sketch with a different focus.

You can help students explore a variety of tools by asking them to focus on sketches, symbols, containers or unique text. This example shows just how much someone can convey visually through drawn elements.

6. Sketch a book.

Students can do sketchnotes on text, taking note of the main ideas and essential quotations before writing a paper or doing a project on it.

7. Sketch for fun.

This teacher simply explored meaning with color. Do something similar by having your students create performance posters, book displays, bulletin boards, or event programs.

8. Sketch complex thinking.

As students get more comfortable in the medium, you can show them more and more complex examples to inspire them to improve. This creative person skillfully mixes and matches all the layers of visual meaning with her words, incorporating symbols, connecters, containers, sketches, and varied forms of text.

Introduce students to sketchnotes with one of these activities and see what happens. You just might be surprised by what they come up with.
Have you tried using sketchnotes in the classroom? How did it go? We'd love to hear in the comments.

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Sketchnotes in the Classroom: 8 Ideas to Get Started

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What if taking notes could put a smile on your students' faces? Just imagine if you could get your kids excited about an exercise in higher-order thinking. Picture your students begging to take notes because it involves gel pens and doodles. Enter, sketchnotes in the classroom.

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Sketchnotes- Lots of Great Ideas and Research

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Sketchnotes- Lots of Great Ideas and Research

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@dianasoriat and @sam_hh to help users begin to feel comfortable with sketchnoting.
Right-click and download the ilinked file or click on it and drag it to your desktop or tap on it to save it to the Camera Roll on your tablet.
​Use it as a background in your favorite drawing program or screencasting program or print it off to use the analog version!

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Sketchnoting, in its purest form, is creating a personal visual story as one is listening to a speaker or reading a text. I also believe the interactive notebook, which includes the process of taking...

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28 Critical Thinking Question Stems For Any Content Area
by TeachThought Staff

Critical thinking isn't a skill, nor is it content knowledge or even evidence of understanding. While it involves and requires these ideas, critical thinking is also very much a state of mind - a willingness and tendency to sit with an idea and 'struggle wonderfully' with it.

In critical thinking, there is no conclusion; it is constant interaction with changing circumstances and new knowledge that allows for broader vision which allows for new evidence which starts the process over again. Critical thinking has at its core raw emotion and tone. Intent.

The purpose of these stems is to help students practice this slippery 'skill.' By having dozens of questions written generally enough to be widely applicable, but with an inherent rigor that challenges students to think, the ability to practice thinking critically is always available.
Critical Thinking Cards
In adddition to the text and cards, we've included a graphic below. You also can purchase them in card-format to be printed and used right away in your classroom, a sample of which you can see below.

By making them cards, they are not only easier to 'keep around'-on your desk, on a shelf in a workstation area, or even copied and given to students- but more importantly, meaningful thinking can become a part of your daily routines. Writing prompts, reading circles, Socratic discussions and more all benefit from critical thinking, and providing students with stems is a way of supporting them as their confidence grows and their habits as thinkers develop.

28 Critical Thinking Question Stems For Any Content Area
1. What evidence can you present for/against...?

2. How does ... contrast with ...?

3. How could you outline or concept map...? Explain your response with examples.

4. Why is ... significant? Explain your reasoning.

5. What are the advantages and disadvantages of ...?

6. What is the point or 'big idea' of ...?

7. How could you judge the accuracy of ...?

8. What are the differences between ... and ...?

9. How is ... related to ...?

10. What ideas could you add to ... and how would these ideas change it?

11. Describe ... from the perspective of ....

12. What do you think about ...? Explain your reasoning.

13. When might ... be most useful and why?

14. How could you create or design a new...? Explain your thinking.

15. What solutions could you suggest the problem of ...? Which might be most effective and why?

16. What might happen if you combined ... and ...?

17. Do you agree that ...? Why or why not?

18. What information would you need to make a decision about ...?

19. How could you prioritize ...?

20. How is ... an example of ...?

21. What are the most important parts or features of ...?

22. Which details of ... are most important and why?

23. What patterns do you notice in ...?

24. How could you classify ... into a more/less general category?

25. What makes ... important?

26. What criteria could you use to assess ...?

27. How could ... and ... function together? How do they work separately and together and different ways?

28. Where is ... most/least ...? Explain your reasoning.

28 Critical Thinking Question Stems For Any Content Area

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28 Critical Thinking Question Stems For Any Content Area |

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28 Critical Thinking Question Stems For Any Content Area by TeachThought Staff Critical thinking isn't a skill, nor is it content knowledge or even evidence of understanding. While it involves and requires these ideas, critical thinking is also very much a state of mind - a willingness and tendency to sit with an idea and 'struggle wonderfully' with it.

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At the core of a great teacher's skill-set is the ability to explain the concepts, theories and techniques that make up their subject. On the reputational scale, there is no doubt that teachers who explain things well, making the complex simple, score highly as Great Teachers. I've observed countless lessons where the teacher exposition accelerated the learning process for everyone through the clarity of the explanation. It can be a joy to listen and learn as an expert teacher tells the story that lifts the fog and makes it possible to see clearly.

Einstein: "If you can't explain it simply you don't understand it well enough"

For me there are two implications of this

1) Getting students to explain ideas to the teacher and to each other is a great way to determine the depth of understanding. In fact it is a bread-and-butter element of all great lessons that they are rich with explanatory dialogue. I come back to this later on.

2) As teachers, for high quality explanations to be habitual, we need to know our subjects, taking time to develop our own capacity to explain the key concepts simply. I think departmental CPD time would be well spent with colleagues rehearsing the ways they explain the more difficult material. Too often we assume we can do this but, over the years, I've found this is a key area for improvement and experimentation, for me personally and for others.

Crucially, Explaining doesn't have to suggest didactic one-way traffic. Explaining well is an important aspect of highly interactive learning of all kinds. Without doubt enquiry and discovery are vital elements of learning; however, very often the most appropriate thing to do is to push ahead and cut through the confusion by delivering a sharp explanation that brings clarity and takes everyone forward to greater challenges that lie beyond.

The penny-drop moment happens for different learners in different ways at different times and sometimes the barriers to understanding can appear unassailable:

In talking about explaining, we are obviously talking about doing this in conjunction with probing questioning, differentiation and challenge. We're also talking about gaining attention and engagement in the process; not merely droning on oblivious to our students' capacity to receive. However, even with the conditions right, we still need to have at our disposal a number of lines of attack that we can use habitually and instinctively as we seek to bring the barriers down.

A quick guide to Explaining
(Most of this may seem really obvious...but I think it is worth spelling out; we can always explain better!)
1) Make connections from abstract ideas to everyday life
Professor Brian Cox is a master in this area - he is not just a pretty face. Here is a perfect example:

The disintegrating sand castle as a model of entropy works brilliantly... order into disorder over time, but in a context that feels real. There are countless examples in every subject, but you need to have them at your fingertips.
2) Show it in action; the walk-through
No point talking in theoretical abstract terms, when you can just provide an example and talk it through. Here is someone explaining iambic pentameter. I didn't properly know what this was until I watched this clip - and now I do!
3) Use models...
You can't teach science properly without models but this also applies to other subjects. In developing deep scientific understanding, it is important to develop models of atoms and molecules and to relate them to macro everyday materials - this takes time. For example in understanding the chemistry of burning magnesium, a model is necessary to explain observations and link them to the equation:

A great science teacher will automatically explain observations by building models. Linking the observation that 'shiny stuff turns into white stuff' to an abstract model that explains the chemistry, showing that new substances are formed.

Actually, enabling students to construct ever more sophisticated mental models is the key to all good science teaching. Last week I had big sheet stretched out across my lab as we tried make space-time to explain gravitational fields.... it worked well. Models, models, models. These aren't merely tricks up your sleeve; they are ideas that form your core knowledge and are embedded in your default mode teaching habits.
4) Use pictures
The idea of being a "Visual learner" may now be regarded officially as pseudo-scientific bobbins, but personally, I love a diagram. I often find that, if I'm getting a verbal description... I need to sketch it out before it makes sense. I'm not alone. One of the least well understood phenomena (I find) is the origin of the changing phases of the moon (Do not say it's the Earth's shadow....please!!). Take a look here:

I'd suggest that the most important diagram in the universe is the number line. The key to good numeracy is a strong mental model of numbers in sequence and scale.

The same is true with fractions and decimals

I've often found that people with weak numeracy skills have a poor foundation at this basic level. Before we get into complex operations, just having a really good feel for number is vital. Having an intuition that 0.6 is less than 2/3 or that 3/4 is bigger than 0.7 - and so on- come from a good visual map of numbers in scale and sequence.
5) Analogies
Another vital weapon in the arsenal is using an analogy to make sense of an abstract idea. Possibly one of the most difficult concepts to convey in science, from my experience, is the relationship between voltage and current. When I was at school.. and I still remember this vividly... our teacher Mr Taylor (red Capri with white Starsky and Hutch stripe on his car... to digress just slightly) told us to think of throwing oranges through a tennis net. Really! The harder you throw (more volts) the more oranges would get through each minute (current) and the size of the holes would link the two (resistance). It worked for me... and I still use it.

Here is another:

There are also analogies using the flow of water with a pump for a cell; traffic flow or the movement of people down corridors... all kinds. The key is to evaluate how good each analogy is - they all have limits - and to make that part of the learning.
6) Set a depth gauge
A key skill in putting together a good explanation is knowing how to pitch it. I love questions that can be answered at different levels. For example:

Why does your heart beat faster during exercise?

Was Henry VIII a good King and how do we know?

What makes this a good poem?

Is it ever acceptable for one person to kill another?

Students could be asked these questions in Y5, Year 9, Year 13... The difference is in the depth. Knowing how to pitch the answers is important. I've found that asking for answers in a sentence or for a 4 mark or 6 mark answer helps students to gauge the depth of their explanations... but, it is often very helpful to know what you'd expect in advance. What would be a good answer to these questions at the level expected? Again, as part of developing our teacher-knowledge, rehearsing these things can be extremely powerful; clarifying your own understanding in order to provide the appropriate explanation - in the Goldilocks zone of difficulty: not too easy; not too hard - just right!
Reciprocal Teaching
This is a high-scoring strategy in John Hattie's effect size scale. ( see here for Hattie videos) Why? Because it involves getting students to construct and produce explanations of concepts so that others can understand them. This requires a secure grasp of the concepts and provides teachers with strong feedback as to the depth of understanding... which can then be further deepened by probing questions. In a recent lesson I observed at KEGS, students' explanations were subjected to superb questioning by the teacher: "So, were we convinced by that?" "I'm confused - is A or B a better explanation - help me out? " And so on.... the explanations and questioning interwoven.

One of the strongest bits of feedback I get from my co-construction groups is that they feel they learn the most when they are doing the teaching themselves. Here is a picture of Tom helping Karan to understand nuclear fission in a recent Y11 Physics lesson.

He has become expert in this area, having been given responsibility to lead on teaching the unit with his group - and the quality of his explanations are excellent. He can go around the class providing support to others in a highly effective manner. All the students do this, when it is their turn.
Online reference points: all the flipping videos.
In putting this post together, I've been looking for good examples of explanations. The fact is that there are now thousands of videos on the internet where teachers are explaining concepts. Some are made specifically to facilitate 'flipped learning' as I discuss in this post. I find it fascinating watching these teachers do their thing. Do they do it well? Would you do it any better? If so how? These videos become reference points for our self-reflection... take a look:

Of Mice and Men Revision lesso n:
Solving Simultaneous Equations by elimination Le Futur Simple (In French...)
In conclusion, Explaining is something I feel we take for granted too often. It is very obviously a core teacher skill but to deliver routine Great Lessons, we may need to do it better.. and there are lots of possibilities to explore!

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At the core of a great teacher's skill-set is the ability to explain the concepts, theories and techniques that make up their subject. On the reputational scale, there is no doubt that teachers who explain things well, making the complex simple, score highly as Great Teachers.

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Cult of Pedagogy

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Math Example

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LONG + LIVE + MATH: A Blog by Carnegie Learning

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With the traditional method of math instruction -- the way many of us were taught -- the goal was to get the right answer. Our instructional model, however, requires students to explain and show their thinking. Today we'd like to share some of the cognitive and learning science research behind this approach, and why it's so important that students explain their reasoning.
1. Teachers need to know how students arrive at their answers.
Right and wrong answers don't reveal much about student thinking. We also need to be able to connect what students do with what they know. For example, let's look at a real piece of student work:

If the only information the teacher had was this answer, s/he might think the student doesn't know anything about fractions. Click here to hear the student explain his thinking.

He said, "I have to find a multiple of 10, so half would go to 5/10 and 1/5 would go to 2/10, and multiply that to make one whole."

Now we know that he worked to find the common denominator and knew right away that it was 10. He also quickly found that 1/2 = 5/10 and 1/5 = 2/10.

So we know that this student knows how to find a common denominator (but not when to find a common denominator). We also know that the student understands equivalent fractions. His mistake was in applying the process for adding fractions to multiplication.

Why would a student do this? The answer is the next advantage of having students explain their reasoning:
2. Explanations encourage students to explain the why and when, not just the how.
This student likely learned to add fractions by following a rote procedure: find common denominators, add (or subtract) the numerators, and simplify. If you learn that procedure without knowing why to find common denominators in addition or subtraction, you might, like this student, assume that all operations with fractions require common denominators.

Asking students to explain their reasoning can make a connection between the procedure and the underlying conceptual knowledge, and that connection helps students know when to apply procedures like common denominators.

In addition, students solve problems in different ways, and if you don't know the way they're solving it, you don't know what the student is capable of doing. For example, one student might use a formula to solve a problem while another uses context clues from the word problem. If a test question only asks for the answer, all you know is that they got it right, and you might assume that they all have the same knowledge when they don't.
3. Students learn better when they self-explain.
Several research studies have shown that self-explaining can have a positive impact on student learning. In one study, students who were prompted to self-explain demonstrated a more robust mental model of what they learned than students who were not.*

Self-explaining establishes connections between conceptual and procedural knowledge. These connections both contextualize the knowledge (providing the why and when) and make it easier to remember. Self-explaining can be a powerful tool for students both when they learn new concepts and when they access that knowledge while solving a problem, so giving them opportunities to do so can have an impact on their success.

Useful Strategies to Get Students to Explain Their Thinking

The simplest way to start having your students explain their thinking is to ask them questions like:

Why?

How do you know?

Are you sure?

Will that always work?

You can also build a student's ability to explain their thinking by providing opportunities for students to analyze the work of their peers and explain what's correct or incorrect about their thinking. You can, for example, provide several samples of student work and ask students to figure out which is correct and explain why.

We want to improve not just test scores, but real understanding of mathematics, which is why our textbook provides countless opportunities for students to demonstrate their thinking and MATHia analyzes and adapts to how students solve problems, not just the answer they give.

*"You Got Some Explaining to Do! Self-Explaining," Dr. Bob's Cog Blog

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Why Students Need to Explain Their Reasoning

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With the traditional method of math instruction -- the way many of us were taught -- the goal was to get the right answer. Our instructional model, however, requires students to explain and show their thinking. Today we'd like to share some of the cognitive and learning science research behind this approach, and why it's so important that students explain their reasoning.

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Edutopia is a free source of information, inspiration, and practical strategies for learning and teaching in preK-12 education. We are published by the George Lucas Educational Foundation, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization.

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Notecard Journal - Reflection or Sketchnote