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The 21 videos in this collection emerged from the videotaped teachers' participation in a learning community led by Jackie Walsh, author of Questioning for Formative Feedback Meaningful Dialogue to Improve Learning (ASCD, 2022), the book to which they are linked.

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Bloom's Taxonomy for Critical Thinking (verbs)

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Bloom's Taxonomy for Critical Thinking (verbs)

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by TeachThought Staff

Bloom's Taxonomy's verbs-also know as power verbs or thinking verbs-are extraordinarily powerful instructional planning tools.

In fact, in addition to concepts like backward-design and power standards, they are one of the most useful tools a teacher-as-learning-designer has access to. Why?

As research has suggested, they can be used for assessment design, curriculum design, lesson planning, personalizing and differentiating learning, and almost any other 'thing' a teacher-or student-has to do.

For example, if a standard asks students to infer and demonstrate an author's position using evidence from the text, there's a lot built into that kind of task. First, a student has to be able to define what an 'author's position' is and what 'evidence from the text' means ( Knowledge-level). They'll then need to be able to summarize that same text ( Understanding-level), interpret and infer any arguments or positions ( Analyze-level), evaluate inherent claims ( Evaluate-level), and then write ( Create-level) a response that demonstrates their thinking.

Though the chart below reads left to right, it's ideal to imagine it as a kind of incline, with Knowledge at the bottom, and Create at the top. You may not always need this kind of tool to 'unpack' standards and identify a possible learning sequence, but it also works ideally as an assessment design tool. If students can consistently work with the topic in the columns to the right-designing, recommending, differentiating, comparing and contrasting, and so on, then they likely have a firm grasp on the material.

You can also read more about Bloom's Revised Taxonomy (or Bloom's updated Taxonomy) if you're so inclined.

While we've shared Bloom's Taxonomy posters before, the simplicity and clean design of the chart format make it a bit more functional-even useful to hand to the students themselves as a hole-punch-and-keep-it-in-your-journal-for-the-year kind of resource. It also makes a powerful self-directed learning tool. Start at the left, and, roughly, move right.
Examples Of Bloom's Taxonomy Power Verbs
Knowledge: Define, Identify, Describe, Recognize, Tell, Explain, Recite, Memorize, Illustrate, Quote, State, Match, Recognize, Select, Examine, Locate, Recite, Enumerate, Record, List, Quote, Label

Understand: Summarize, Interpret, Classify, Compare, Contrast, Infer, Relate, Extract, Paraphrase, Cite, Discuss, Distinguish, Delineate, Extend, Predict, Indicate, Translate, Inquire, Associate, Explore Convert

Apply: Solve, Change, Relate, Complete, Use, Sketch, Teach, Articulate, Discover, Transfer, Show, Demonstrate, Involve, Dramatize, Produce, Report, Act, Respond, Administer, Actuate, Prepare, Manipulate

Analyze: Contrast, Connect, Relate, Devise, Correlate, Illustrate, Distill, Conclude, Categorize, Take Apart, Problem-Solve, Differentiate, Deduce, Conclude, Devise, Subdivide, Calculate, Order, Adapt

Evaluate: Criticize, Reframe, Judge, Defend, Appraise, Value, Prioritize Plan, Grade, Reframe, Revise, Refine, Grade, Argue, Support, Evolve, Decide, Re-design, Pivot

Create: Design, Modify, Role-Play, Develop, Rewrite, Pivot, Modify, Collaborate, Invent, Write, Formulate, Invent, Imagine
100+ Bloom's Taxonomy Verbs For Critical Thinking

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100+ Bloom's Taxonomy Verbs For Critical Thinking

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by TeachThought Staff Bloom's Taxonomy's verbs-also know as power verbs or thinking verbs-are extraordinarily powerful instructional planning tools. In fact, in addition to concepts like backward-design and power standards, they are one of the most useful tools a teacher-as-learning-designer has access to. Why?

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There is no shortage of data or anecdotes about the trauma and disruption that students, teachers, and parents have endured over the last year. While the entirety of our nation's education system was upended, students of color and students from low-income communities continue to be disproportionately harmed by the COVID-19 pandemic. As our country begins to emerge from the pandemic and students return to the classroom, we must now face the question of the path forward. At this crucial moment, we have the opportunity to revisit the purpose of the educational enterprise and ensure schools, families, and communities are working together to define student success through a holistic lens. As one parent told us during a focus group, "This is the groundwork that begins to allow this country to heal."

Academic challenges have been well cataloged, and new reports show severe negative social and emotional consequences for children. The sad truth is that trauma and the lack of social-emotional supports in schools were serious problems for students even before the pandemic aggravated the situation. The past year provided an opportunity to listen to parents, teachers, and students to understand their perspectives on student development and their ideas for the way forward.

In our new report, written by Civic and supported by the Allstate Foundation, we drew on a February 2020 nationally representative survey of parents and teachers on their views of social-emotional learning and service learning and on focus groups with parents and teachers in November 2020 to understand how those views had changed during the pandemic.

Parents across socioeconomic lines agree that their top goals for their children are developing good character, integrity, and finding happiness-more than getting a good job or preparing for college. In turn, teachers see it as their duty to prepare students for all facets of their future, especially applying classroom learning to situations outside of school. One teacher spoke for many in saying, "Students gain a sense of agency and confidence in themselves when they can participate in the real world and do something to benefit others."

Majorities of both parents and teachers want schools to develop social-emotional skills as much as academic ones. They strongly endorse integrating social-emotional learning and service learning-linking classroom learning with real-world opportunities to serve others-and believe schools should place a stronger emphasis on both.

The overwhelming support for more SEL and service learning has merit. A national commission on integrating social, emotional, and academic development brought science together with practice and found SEL boosts everything schools already measure-from better attendance and behavior to higher grades and graduation rates. It also builds discipline, empathy, and collaborative problem-solving.

It has long been the case that students themselves want more social-emotional and service-learning opportunities in school. In a 2005 Civic survey of students who made the devastating decision to drop out of high school, we found that the leading reason was not academic failure. Instead, it was not seeing the relevance of school to life. Their top suggestion for educators was to provide more opportunities to connect classroom learning with real-world experiences, a primary goal of service learning. In 2012, another Civic report highlighted a survey of youth disconnected from school and work, which showed that nearly 7 in 10 wanted to serve in their communities. Only 3 percent reported having opportunities to do so.

The nearly universal demand from parents, teachers, and students for a holistic approach to education and opportunities to link learning to life should be a wake-up call to school systems to prioritize such efforts. The cascading challenges of the current moment will require a generation of leaders with knowledge, empathy, resilience, appreciation of diversity, and civic dispositions to innovate through times of crisis.

However, fewer than 1 in 4 teachers say SEL is implemented in their school on a programmatic, schoolwide basis, and fewer than 1 in 4 parents and teachers say their students have service-learning opportunities on their campuses. The SEL and service-learning opportunity deficits are most pronounced for students from low-income families and in rural areas.

Listening to those on the front lines of schools-teachers, students, and parents-paints a clear path forward. States need SEL standards and competency benchmarks backed by resources for full implementation, including support for efforts led by the Collaborative for Academic, Social and Emotional Learning, or CASEL, to create a best-practices network across participating school districts and states. Both SEL and service learning should be integrated into workforce-development systems to ensure students have the skills most in demand from employers.

Crises are times for reflection and resetting. The pandemic has rattled our education system and caused parents and teachers to ask for more focus on both social-emotional learning and service learning in America's schools. We should listen to the perspectives of those closest to the needs of students whose education will determine the future of our society, economy, and democracy.

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Where Does Social-Emotional Learning Go Next? (Opinion)

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There is no shortage of data or anecdotes about the trauma and disruption that students, teachers, and parents have endured over the last year. While the entirety of our nation's education system was upended, students of color and students from low-income communities continue to be disproportionately harmed by the COVID-19 pandemic.

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Listen to this post as a podcast:
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My daughter was recently given an assignment to create a model of a volcano. It was a group project, meant to be done entirely at home, and the only clear requirement was that it had to look like a volcano, with extra points if it could actually erupt.

And so it began: My daughter and I planned when her two friends would come over to work on it. I texted their moms and we set a date. We also figured out what supplies she'd need from the craft store and when I would drive her there to get it all. We ended up spending about $40 on modeling clay, spray paint, fake palm trees, and tiny dinosaurs. And that's after I said no to about $40 worth of other stuff she wanted to get.

The three girls met at our house one afternoon. One of the other parents brought over the materials they used to make the volcano erupt. I insisted that they do the project in the dining room, where we could make sure they stayed on task, instead of my daughter's bedroom, where I knew they wouldn't. My husband helped them hunt through the basement for an old lampshade to give the model some height, helped them figure out how to make the clay stick to the lampshade, then did a few trial runs of the "eruption" with them, so they knew it would work in class. A few days later, I drove my daughter to school and helped her walk the model safely into class.

So much had to happen to get this assignment done, and very little of that was actually done by the three students whose names went on the project. I'm not saying my daughter and her friends didn't build the volcano, but they got a lot of support along the way, and if any of that support had been missing-time, transportation, money, space, suggestions, supervision-the project would have been less successful.

When I ask my daughter about the other student projects that were turned in that day, she confirms my suspicions that they ranged in quality: Some, she says, were "huge and detailed," while others consisted of little more than a painted water bottle.

Though I never confirmed it, I suspect that each of those projects got vastly different grades.

What Are We Measuring?

Although a movement is growing to eliminate grades, they are still a reality for most of us, and they impact everything from college admissions to whether students get to go on certain field trips. So it's important that we do whatever we can to make sure they measure what matters.

And in too many cases, that's not happening. Take the volcano project: The grade students received on that ultimately reflected the resources each group happened to have at home-not what they learned or even the effort each student personally put into the task. Those with the "huge and detailed" ones probably got the best grades, and those with the painted water bottles probably got the lowest.

Or consider these other scenarios:

The student whose essay gets a D, because even though he organized it pretty well, made some strong, well-supported arguments, and used rich vocabulary, his teacher's rubric allotted 40 percent of the grade to neatness and correctness, and he had a lot of mistakes. The teacher lets him revise for a higher score, but only gives half credit for the points earned the second time around.

The student who raises his grade by earning extra credit for donating tissues and hand sanitizer to the class.

The student who gets a C on an assignment that requires her to compose an original song to explain a constitutional amendment. Despite her solid understanding of the constitution, she doesn't happen to have a knack for writing lyrics and music.

The student whose project is turned in a day late and gets only half credit according to her teacher's "no excuses" late policy.

In all of these cases, the grade is not an accurate representation of what a student has learned. This is a problem of design: When constructing assignments, assessments, and grading policies, every teacher makes dozens of small decisions that determine how much a grade reflects a student's academic work and how much it reflects a mishmash of other factors. Those quantities are different for every teacher and every assignment. Despite that, we tend to treat grades as if they mean the same thing all the time.

Some Questions to Ask While Planning

So what's to be done about this? If you or your colleagues aren't ready to completely overhaul your grading system (again, see how others are doing that here), or you haven't moved to standards-based grading, you can still improve the integrity of traditional grades by considering some important questions while planning for instruction.

1. What learning does this task measure?

The grade on an assignment should match the learning students are supposed to be doing in your class. This sounds simple, but it amazes me how often I see assignments that seem to have no real connection to what the curriculum says students are learning.

If your standards require students to "be able to explain how geography impacts culture," then assignments should ask them to do some variation of that: explain how geography impacts culture. If, instead, they are making a relief map that shows geographic features, and their grade is based largely on how accurately they represent those features, then they are being graded on map-making skills, not on the standard.

This is especially problematic when qualities like "creativity" are part of your criteria. For one thing, this term means completely different things to different people, so students will have to guess how to perform well on this metric. More importantly, grading for "creativity" on an assignment that is supposed to measure something else will distort the results, making it much harder to tell who actually mastered the skill.

2. Are you going to teach everything you will measure?

We often assign points for skills and qualities that students happen to bring with them, but are never taught in our class.

Suppose you assign a group project, and part of each student's grade will be based on how well he or she worked with the group. Collaborative skills are important, absolutely, but if you're grading for them, shouldn't you also be teaching them?

Similarly, if you're going to ask students to do an essay-type question to demonstrate their learning, and part of their grade will be based on how effectively they write, then ideally, some of your teaching prior to that assessment should give students practice in the kinds of writing skills you want to see on that task.

If our lessons don't prepare students to do well on graded assignments and assessments, then those grades aren't a fair measurement of learning in our class.

3. What will quality work look like on this task?

When creating assignments, we often have a general idea of what a good end-product will look like, but we don't always know for sure until the work gets turned in. At that point, it's too late for students to rise to our expectations, and if we haven't clearly defined them ahead of time, it's easy for personal bias to cloud our judgment.

We'll get better work from students and judge it more fairly if we identify and communicate the criteria for success ahead of time. Many teachers accomplish this with a rubric given to students before they start. These come in different formats: A growing number of teachers are finding that students appreciate the single-point rubric for its clarity and ease of use.

I would also strongly recommend you do the assignment yourself as if you were a student-a process we call dogfooding. This will help you get much clearer on how you define excellence for this assignment.

4. How much of the grade depends on outside resources?

If an assignment is going to be completed partly or entirely at home, take a good look at how much the available resources outside of school could influence the grade. Things like transportation, money for supplies, access to technology, or help from an adult can all contribute to an end product that looks impressive, but may not directly reflect that student's academic skill or effort.

If your assignment is designed so that the focus stays on content and skills, and if you set things up so that the majority of the work happens in class, the assignments you get back should be a more accurate representation of what each student can do.

5. Can all students do well on this task, regardless of how they learn best?

If an assignment is delivered with only one type of learner in mind-with instructions only given verbally, for example-some students will be behind before they even start. Ideally, every task will be designed in a way that all students can access.

Universal Design for Learning is a framework that can help teachers design materials so that all learners have equal access to them. To learn more, watch this overview video or explore the UDL Guidelines developed by CAST. As you work to make your assignments more universally accessible, take a look at some of the great accessibility tools Microsoft offers teachers for free.

Similarly, if the task favors students who happen to have a specific type of artistic skill-the way the constitutional song assignment did for students with musical talent-others who might have preferred to demonstrate their learning through an essay, a poster, or a video are less likely to shine.

Instead of limiting student products to a single, narrow option, consider whether you can give them choices in how they demonstrate learning. If the volcano project had been designed for students to create a model for how a real volcano works, that model could have been done with a paper diagram, in a video, with a student-produced skit, or with a physical model. Not only would this give students an opportunity to put their unique gifts to use, it would also provide options that cost a lot less money to bring to fruition.

6. Could this assignment be called "practice" instead?

Too often, teachers give grades to all classroom activity; they are convinced that kids won't do something unless it's going to get a grade. And that means tasks that are really meant to give students practice in a skill or early exposure to content are ultimately included in final grade calculations.

They shouldn't. Instead of making everything graded, have students do some class work as practice, in preparation for a task that will be graded. So if students have to take a test on long division, require them to do enough self-graded practice pages until they get 80 percent or better. These problems won't be part of their final grade calculation, which also means you don't have to grade them, but students can't take the test until they can demonstrate proficiency on the practice, and their grade on the test will count. This way, their grade will reflect their mastery of long division without penalizing them for how long it took to master the skill.

Other Factors to Consider

Late Work

Some policies on late work can have a significant impact on student grades, so that a student who turns work in late can have very low grades, even if they have mastered the content. In classes where late work is penalized, a grade is a reflection of the student's time management, or of stress, or perfectionism, or dozens of other possible factors. What it isn't is a reflection of learning.

Despite this, many teachers feel that taking points is their only option for responding to late work. This piece by Starr Sackstein explores this dilemma and considers some ways teachers can address the problem without docking points. Spoiler alert: It's not a one-size-fits-all solution, because students turn work in late for a variety of reasons. "At the root of every challenge we face with students of all ages is a story," she writes. "Our job as teachers to figure out what the story is. Some students will be an open book and others we will need to be detectives to figure stuff out. Don't give up on the kids. Giving a zero is giving up and almost expecting them to do the same."

Extra Credit

Giving points for anything that doesn't directly reflect learning can have an incredibly distorting effect on grades. In some cases, it elevates grades, giving the impression of mastery without the actual mastery. In other cases, it masks problems: If a student misses a few test items, but erases them with bonus points, that student could fly under the teacher's radar and miss opportunities for reteaching.

Students who are doing so well on the regular class work that they finish early don't need extra credit, they need differentiated assignments and more challenge. Students who do poorly on assignments don't need extra credit to make up the missing points; they need opportunities to re-do and improve on the work.

This piece by Joy Kirr does an excellent job of showing how a variety of typical extra credit assignments are rife with all kinds of problems.

Grade Averaging

If you calculate your grades by simply averaging them-dividing the points earned by the total possible points-your final course grade could be doing a poor job of representing what your students actually learned in your class. In this piece on the pitfalls of grade averaging , Rick Wormelli uses specific examples to illustrate this problem.

Having graded this way myself, I always liked the simplicity and convenience of grade averaging, so I know that the thought of trying some other system will likely be daunting. But if it means our grades will have more integrity, it's worth it.

One alternative to consider is something called a decaying average , which puts more weight on assignments done later in a learning cycle. In theory, this recognizes that skills should improve over time. Although this approach seems to work better in skill-based classes, it shows us one way to rethink the way we calculate grades so they are better aligned with who our students are as learners.

Grades are inherently imperfect. To truly assess our students' learning, we need to get to know them, observe them, and study a wide sampling of their work over time. When we reduce all that to a single measurement for the sake of efficiency, we lose that bigger picture. But as long as grades remain a reality in our system, let's be thoughtful and deliberate when we calculate them. ♦

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Grades impact everything from college admissions to whether students get to go on certain field trips. With so much at stake, how can we make sure they measure what matters?

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Traditionally, educators and psychologists in the U.S. were not fans of allowing students to flounder. B.F. Skinner, the hugely influential 20 th century behavioral psychologist, didn't even like his lab rats and pigeons to err and constructed experiments to shape their behavior toward always getting the task right. "He thought if they made a mistake, the mistake would get entrenched, and you'd have to backtrack to erase it," explains Janet Metcalfe, a professor of psychology at Columbia University, and the author of an impressive scientific review titled "Learning from Errors," published earlier this year in Annual Review of Psychology.

American educators, perhaps influenced by Skinner, have tended to see things the same way. Classic studies by psychologists James Stigler of UCLA and the late Harold Stevenson, detailed in their 1994 book The Learning Gap, compared videotaped lessons in eighth-grade math in several countries. They found that American teachers emphasized specific procedures for solving problems, largely ignored errors and praised correct answers. Japanese teachers, by contrast, asked students to find their own way through problems and then led a discussion of common errors, why they might seem plausible and why they were wrong. Praise was rarely given and students were meant to see struggle and setbacks as part of learning. The difference, the authors believed, is one reason that Japanese students outperform Americans in math.

"Learning about what is wrong may hasten understanding of why the correct procedures are appropriate," they wrote, "but errors may also be interpreted as failure. And Americans ... strive to avoid situations where this might happen."

'Being in this environment where we are openly discussing mistakes, where mistakes are good, really opened the door for certain kids who had math phobias.' Kushal Patel, teacher, Columbia Secondary School for School for Math, Science and Engineering, New York City

The American allergy to errors began to ease with a burst of new studies by cognitive psychologists beginning this century. They showed clear benefits to engaging with mistakes-in both verbal and math tasks. For instance, Nate Kornell of Williams College conducted a word-pair experiment in which people were cued with a word (say, tree) and then asked to pair it a related "target" word (say, oak). He found that they remembered the target word significantly better if they had made a wrong guess (like maple or pine) and were corrected than if they were simply given the correct pairing and asked to memorize it.

Numerous other studies have confirmed and expanded upon this finding. Metcalfe and others have shown that on tests involving general knowledge (What's the capital of Australia?), a wild guess doesn't help with learning. "They have to be making a serious stab at the answer," she notes. And it was Metcalfe and colleagues who showed that the more certain you are of your wrong answer, the better you will learn the right one after being corrected.

Why is this? The answer isn't completely clear but it likely involves the fact that making an error rallies your attention - and even more so if you're surprised that you got it wrong. In addition, it is easier to learn something new after you've summoned up your prior knowledge - a process neuroscientists call memory reconsolidation.

There's hard, biological evidence for some of this. By placing electroencephalogram caps on subjects as they play video games or do other tasks, scientists have identified specific signals in the brain linked to making errors. The first one, known as Error-Related Negativity or ERN, occurs just 50 millionths of a second after the error. That's well before you are even conscious of the mistake! A second wave, called error positivity (Pe for short), comes 50 to 550 milliseconds later and is believed to reflect conscious attention to the error, usually followed by an effort to avoid repeating it.

As an undergrad at Michigan State, Hans Schroder became so obsessed with error-related brain signaling that, he recalls, "I actually 'married' it on Facebook." He also did serious work on the subject in psychologist Jason Moser's lab there. Past research had shown that these signals relate to academic performance.

"The ERN tends to correlate with grade-point average. It's linked with the ability to recognize when things don't go as expected and to better working memory," Schroder explains. "The Pe is more linked to effort, becoming aware of mistakes and rebounding." While both signals emanate from a brain region called the anterior cingulate, the Pe involves more widespread activity as you allocate mental resources to improve your performance.

'By taking the grade off their test I thought they might spend more time looking at what they got right and what they got wrong. I wanted to refocus them on actually learning the content.' Leah Alcala, math teacher in Berkeley, Calif.

Schroder was especially interested in this effort-related activity and wanted to know if it was linked to a person's attitude or mindset about his or her own ability. Stanford University psychologist Carol Dweck kicked off a wave of research in education and psychology with her work - and popular 2006 book, Mindset- defining two distinct "mindsets": the belief that one's intelligence is fixed or that it is fluid and can grow with effort. People with a fixed mindset (as measured on a standard questionnaire) tend to see errors as signs that they are not good at something. Those with a growth mindset see them as signs they need to work harder.

Schroder theorized that people with a growth mindset would have a stronger Pe signal following an error. This proved to be true in studies with both children and adults. Just as important, growth-minded people raised their game more in the wake of an error. For instance, he reports, growth-minded children playing a videogame in which they had to round up escaped zoo animals "were more accurate after making a mistake than kids who were fixed-minded."

How do these psych lab results translate to the messier world of the classroom? A number of researchers are attempting to answer that question with studies that more closely mimic educational situations or by conducting research within schools.

Carnegie Mellon psychologist Robert Siegler, an expert on how children learn math, has delved deeply into the best way to give feedback on student errors. He has shown, for instance, that asking third and fourth graders to explain how someone got the wrong answer and also how someone got the right answer is enormously effective - more so than just asking the child to explain the correct procedure, as teachers so often do. Dislodging wrong ideas is important, he notes: "These wrong approaches are like crab grass, they are hard to get rid of and often have deep roots. You really have to undermine the roots of the misconception as well as strengthen the correct conception."

Metcalfe is exploring that approach in an experiment with eighth-grade math teachers at the Columbia Secondary School for Math, Science and Engineering - a New York City public school affiliated with Columbia University. For the past two years, her team has been monitoring what happens to performance on the state's Common Core Regents algebra test when teachers give frequent practice quizzes followed each time by a review of the students' specific errors, in a continuous cycle four days a week for four weeks prior to the statewide exam.

The results, which have not yet been published, seem promising. "We had a 100% pass rate on the Algebra 1 Regents for eighth grade, which was pretty awesome," says Kushal Patel, a participating teacher. Patel notes that even though the passing grade for special education students is 55 rather than the typical 65, all of the special ed students passed with the higher grade. Performance across the class was even stronger the second year than the first. Metcalfe's team is now analyzing videos of class sessions second by second, looking at exactly what teachers did and how it relates to the errors individual children made. Preliminary results suggest that the improvement in performance was closely tied to the error-focused feedback.

"Being in this environment where we are openly discussing mistakes, where mistakes are good, really opened the door for certain kids who had math phobias," Patel observes.

And in keeping with a growth mindset, students began to see errors as a path to learning rather than humiliation. When he shared students' errors anonymously with the class, he says, "the kids got really good about saying 'Hey, that's my mistake! Let me talk about what I did wrong.' It was incredible. They got past the shy moment of, 'Oh, I screwed up.'"

Next year Metcalfe will be testing a new system for reviewing errors that combines computerized feedback with teacher-led instruction.

In Berkeley, Calif., math teacher Leah Alcala witnessed a similar change in middle school and high school students when she began spotlighting what she calls her "favorite errors." Alcala likes to hand out test results without grades but with highlights indicating the precise spots in a math problem where things took a wrong turn.

"By taking the grade off their test I thought they might spend more time looking at what they got right and what they got wrong," she explains. "I wanted to refocus them on actually learning the content." You can see her method in an online Teaching Channel video.

Like Patel, Alcala says she was influenced by Dweck's mindset framework. While not everyone in her economically and ethnically diverse classes masters all the math, "what I know for sure is that my kids never give up on my class."

Such robust examples of teaching kids how to learn from their errors remain the exception in U.S. classrooms. Probably the biggest reason, Siegler suggests, is that "the people who write the textbooks don't know about the research findings. There's a lot of knowledge in the psychology of learning that hasn't been incorporated into education." Also, he notes, there's a "common sense wisdom" to focusing almost exclusively on correct procedures. It's what American teachers have always done.

And it's what most of us believe in, the evidence be damned. Metcalfe has found that people are generally unaware of the benefits of bumping up against mistakes. This is true even after they participate in studies in which, again and again, they improve their performance after getting something wrong and being set straight. When asked if they did better in trials where they were given the answer or those in which they erred and were corrected, they chose the former.

"Isn't that amazing!" she says of this metacognitive blind spot. No wonder so many educators err when it comes to errors. "If teachers don't realize that making errors will help learning, they will be like Skinner and say 'I'll just teach them the right thing.' "

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Why Mistakes Matter in Creating A Path For Learning | KQED

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Traditionally, educators and psychologists in the U.S. were not fans of allowing students to flounder. B.F. Skinner, the hugely influential 20 th century behavioral psychologist, didn't even like his lab rats and pigeons to err and constructed experiments to shape their behavior toward always getting the task right.

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Bringing Board Games into the Classroom 

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Bringing Board Games into the Classroom 

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2 Ways to Bring Games Into Your Classroom

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Gamification and game-based learning are different instructional strategies, but both can work wonders for student engagement.

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Importance of Authentic Learning for Students (Video)

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Importance of Authentic Learning for Students (Video)

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"Students who engage in authentic learning do as well as others on standardized tests, and do much better on real assessments and real tasks of critical thinking and problem solving." Linda-Darling Hammond @LDH_ed speaks to why #PBL is such an effective way for students to learn.

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"Students who engage in authentic learning do as well as others on standardized tests, and do much better on real assessments and real tasks of critical thinking and problem solving." Linda-Darling Hammond @LDH_ed speaks to why #PBL is such an effective way for students to learn. https://t.co/hB0MH08JvR

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"Students who engage in authentic learning do as well as others on standardized tests, and do much better on real assessments and real tasks of critical thinking and problem solving." Linda-Darling Hammond @LDH_ed speaks to why #PBL is such an effective way for students to learn. pic.twitter.com/hB0MH08JvR
— edutopia (@edutopia) April 3, 2021

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"Students who engage in authentic learning do as well as others on standardized tests, and do much better on real assessments and real tasks of critical thinking and problem solving." Linda-Darling Hammond @LDH_ed speaks to why #PBL is such an effective way for students to learn. https://t.co/hB0MH08JvR

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"Students who engage in authentic learning do as well as others on standardized tests, and do much better on real assessments and real tasks of critical thinking and problem solving." Linda-Darling Hammond @LDH_ed speaks to why #PBL is such an effective way for students to learn. https://t.co/hB0MH08JvR

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"Students who engage in authentic learning do as well as others on standardized tests, and do much better on real assessments and real tasks of critical thinking and problem solving." Linda-Darling Hammond @LDH_ed speaks to why #PBL is such an effective way for students to learn.

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Honor as Power: The Practical Keys to Antiracist Teaching 

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Honor as Power: The Practical Keys to Antiracist Teaching 

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ASCD empowers educators to achieve excellence in learning, teaching, and leading so that every child is healthy, safe, engaged, supported, and challenged.

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Alexis, 17, has always been close to her parents. But since the pandemic began, they have been arguing a lot. "We snap at each other more," she said. "And because there's more negative emotion with the virus and we're all trapped in the house together, the stress is definitely amplified."

Both her parents have been working from their Maryland home since March last year. For most of that time, Alexis' sister, who has graduated from college, has also been living at home. Last April, their grandmother also came to stay with the family for a while, when the Covid cases in Florida, where she lives, were skyrocketing. Until this past year, Alexis, who has her own bedroom, said she had always thought of her house as "normal" sized.

But with her family at home all the time, seeing each other at every meal, the house began to feel awfully small. Problems that in normal times would blow over instead blew up into conflicts. "That's a clear memory I have of them just getting very, very upset very quickly," she said of her parents. "I remember they got extremely, extremely mad."

Her experiences aren't unique. The parents of the more than 50 million children who attend public schools in the U.S. are facing an unprecedented amount of stress. They worry about keeping their families healthy and how to juggle work and childcare. Some face financial anxieties because of furloughs or unemployment, and nearly everyone is feeling isolated and lonely.

Teachers are in a similar boat, Alexis has noticed. In her online classes, they can seem on edge. She burst out laughing when she heard that some adults think children don't notice - and aren't affected by - how stressed they are. "Parents and teachers aren't fooling us," she insisted. "Not even close."

Jennifer Greif Green, an associate professor in the Wheelock College of Education and Human Development at Boston University, said most of a child's interactions with adults are with their parents and teachers, "so any disruption to that is really going to have an impact on that whole ecosystem and all those relationships."

She said that as everyone heals from the disruption of the past year, the education system needs to recognize that adult stress has affected children and must put in place a plan to support adult mental health and rebuild trust in relationships. "When parents and teachers who are around children are doing well and are feeling good, then the children who they're with will have better mental health and better academic outcomes."

"We know from decades of research on parent and child relationships, that when, for example, mothers are depressed, children are much more likely to be depressed. And there's similar research coming out in schools where teachers who are depressed have students who don't do as well," Greif Green said.
Related: Isolation, panic and constant juggling - A year in the life of three moms
Adults who are stressed may not pay close attention to the needs of children, she said. And even if adults try to hide it, that stress trickles down to children and affects how they do academically, psychologically and emotionally.

Lisa Sanetti, a professor of educational psychology at the Neag School of Education at the University of Connecticut, said recent research shows adult stress affects children's bodies. "When children are in the presence of really stressed adults, that they actually have a physiological reaction," she said. "Their cortisol levels, the stress hormone levels, go up."

This stress can disrupt children's relationships with adults, including their teachers. "And we know that relationships between teachers and students are essential to students feeling connected and engaged in school and frankly, just staying in school."

Sanetti said the "levels of heightened stress and waves of uncertainty" adults have experienced during this past year have very real effects on children. "I'd say that it's not possible to focus on the children without making sure that the adults around them are healthy as well."

As millions of children moved to distance learning, there were challenges of how to provide students devices and WiFi as well as training in how to use the technology. Parents say one of their biggest challenges is struggling to balance work with their children's online educational needs. Credit: ROBYN BECK/AFP via Getty Images

Alexis said that early on in the pandemic most of her parents' stress was because no one knew a lot about how the virus was transmitted or what would keep them safe. They washed groceries and stocked up on supplies. Now, she said, her parents' concerns relate to other stressors.

When her parents worry about her grandmother or struggle with work demands or get frustrated when the Wi-Fi crashes, Alexis said the whole energy at home changes. "You can see them getting upset, just being snippy or sulking around the house, like a teenager would." She said it doesn't happen often but when it does, it affects her a lot. "With parents, their mood changes the mood of the whole house."

Stress in adults is higher among parents, according to a poll by the American Psychological Association. And one of those stressors is trying to teach their kids: Almost three-fourths of adults with children recounted that managing online learning was a "significant source of stress." A recent Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study found parents of children studying online were more likely to report work loss, job stability concerns, child care challenges, emotional distress and trouble sleeping, than parents whose children studied in person. Parents of students learning virtually were also more likely to indicate that their children's mental or emotional health had worsened since the start of the pandemic.

Dorina Bekoe, the mother of two children, ages 9 and 12, knows that stress well. She's been very careful about following all the recommended Covid-19 protocols because her daughter has a pre-existing condition. Bekoe said she's been dealing with the stress of trying to keep her family safe on top of the constant juggling act of managing her own work as a social science researcher with her children's online school work.

"Parents and teachers aren't fooling us."
Alexis, 17

That means waking up at 4:30 a.m. to get some work in before her children wake up. And staying awake working after the children go to bed at about 10 p.m. "It's kind of grueling," she said.

Bekoe no longer has time to go on daily runs, an activity she said is a huge stress reliever. She also no longer reads for pleasure. "If I need to choose between sleep and reading, then I will just sleep. So those outlets don't exist anymore," she said. And she no longer has much social contact, even something as simple as chatting with her kids' friend's parents at soccer practice or a birthday party, because all their activities have been canceled or are online. "That kind of community is just not there anymore."

When she has deadlines that have to be met, Bekoe said she tries to block everything else out so she can get her work done. But she feels torn because when she successfully focuses on her own work, she knows that her son's school work isn't getting done. "Part of what makes it so difficult is I can see the stress on my kids, and more so for my younger child. That stress will manifest in tantrums or crying or just not wanting to do the work," Bekoe said.

She's not sure her children can articulate, '"You know, Mom, I'm stressed because you're feeling stressed,'" she said. "But I know that when I have the time to really pay attention, everything's a lot calmer."

Parents with children who have disabilities are especially affected by the pandemic. They've experienced more anxiety, depression and loneliness than their peers whose children do not have special needs, according to a December 2020 report from the University of Oregon. The report, based on the months-long "Rapid Assessment of Pandemic Impact on Development Early Childhood Household Survey," indicated these parents worry about delayed screenings for disabilities, cancelled therapies and their children regressing.

A number of studies have found the pandemic has created a range of parental stressors, such as school closures, job losses and interruptions in care for children with chronic diseases. Parents have reported high levels of stress, clinical anxiety and depression - all of which are associated with a higher child abuse potential.

"When children are in the presence of really stressed adults, that they actually have a physiological reaction."
Lisa Sanetti, of Neag School of Education at the University of Connecticut

Even early on in the pandemic, surveys showed parental stress was affecting children. In March 2020, a University of Michigan study found parents with at least one child under the age of 12 reported they were disciplining their children more during the pandemic. At the time of the study, a majority of parents (61 percent) had "shouted, yelled, or screamed" at their children at least once in the previous two weeks; 20 percent of parents had spanked or slapped children at least once in the previous two weeks.

Byron McClure, a school psychologist at a high-poverty school in Washington, D.C., said he hears every day from students whose families are struggling with basic needs like food and electricity. Many of the families at the majority Black school have lost their jobs and have been disproportionately affected by Covid. He said that an "insurmountable amount of stress" permeates everything.

"Parents are without a doubt bringing that stress into the house. And whether they know it or not, children are receptive and they're picking up on that," McClure said.

The high schoolers he works with report trouble sleeping, changes in their eating patterns and say they are more likely to have temper tantrums or crying fits. "And some of the times the children might not be able to tell you why that's happening, but without a doubt it's from that stress that is happening inside that environment."

Malika, a high school senior, understands that stress. She lives in Washington, D.C., with her father, a driver, and grandparents. Her father has been working long hours since the pandemic began, mostly delivering food. "He's tired a lot. And he is more irritable about small things," she said. If she left dishes in the sink pre-pandemic it wouldn't have bothered him, but now he gets upset. And this, in turn, affects her, she said, because she's dealing with her own challenges. "It makes me agitated and irritated," she said, which makes it harder to get school work done.

"I take longer to complete it because I'm so frustrated that I can't really focus," Malika said. "It gives me a headache and I have to take a break and come back to it."

The American Psychological Association has warned the negative mental health effects of the coronavirus will be "serious and long lasting."

Parents whose children are learning virtually were more likely to report that their children's mental or emotional health had worsened since the start of the pandemic. Credit: Mel Melcon/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

Across the river in Maryland, Alexis tries not to think about how different her last two school years would have been if not for Covid. She's a straight-A student, takes part in several extra-curricular activities and has always enjoyed good relationships with her teachers.

The pandemic has made her teachers seem more like regular people.

"It was definitely weird to see moments of weakness in my teachers. They're stressed about grading, they're stressed about the pandemic, they're stressed about their kids," she said. She also noticed her teachers look tired all the time. "You can just see like bags under their eyes, a little glassy look, just visual cues of being exhausted."

She said one of her teachers has to take breaks from her Zoom class to help her own children with their online work. One day, her teacher got a call telling her that her son was ill. "I saw her face change and I saw her getting emotional. It was a very vulnerable moment for her," Alexis said. She understood then why that teacher had seemed frantic when presenting a lesson earlier.

When Alexis has asked for an extension because she is struggling, some teachers are very understanding. Her math teacher, for example, wrote back to her immediately saying, "I understand. I'm feeling similarly." But in other cases, she said, "some teachers get a little mean, a little more on edge. A lot of times they just want things done their exact way."

"I've been working with this teacher for 20 years. I've never seen her ever even come close to losing her cool before."
Gregg Weiczorek, a high school principal in Hartland, Wisconsin

Having teachers who are patient and relaxed makes a difference in how she feels about herself and her school work. "A bad interaction with a teacher can definitely ruin a day," she said.

Heidi Crumrine, who teaches high school English in Connecticut, said this is the most challenging year she's ever had. "And I say [that] as someone who started her first day of teaching on 9/11 in the Bronx in New York City," she said.

She said she's working harder than she ever has and yet feels a constant sense of guilt. "That I'm not a good enough teacher for my students and I'm not a good mother for my own children," she said. "It just feels like a constant wave of never feeling like I can do what I know I'm good at."

Crumrine's husband is a teacher as well, and they're constantly juggling schedules. Her district has switched often between online and in-person classes, and she sometimes has to be in school while her children are at home. She doesn't want to put them in child care and increase their exposure to the virus, yet doesn't have family who can easily help out. It feels, she said, "like we're building the plane while we're flying it and the destination keeps changing on us."
Related: Tears, sleepless nights and small victories: How first-year teachers are weathering the crisis
Crumrine said that when she speaks to teacher friends across the country they say they are eating more, drinking more and working more. For her part, Crumrine said she's sleeping more, but it doesn't help. "I'm tired all of the time," she said.

Sanetti, at the University of Connecticut, said even before the pandemic, teaching was stressful. "They're tied with nurses as the number one most stressed occupation in the United States," she said.

Gregg Weiczorek, the principal of a high school in Hartland, Wisconsin, said Covid has just exacerbated that pressure. He has witnessed first-hand how pandemic-related stress affects students, too. Weiczorek, who is also the president-elect of the National Association of Secondary School Principals, said most students in his school have been attending school in person almost the entire pandemic, while about 20 percent are on online. The stress of teaching in a dual format is exhausting, he said.

61 percent of parents with at least one child under the age of 12 reported they had "shouted, yelled, or screamed" at their children at least once in the previous two weeks, according to a University of Michigan Study conducted in March 2020. The figure represents an increase over pre-pandemic behavior.

"Teachers are working exorbitant hours. Some of them are working in school all day, and then they're working for four or five hours from home," he said. "So there's significant burnout that's occurring."

He realized teacher stress was becoming a problem when he saw an interaction between a teacher and student in class, when the student questioned something the teacher had said.

"This teacher started crying. Then she took her glasses and smashed them on the table, broke them and raised her voice and said, 'This is it. I'm going to quit. I can't deal with this anymore,'" Weiczorek recounted. "I've been working with this teacher for 20 years. I've never seen her ever even come close to losing her cool before."

Weiczorek said his role this year has been less as principal and more as a counselor. He's had many teachers cry in his office and has already had conversations with some teachers who plan to retire early at the end of the school year.

Experts say helping teachers manage their stress is essential for kids, too. But figuring out how to provide that support is tough. Crumrine said her district has offered a "self-care" webinar which she appreciates, but said it just feels like one more thing she needs to do.

"I didn't want to spend the whole day on Zoom doing that," she said. "The reality is when you're living it, you're just trying to get to the end of the day successfully and try again tomorrow."

The pandemic has created an unprecedented amount of stress. Many parents are feeling anxious because of furloughs or unemployment. They report struggling to pay for basic needs including food. Credit: APU GOMES/AFP via Getty Images

The ideal situation for children is for the adults in their lives - parents and teachers - to be partners. But the push to reopen schools has exposed the tension between families who want their children to return to school and teachers who are concerned schools are not yet safe. Greif Green, of Boston University, said this has set up an unfortunate dynamic, where the adults are at odds with one another. And this further exacerbates the stress everyone feels.
Related: The 'invisible' front line workers of education
"It's made it much harder for teachers and parents to stay focused on the needs and mental health and well-being of children. And that has created a huge challenge," she said.

Leonda Archer, who teaches middle school math in Virginia, said she misses her students, both as a teacher and as a basketball coach. " I miss the vibe of school, the energy, all of that. But I also love humans and I don't want to people to be sick," she said. She's had family members die of Covid and she's worried about her daughter getting infected.

She said that when schools closed, teachers were lauded - initially. " We were seen as angels like, 'Oh my God, I've been home with my child for two months, how do teachers do it?' And now the narrative is totally flip-flopped," she said. "All I hear is people telling us what we need to do, but not recognizing what we are doing."

Sarahi Monterrey, who teaches English learners in Waukesha, Wisconsin, knows how scary the illness can be:Her entire family, including her 7 and 8 year old daughters, got Covid. She worries that her colleagues - some of whom have pre-existing conditions - might become infected.

Monterrey said she's surprised by how contentious the issue has become: "It's stressful because there seems to be a huge divide. It's almost us against them," she said.

At one school board meeting she attended, she was placed in a virtual room with parents and students, rather than with educators. "There was a teacher who spoke about her husband getting Covid," said Monterrey, "and a parent in my room said, 'Who cares?' And I was like blown away. Like, someone just said her husband had Covid and your response in front of kids is 'Who cares?'"
This story about adult stress was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger's newsletter.
Sanetti, the educational psychology professor, said reopening will be difficult, not just because of the logistics involved but because a sense of trust has been broken. For schools to truly get back to normal, she said that trust needs to be rebuilt. "The relationships between the school and the community and making sure that we can repair that, is going to be an important part of coming back," she said.

Alexis has noticed what she calls this "weird" divide among the adults she sees the most. "It's like a disconnect, where neither side wants to understand the other," she said. She's heard many parents blame teachers for schools not reopening, which she thinks is hypocritical because they are still working from home. At the same time, she said, it's hard not to wonder how much better her education and social life would have been had teachers agreed to in-person classes this year.

She said kids are dealing with their own pressures and sense of loss; when adults don't agree, it just adds to students' anxiety. "You feel caught in the middle. Like there are two voices in my own head that are telling me different things," Alexis said. "You're always taught, 'Respect your parents and respect your teachers.' But when they want completely different things what do you do?"

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Parents fighting, teachers crying: Grownup stress is hitting kids hard

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Get important education news and analysis delivered straight to your inbox Alexis, 17, has always been close to her parents. But since the pandemic began, they have been arguing a lot. "We snap at each other more," she said. "And because there's more negative emotion with the virus and we're all trapped in the house together, the stress is definitely amplified."

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Gest, who is chair of human services at the Curry School of Education and Human Development, says, "There is a long tradition of informal guidance on how to think about group dynamics in the classroom, but relatively little empirical research to back up particular strategies." That said, some things are known. There are four big impediments to friendship formation in school: lack of contact, competition, unequal status, and surface-level homophily (a.k.a., "birds of a feather flock together"). Each of these factors can prevent relationships from blossoming, particularly across gender, racial, and other divides. For each of the four roadblocks, teachers wield at least one not-so-secret weapon.

Encouraging contact

Lack of contact obviously inhibits friendship formation. On the flip side, physical proximity negative perceptions of a peer. Teachers and administrators often don't have control over the biggest piece of this puzzle -the makeup of their student body-but they can manipulate contact between the kids they do have. For starters, Juvonen says, teachers and administrators should consider keeping friends together when assigning classes. Schoolwide "house" programs that produce stable cohorts have also shown potential.

Students who dislike one another , however, be paired for peer-assisted learning. Most commonly in pairs, peer-assisted learning has been shown to improve the standing of students with learning disabilities and help shy children befriend peers. In choosing dyads, professors Lynn and Douglas Fuchs suggest different strategies for and , both of which involve splitting the class into a top half and a bottom half by current skill level and then choosing one student from each block. But Juvonen says teachers would do well to make these matches with pre-existing friendships and common interests in mind as well, and at least backs her up (there, how much partners liked each other predicted how well they learned).

Another type of grouping shows promise for that though. By doing away with competition, cooperative learning boosts learning and decreases problematic behaviors, says Cary Roseth , chair of the Department of Counseling, Educational Psychology and Special Education at Michigan State University. It requires establishing positive interdependence , meaning "individuals can attain their goals if (and only if) others in their group also reach their goals," Roseth has written.

Teachers may require a single finished product from a group (goal interdependence) or may offer a reward to the group if everyone achieves above a certain threshold (reward interdependence). Members of the group can be issued different materials that the group must share to complete the lesson (resource interdependence), or each member of the group could be assigned a different role to play (role interdependence). The group may have its own name (identity interdependence), or each group member may have to complete a different step in a task, like on an assembly line (task interdependence).

When teachers carefully create and scaffold small groups, an expectation that a group member will cooperate arises, and that produces liking. If one group member perceives another as attempting to promote their success, that also promotes liking, even if they ultimately fail . A positive feedback loop results: "The more students work cooperatively to learn, the more they will tend to like each other, and the more they like each other, the harder they will work to help each other learn," Roseth and colleagues report. In other words, positive interdependence fosters, at the very least, Aristotelian friendships of utility.

Equalizing status

Encouraging contact provides the opportunity for friendships to form, but budding connections can easily be nipped by social status asymmetry. Those who don't conform with school norms on behavior, ability, sexuality, and even body size will be shunned without intervention, Juvonen says. Promoting a cooperative, rather than competitive, learning environment is one step toward redefining "smart" and "good" in children's minds, but teachers can further decrease status gaps by drawing attention to hidden strengths .

To this end, teachers should think of themselves in social media parlance as "influencers" or "thought leaders." Teachers' relationships with kids "have a big influence on how those kids are seen," Gest confirms: "Kids who perceive their classmates as not getting along with the teacher come to see those classmates less positively." But "if teachers make public comments about a child's academic or social strengths, those have an impact on how kids view that classmate" too.

There's a problem though: Teachers' on who is high status and who isn't doesn't always align with kids', Gest says. "There are kids whom teachers perceive to be disruptive and a problem yet who are quite popular with their classmates. And then conversely, sometimes kids teachers perceive as super nice and prosocial are not particularly influential." A first step, then, in realizing children's potential to elevate and inspire one another, is "developing an accurate understanding of what those relationship patterns are."

Leveraging homophily

One pattern is called homophily. Plato once wrote "similarity begets friendship," and modern social science research has proven him right. Like tends to stick with like in terms of attitudes and beliefs, but also ethnicity, socio-economic status, and gender even in an integrated classroom. (In Friendship , Denworth reports: "Friendship with opposite-sex peers 'drops off precipitously after seven years of age.'")

Yet friendships that bridge these divides have been associated with higher academic outcomes, and Juvonen says, "students with a greater proportion of cross-ethnic friendships reported lower vulnerability" to peer victimization. On the other hand, discriminatory experiences lead to anger, impulsivity, depression, anxiety, sleep loss, and more, all conditions that drive down academic engagement and performance.

For cross-group friendships to thrive, Juvonen says, teachers and administrators have to "disrupt typical social dynamics and avoid instructional practices that highlight differences." Going after low-hanging fruit, Juvonen recommends we stop saying, "Good morning, boys and girls." Using these categories implies that they have functional importance in elementary school (when research has yet to prove they do ) and impedes same-gender bonds.

Though initiatives like these take time and institutional support, there's one thing educators can do right away, Laursen says. While perceived similarities predict who will become friends better than actual similarities, it's the latter that determines whether friendships will last. Teachers can help kids' friendship calculus be more accurate by making less obvious similarities salient. Another way of looking at it? By drawing attention to traits and interests that aren't as readily apparent as gender or skin tone (e.g., "You two and your Minecraft obsession!"), teachers foster Aristotelian friendships of virtue.

Juvonen says extracurricular activities like sports and interscholastic robotics competitions provide the ideal context both for highlighting shared interests and promoting positive interdependence, but access is often a problem. Administrators can try to decrease hurdles such as transportation and out-of-pocket expenses, as well as ensuring there's extra support on hand to facilitate the participation of special needs students. But logistical stumbling blocks aren't the only type. "Some kids are just reluctant to take the big step to join a club," Laursen says, and schools would do well to create an emotionally safe environment. That can mean paired activities and inclusion-oriented clubs such as Gay-Straight Alliances.

Kids can also be encouraged to find hidden similarities on their own. Julia Smith, who teaches first-grade in San Francisco, reads her students The Day You Begin by Jacqueline Woodson:

There will be times when you walk into a room and no one there is quite like you until the day you begin to share your stories. My name is Angelina and I spent my whole summer with my little sister , you tell the class .... Your name is like my sister's , Rigoberto says. Her name is Angelina, too .... This is the day you begin to find ... every new friend has something a little like you.

But Elizabeth Self, an assistant professor at Vanderbilt University, says it's important to keep in mind there simply isn't enough research on encouraging cross-group friendships for academics like her to provide a 10-tricks book. For the most part, they are instead "going to talk about, you could do this, but you'd need to watch out for that."

Case in point: Just how much to spread kids out.

Skill sorting and ability grouping, Juvonen says, "not only reduces contact, but also highlights status differences between demographic groups." Tracked classes, resource rooms, and second-language learner programs that separate groups of students and highlight their differences are also "likely to hinder peer acceptance and the development of friendships," she says.

And yet, distributing a small group of atypical kids across classrooms can also be the wrong call. In one study, children with disabilities, who can struggle with social integration, were just as likely to have friends and be accepted as their developmentally typical peers when placed in classrooms where one-third of the students had a mild disability. Juvonen's conclusion: "There is a critical minimum mass required for groups of vulnerable students to be socially integrated."

Research on race relations in middle and high schools suggests exactly that. In Beverly Daniel Tatum, a psychology professor and former president of Spelman College, explains that around the onset of puberty, Black students start to explore their identity just as "the world begins to reflect their Blackness back to them more clearly." In racially mixed settings, she writes, voluntary "racial grouping is a developmental process in response to an environmental stressor, racism." When it comes to racial Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? microaggressions, white peers "are unprepared to respond in supportive ways." That makes joining with other Black students "a positive coping strategy."

A teacher with a class of 25 students that includes 5 Black students and needs to be split into 5 groups may be tempted to create diverse pods by placing one of the underrepresented students in each group, but doing so can actually set intergroup relations back. Once kids are old enough to grapple with race, numerical insignificance and stereotype threat -which one of Dr. Tatum's young sources described as "that constant burden of you always having to strive to do your best and show that you can do just as much as everybody else"-can silence and alienate Black children, reduce their status, and thwart friendship formation. When small groups involve peer critique, preventing critical mass can also leave Black students emotionally unprepared to receive feedback. As counterintuitive as it may seem, allowing Black students "the psychological safety of their own group" can actually increase the likelihood that they form friendships outside it.

Elizabeth Self says similar concerns apply to "putting kids from the same linguistic background together in maths small group work."

Making game-time calls

At the end of the day, teachers will have to make judgment calls when it comes to friendship. Students who are easily distracted may benefit from more individual work, and there's research showing that friends interfere with productivity in some circumstances: for example, when they're not engaged by the subject matter or they put one another's feelings over giving meaningful feedback. But if a friendless child goofs off with a peer, Laursen says, a little more leeway may be in order, since research shows that kids with at least one friend are both less likely to be bullied and less harmed by bullying. It would make sense then, to seat a child with very low social status near one who is both friendly and popular. A warm relationship with someone like that could increase classwide acceptance considerably.

Elizabeth Self likes the idea of reconceptualizing friends as a resource, thinking, "How can we give them permission to draw on that person?" When a student is getting out of sorts, for example: "If they have a good bud who is not in the classroom, say: 'Let's go see if we can pull Margarita from Ms. Jon's class. You all stay in the hall for five minutes. We are going to set a timer to see if spending some time together helps you to be able to come back into class.'" In the context of restorative justice circles, why not have an ally present for each child? "I think there is rich opportunity here," she says.

But Gest wants to remind teachers, administrators, and their communities: "You can't address everything at once, through either a seating arrangement or a group learning assignment." Yes, friendship can present untapped academic potential, but "there's limits to how much teachers can do."
This article is part of the "Friendship in Schools" series, which explores the complexities of friendship at various stages of learning.

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What the Research Says About the Academic Power of Friendship - MindShift

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Gest, who is chair of human services at the Curry School of Education and Human Development, says, "There is a long tradition of informal guidance on how to think about group dynamics in the classroom, but relatively little empirical research to back up particular strategies." That said, some things are known.

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13 Effective Strategies to Help Students Learn

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13 Effective Strategies to Help Students Learn

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13 Effective Study Strategies to Help Students Learn - MindShift

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Daniel Willingham outlines effective study strategies to help students learn in person and via remote learning.

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Before COVID-19, a concerted effort was underway to expand the use of chronic absenteeism as a measure of school quality and educational equity in the United States. But the hybrid, virtual, and in-person learning contingencies forced by the pandemic have upended the very notion of attendance. To promote educational equity, both now and postpandemic, we need to supplement absence-based school accountability measures with those that capture meaningful participation in learning, regardless of where and when it happens.

During the pandemic, student absences doubled. According to an October 2020 estimate from Bellwether Education Partners, as many as 3 million children had not been consistently engaged in learning since last March. Chronic absenteeism (missing 10 percent or more of school days) is linked to lack of reading proficiency and dropping out of high school. It's essential to reengage disconnected students in learning, but how do we monitor our progress in a way that acknowledges the myriad challenges that some students face in accessing in-person and virtual school? Changing what we measure could help better identify and support students and their families in reengaging with school.

We've already seen that the way we measure school attendance and participation matters. For years, federal guidelines directed states to track truancy; in turn, remedies for truancy were primarily punitive -including prosecuting and even jailing parents whose children did not attend school.

In 2015, spurred by the Every Student Succeeds Act, the U.S. Department of Education began to shift its focus from truancy to chronic absenteeism. This shift has encouraged states to more holistically assess and address the reasons students miss school, including a physical or mental-health issue, housing instability, a competing job, or school bullying. Shifting the focus to reducing chronic absenteeism has also led to the engagement of a wider group of health- and social-service stakeholders to support families in addressing barriers to school attendance.

As we begin to emerge from the pandemic with an eye toward identifying students at highest risk for continued academic disengagement, we need, once again, to assess whether we're measuring what matters. Our university's eSchool+ Initiative, in collaboration with the World Bank and UNICEF, has recently launched its Global Education Recovery Tracker. Among the findings of this joint research effort is confirmation that hybrid and remote forms of education continue to be widespread around the world because of COVID-19.
Many students are still learning outside their physical classrooms. As a result, accountability metrics must evolve to capture students' participation-not just their presence-in school. Accountability measures that focus on access and engagement rather than presence alone can acknowledge what has always been tacit in student-absence data: Not all students have equal access to the resources they need to participate fully in educational experiences and not all students are optimally served.

The pandemic has ushered in a new era of flexibility in how and where student learning occurs. Given this flexibility, how do we measure if students have access to meaningful participation? What metrics will allow us to assess that participation? If we don't get the measures right-if we aren't monitoring for the right indicators-our ability to address the educational inequities laid bare by this pandemic will be substantially hampered.

As we rethink the best ways to remediate the impact of the pandemic on school engagement, we should also continue to provide educational services to students without confining them to the classroom. For some older students, virtual school can offer a way to set aside their schoolwork in the middle of the day and participate in paid employment or take care of other household responsibilities. Before the pandemic, those same job and family responsibilities would have led to chronic absenteeism and increased the risk of dropping out.

To continue to offer this flexibility, a new measure of participation might allow students to, for example, produce a portfolio of learning achievements through which they could demonstrate mastery, even if their learning did not occur during typical school hours. Such an approach supports college and career readiness in the 21-century economy and disrupts some of the key barriers to participation.

The pandemic has forced us to reevaluate the relationship between presence in school buildings and academic success. We must now consider the range of student learning needs-from traditional to alternative and perhaps unorthodox. Whether it's focusing on competency-based learning goals or new blended learning models in partnership with communities, we must be expansive in our thinking to shepherd all students through this unprecedented education experience. By refocusing school accountability metrics to capture not just barriers to attendance but barriers to meaningful participation in learning, we can reimagine ways to engage those that we have typically called "at risk" to become active agents of their own learning.

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Absenteeism Is the Wrong Student Engagement Metric to Use Right Now (Opinion)

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Before COVID-19, a concerted effort was underway to expand the use of chronic absenteeism as a measure of school quality and educational equity in the United States. But the hybrid, virtual, and in-person learning contingencies forced by the pandemic have upended the very notion of attendance.

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To understand what constitutes the right amount of homework, we should be clear on what it's meant to accomplish. We believe it should perform four basic functions. First, homework should be assigned in order to make the most of class time. In an English class, for example, teachers need to ask students to read at home in order to do the important work of leading in-class discussions. Second, at-home assignments help students learn the material taught in class. Students require independent practice to internalize new concepts. Third, these assignments can provide valuable data for teachers about how well students understand the curriculum. Finally, homework helps students acquire the skills needed to plan, organize, and complete their work.

Unfortunately, many schools assign homework for its own sake, in amounts that are out of proportion to these basic functions-a problem that seems to have gotten worse over the past 20 years. This isn't necessarily intentional. Some of your son's teachers probably underestimate the time it takes their students to complete assignments. But your description makes clear that homework has taken over your son's life. That's why he should make sure to tell his teachers that he's been working past the nightly limits prescribed by the school.

Additionally, he should use those limits for his own well-being: If he can't get through a math worksheet in half an hour, he should stop, draw a line after the final problem he was able to complete, and talk with his teacher the following day. That way he will be able to spread his time more evenly among classes, and his teachers will get a better sense of how long their homework is taking. Sometimes teachers aren't aware of how much other work our students have on their plate, not to mention their extracurricular responsibilities. Fill us in! Most teachers would prefer to recalibrate our students' workload than find ourselves responsible for keeping them up so late.

But the goodwill of individual teachers may not be enough to solve the issue. Schools have any number of incentives to assign a lot of work, one of which is the pernicious assumption that "good" schools provide as much of it as their students can pack into a day. If your son's workload doesn't get lighter after he talks with his teachers, contact the administration and explain the situation. Hopefully this will prompt a larger conversation within the school about the reasons to assign homework in the first place-and the reasons not to.

B y submitting a letter, you are agreeing to let The Atlantic use it-in part or in full-and we may edit it for length and/or clarity.

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To understand what constitutes the right amount of homework, we should be clear on what it's meant to accomplish. We believe it should perform four basic functions. First, homework should be assigned in order to make the most of class time.

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12 Principles Of Modern Learning
by TeachThought Staff

What are the principles of modern learning?

Well, that depends on how you define 'learning' and what you'd consider 'modern.' Richard Olsen put together this useful visual way, way back in 2013-a chart that lays out three categories of a modern approach to learning- Modern, Self-Directed, and Social.

These broad categories are then broken up into four principles per category. Each principle is then described by its Reality (its function) and Opportunity (the result of that function). Honestly, these two categories are a bit confusing-or at least the distinction between some of the entries are ( the ability to participate and enables modern learners to participate, for example).

Overall, though, defining 'modern learning' through inquiry, self-direction, and connectivity is at the core of what we preach here at TeachThought. Let's take a look at what it's saying by exploring the first category, Modern Inquiry Learning.
12 Principles Of Modern Learning
The four principles of Modern Inquiry Learning, according to the graphic, are Compile, Contribute, Combine, and Change, with their respective Realities and Opportunities shown below.
Modern Inquiry Learning Principle: Compile
Reality: The ability to save and retrieve information in a variety of formats

Opportunity: Give modern learners virtually 'unlimited' capacity to retrieve and store information
Principle: Contribute
Reality: The ability to participate in more complex projects

Opportunity: Enables learners to participate in more complex projects
Principle: Combine
Reality: The ability to reuse and build upon the work of others (ed note: as we are doing with this post)

Opportunity: Allows learners to move beyond individual and isolated projects
Principle: Change
Reality: The ability to quickly obtain learning feedback from multiple sources

Opportunity: Enables learners to continuously improve work
Modern Self-Directed Learning Principle: Correlate
Reality: The ability to generate large amounts of data about our technology-based activities...

Opportunity: Enables modern learners to use self-generated data to assess and make decisions on future actions.
Principle: Compare
Reality: The ability to view the learning artifacts of others...

Opportunity: Enables modern learners to learn from what other learners are doing or have done.
Principle: Catch
Reality: The ability to participate in virally amplified online activities and events...

Opportunity: Enables modern learners to easily identify new and important ideas and content.
Cooperate
Reality: The ability to learn in the same communities as experts and professionals.

Opportunity: Enables modern learners to make better decisions about their own learning.
Modern Social Learning Connecting
Reality: The ability to access high-quality content whenever and in whatever format needed...

Opportunity: Enables modern learners to draw upon a diverse range of external resources.
Communicating
Reality: The ability to publish using a variety of media for low or no cost...

Opportunity: Enables modern learners to share their ideas and get feedback from others.
Collaborating
Reality: The ability to form learning networks...

Opportunity: Enables modern learners to contrast ideas and experiences with other learners.
Learning Collectively
Reality: The ability to form highly interconnected groups around an object of interest...

Opportunity: Enables modern learners to engage in shared meaning-making.
Our Take
While the graphic doesn't really get at the core values of what makes each approach (Inquiry, Self-Direction, Connectivity) valuable and worthwhile (and so misses a huge opportunity), the trifecta of the three does, in fact, represent prevailing movements in progressive education. Technology, for example, would be a part of each. It supports inquiry and self-direction while being both a cause and effect of connectivity.

How should you use this to guide your teaching? You could take the verbs shown here (e.g., contribute, correlate, etc.) and design project-based learning or related learning playlist activities alongside your students.
12 Principles Of Modern Learning; image attribution Richard Olsen

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12 Principles Of Modern Learning: From Inquiry To Social Learning

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12 Principles Of Modern Learning by TeachThought Staff What are the principles of modern learning? Well, that depends on how you define 'learning' and what you'd consider 'modern.' Richard Olsen put together this useful visual way, way back in 2013-a chart that lays out three categories of a modern approach to learning- Modern, Self-Directed , and Social.

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In April, for example, Prachi Shah, an associate professor of pediatrics at the University of Michigan, published findings from a study of 6,200 children and found that elevated curiosity was linked to higher math and literacy skills among kindergarteners. That effect remained strong even when researchers compared kids with similar levels of "effortful control," or the ability to concentrate and pay attention. Even more surprising, she discovered that students from impoverished backgrounds with a strong thirst for knowledge performed as well as those from affluent homes.

"At high levels [of curiosity], the achievement gap associated with poverty was essentially closed," Shah says. That finding hints that promoting inquisitive thinking could reduce differences in school performance related to socioeconomic disadvantage. In future work, Shah hopes to identify parenting styles that help explain why some students are so driven to learn, which might lead to interventions benefiting economically disadvantaged children.

Meanwhile, neuroscience is starting to explain curiosity's power. When we're hungry for answers, our brain activity changes in ways that help us retain new information. For one, the curious mind engages processes and brain regions associated with anticipating a reward. We want to learn more because the answers are satisfying. In addition, the hippocampus, a memory hub, ramps up activity, preparing to store information. The more we want to know an answer, research suggests, the more memorable it becomes.

"It's also probably tied to depth of processing," says Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, a professor of education, psychology and neuroscience at the University of Southern California. In ongoing research, she has found that curiosity can predict not only how much teens will remember about a story they've read, but also how thoughtfully they reflect on the story's characters. "They can take multiple perspectives, try to integrate and reconcile them, [and] they appreciate the feelings people have that drive their actions," she says.

But unraveling the factors that shape a curious mind has long been a daunting prospect. "It's so difficult to study," says Shah of the University of Michigan. Not only is the concept difficult to measure, she explains, but also "there isn't a well-defined or recognized definition of what curiosity is."

Rather than being clear-cut, curiosity overlaps with other psychological constructs such as intrinsic motivation and an open personality. And there's evidence for both the idea that curiosity is a trait (not unlike extroversion or neuroticism) that's pretty stable within each person and that it is a state (akin to happiness or hunger) that can wax and wane based on context.

"Curiosity is automatic, it's in our DNA ... We're born curious about so many things," says psychologist, author and researcher Scott Barry Kaufman. But we're not equally curious about everything, he says. Instead we each have special interests and natural proclivities.

When we talk about curiosity in an academic context, Kaufman points out, we are describing a desire to acquire very specific kinds of knowledge. "You don't need to be more curious about eating pizza," he says.

Indeed, an as yet unpublished study of 92 kids from grades 1 through 6 found that all of the students exhibited some level of curiosity. But for the most part their curiosity was directed towards social and extracurricular interests - not schoolwork. The challenge for teachers is finding a way to encourage interest in what's happening in class.

One way to do that, Kaufman argues, is allowing kids to follow their interests. Immordino-Yang, for example, has found that when classwork connects to topics that students care about, they engage more deeply. She points to a New York City school where teachers connected chemistry coursework to discussions of lead in the water in Detroit. "The science and societal implications inform and drive one another so kids can connect to the bigger purpose of these academic skills," she says.

Another option is for teachers to model curious behavior. Curiosity, as it turns out, is contagious. In 2015, for example, a team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that a robot that expressed enthusiasm for learning and actively speculated about a story's outcome during a reading activity with a child could inspire that youngster's desire for knowledge.

For her part, Jirout suspects that a teacher's language can encourage kids to think like creative detectives about their schoolwork. "It really can be subtle differences," she says. "Not just answering a student's question but acknowledging 'thank you for asking that question.'"

She also believes teachers can be models of how to be comfortable with uncertainty. That idea stems from the fact that, in her work, Jirout defines and measures curiosity in terms of how people respond to gaps in their knowledge. Teachers can demonstrate through their own mistakes or uncertainty that admitting to not knowing something opens up an opportunity for learning.

They can also adjust the levels of freedom and handholding they give students. With curiosity, you need just enough information to be intrigued - too little can make a situation bewildering and too much robs you of the opportunity to explore a topic and learn for yourself. Curiosity, then, like so many things, is all about balance.

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The Benefits of Cultivating Curiosity in Kids | KQED

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Studies suggest that curiosity is linked to joy on the job, social skills and even a happy disposition. And in an academic context, greater curiosity generally predicts greater success.

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How Can Students Self-Assess When Teachers Do All the Grading and Work? | KQED

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Too often, feedback is given at the end of a project or test. But what if students had more opportunities to receive feedback while they’re doing the work so they can improve their learning? Author and blended learning expert Catlin Tucker makes her case for putting more assessment tools into studen…