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Inductive Model Lesson Plan

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Vocabulary Acquisition Lesson Plan

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Perfect Assignment Research

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Big Ideas & Links to Theories

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Big Ideas and Links to Theories Overview F 09

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Grit and Fixed Mindset

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21st Century Skills Framework

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Attention Behavior Difficulties

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Autism

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Deaf and Hard of Hearing

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Emotional and Behavioral

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Non-Readers

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Orthopedic Impairments

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Physical Impairments

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Sensory Impairment

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SDAIE Strategies

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Assessment Types

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DOK and COG Tax Question Stems

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ELD Continuum

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Academic Language Function Toolkit

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TPE Examples

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13 Characteristics of ELD Lessons

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The Learning Scientists Blog

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But spacing your learning requires advance planning. If you have the summer off, then now is the best time to plan for spaced practice in the Fall.
How should you space your learning?

Start planning early - the beginning of the semester, or even earlier. Set aside a bit of time every day, just for studying, even if your exams are months away. This may seem strange at first, if you are used to cramming right before an exam; but it's just a new habit that you will get used to if you persevere.

Review information from each class, but not immediately after class. A good way to do this is to reserve some time one day after each of your classes meet. For example, if you have classes Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, you might review the information on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday respectively for each of those classes.

Spacing your learning doesn't mean you won't be studying at all right before the exam. You can still study up until the exam - but instead of only studying then, spread it out so that you're studying days and weeks before the exam as well. You'll spend less time and learn more, in the short-term and in the long-term.

What should you do during these short learning sessions?
It's important that you don't just sit down and re-read your notes. Instead, you should use effective learning strategies such as retrieval practice or elaboration.

After you study information from the most recent class, make sure to go back and study important older information to keep it fresh.

This may seem difficult and you may forget some information from day to day, but this is actually a good thing! You need to forget a little bit in order to benefit from spaced practice - see this guest post for an explanation.

Create small spaces (e.g., a few days) between your study sessions, and do a little bit at a time, so that it adds up!
"But, but...cramming works!"
If you're reading this and you're skeptical because cramming has worked just fine for you in the past, here's why. Cramming can, indeed, do exactly what it suggests - cram information into your mind right before an exam. However, there are at least three really big problems with this.

1. First, cramming actually takes more time. Think about it: if you learn more in the same amount of time spaced out (e.g., 5 hours in 1-hour increments compared to one 5-hour cram session), then you have to spend more time during the cramming session to get to the same level of learning.

2. Second, as quickly as you learned that information, you will then also forget it. You may do fine on the test, but all that extra time you spent during cramming? It will all have been wasted. If you had spaced your learning, you would forget much less after the test. No matter what you are learning - science, math, a foreign language - future learning will depend on previous learning. It is therefore very inefficient to forget everything you learned for one test, only to have to re-learn it again later along with new, more complicated information! This also applies to future classes, where it might be helpful to retain knowledge from a previous class.

3. Another reason why cramming is a bad idea is that it inevitably replaces sleep, which is very important for learning and also for your mental and physical health more generally. So, resolve to form a healthy habit today and plan to space your learning!

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This is the third post in a series designed to help students learn how to study effectively. You can find the first post here and the second post here. The purpose is to provide students with a resource that can help them take charge of their own learning. Today's ...

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Spacing in Teaching Practice

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So, what time delay should I build in to my teaching?
In many courses taught to adolescents, learning typically proceeds in blocks or units. Splitting these into several smaller blocks would be a relatively pain-free tweak for a teacher to make. For example, if 5 topics were taught over a few weeks each, these could instead be interspersed throughout the year.
My classroom practice and the issue of knowledge level
However, the issue of how to apply spacing in our classrooms is actually far from obvious when you begin to delve into the details. For starters, how much of a time delay is best? Is there such a thing as too much spacing? This question is difficult to study in the classroom because there are so many other variables at play, and it should be noted that the bulk of the research on this topic is lab-based.

Nevertheless, it is likely that many teachers are revisiting topics too soon. In an experimental study of spacing with delays of up to a year, One study recommended leaving a gap before reviewing of around 20-30% of the time between first studying something and the final test/exam ( 8). If, for example, an exam was 6 months away, this would suggest that conducting a review activity/revision quiz after a month or so would be preferable to doing so within a few days of first studying the material. They also caution that the optimal gap will differ based on many parameters, and while a gap can be longer than optimal, this is preferable compared to a gap that is too short!

I have started to try out spacing in my own classroom. In my first classroom study, I took advantage of a naturally occurring break in classes for exam leave, allowing me to measure learning when there was a gap between two lessons compare to two lessons in the same week. Although results were promising, I found it hard to reliably and fully measure outcomes from an entire 1-hour lesson, as so many other factors come into play, leading to 'noise' and possible confounds in the data. I therefore moved on to studying performance on a much shorter learning task - something that takes just a few minutes and contains a few specific facts to master. These facts can then be re-studied either immediately, later in the same lesson, or after a delay of a week or more. The initial results I'm finding suggest that the largest spacing is optimal - although I need more time before I can gauge the long-term benefits!
To read more about how other teachers use interleaving in the classroom, check out our Weekly Digest on this topic. References:
As I have been working on my classroom research, I have also noticed that spacing appears to have a more beneficial effect towards the end of a topic than at the beginning. It could be the case that the optimal amount of spacing interacts with how well developed the learner's overall knowledge is - if newer to a topic, forgetting will be more rapid, so the delay before a repetition or practice quiz may need to be shorter. I have yet to fully explore this idea, but it is something that I plan to work on over the coming year.

Overall, then, the exact timing may come down to a class's specific needs and the students' prior experience. What is clear is that however you do it, spacing (and interleaving) is generally beneficial. Why not try splitting a topic into two blocks, delaying a review session or homework task, or leaving things unfinished at the end of a lesson? I'd love to hear your experiences.

( 1) Ebbinghaus, H. E. (1964). Memory: A contribution to experimental psychology. New York, NY: Dover. (Original work published 1885)

( 2) Bjork, R. A. (1994). Memory and metamemory considerations in the training of human beings. In J. Metcalfe and A. Shimamura, (Eds.), Metacognition: Knowing about Knowing (pp. 185-205). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

( 3) Roediger, H. L., & Karpicke, J. D. (2011). Intricacies of spaced retrieval: A resolution. In: A. S. Benjamin (Ed.) Successful Remembering and Successful Forgetting: Essays in Honor of Robert A. Bjork (pp. 23-47). New York: Psychology Press.

( 4) Dempster, F. N. (1988). The spacing effect: A case study in the failure to apply the results of psychological research. American Psychologist, 43(8), 627-634.

( 5) Kang, S. H. (2016). Spaced repetition promotes efficient and effective learning policy implications for instruction. Policy Insights from the Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 3(1), 12-19. doi: 10.1177/2372732215624708.

( 6) Rohrer, D., Dedrick, R. F., & Stershic, S. (2015). Interleaved practice improves mathematics learning. Journal of Educational Psychology, 107, 900-908. doi: 10.1037/edu0000001

( 7) Phillips, N. E., Mills, C., D'Mello, S., & Risko, E. F. (2016). On the influence of re-reading on mind wandering. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 1-20.

(8) Cepeda, N. J., Vul, E., Rohrer, D., Wixted, J. T., & Pashler, H. (2008). Spacing effects in learning a temporal ridgeline of optimal retention. Psychological Science, 19(11), 1095-1102.

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Like many teachers, I have become intrigued by the idea that simply by changing the gap between two or more learning activities such as explanations or revision, I can help my students do better - the so-called 'spacing effect'. What wonderful thing is this ...

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10 Key Learning Science Discoveries

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Instructional Design Article

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Learning About Learning

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Learning Sciences Key Principles

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Professional Learning Community (PLC) Article

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The PLC Handbook for Educators

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The Effects of Poverty on The Brain

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Teaching Methods Research Paper

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Ten Cornerstones of Cognitive Learning Sciences

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Ten Cornerstones of Cognitive Learning Sciences 19

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The Science of Learning

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Six Strategies for Effective Learning

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Kagan's Articles

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1. RallyRobin
2. Timed Pair Share
3. RoundRobin
4. RallyCoach
5. Stand Up, Hand Up Pair Up

The idea, which became the Essential 5, came from a great friend and fellow National Kagan Trainer, Rob Jutras, and of course from Dr. Spencer Kagan whose visionary ideas have done so much to develop education, and in particular, the field of Cooperative Learning over the last three decades.

In my role as a trainer and mentor, I have the privilege to work alongside and support all kinds of teachers, trainers, lecturers and professors. Some of those colleagues are incredibly experienced, 30 years plus in education, some complete "newbies" newly-qualified or not yet entered the teaching profession, i.e. teaching students, graduate teachers, etc. In my training and workshops, I hope I clearly demonstrate the power of Kagan Structures and my belief in these wonderful tools and just how they make a difference in the lives of students. My evaluations regularly tell me I do. However, from time to time, I still encounter questions like these:

"Which Kagan Structures should I learn and use first?", and "Where do I begin?"

In response to these questions and, "Necessity", as the saying goes, "being the mother of invention" Rob and I got to talking about how best to serve these colleagues. The result is our Essential 5, a personal list of fabulous Kagan Structures to be used very much as a starting point to understanding Kagan Structures. I hope you find the list useful, and of course it goes without saying, I rely on you using this list as a springboard to accessing and learning much, much more about Kagan Structures in the future.

The Structure Function table here illustrates that Kagan Structures fit into multiple categories. For example, we can use RoundRobin for Teambuilding, the process by which students get to know, respect, value and like their teammates. RoundRobin is also extremely useful for Knowledgebuilding, students interact with each other to review or memorize stuff to know. As you look across the other functions, you can see that RoundRobin is also great for practicing procedures, processing or presenting information, and for developing and engaging a range of thinking skills. In traditional classrooms, teachers have students work alone. They don't have the chance to learn to work well with others and to manage their own emotions while in interaction with others. At the very same time that students are, for example, reviewing content; Cooperative Learning Structures, i.e. RoundRobin, have the students interact with each other in ways that help them to acquire social skills, character virtues, and emotional intelligence.

The list of structures is long, there are many "tools." The skill of the teacher is selecting the right tool for the right job. If we continue the tool analogy we wouldn't use a hammer for sawing. With Kagan Structures we don't want to use a high-consensus structure for developing divergent thinking.

To learn more about Kagan Structures read Kagan Cooperative Learning by Dr Spencer Kagan, in particular Chapter 6 on Structures and Functions.

Of the 250+ fabulous Kagan Cooperative Learning Structures, what then is the least number of Structures one could learn and still be able to cover all possible types of questions, functions and situations in the classroom? (*With the exception of Decision Making.) Below is our Essential 5. Rob and I can't think of a better 5. Once you are familiar with Kagan Structures, you may decide on a different set of structures. That is the beauty of these "tools"- they allow you, the teacher, to be creative and develop your own lesson designs!

The Essential 2!

Teachers that use just RallyRobin and Timed Pair Share can make a huge difference in achievement and engagement and can take their students a very long way simply instead of "calling-on-one." Along with higher academic achievement you will also see a reduction of the gap between high and low achieving students, improved social skills and cooperativeness, improved self-esteem, increased liking for school and learning, improved classroom climate, decreased discipline problems, increased leadership and employability skills, improved conflict resolution skills and increased empathy and concern for others!

The Essential 5!

In pairs, students alternate generating brief oral responses.

Examples:
* List adjectives to describe the character.
* List inert elements.
* Share steps of the experiment.
* Describe an event from the story.

In pairs, students share with a partner for a predetermined time while the partner listens. Then partners switch roles.

Examples:
* What is the key thing that you learned?
* What is one literary technique you plan to use in your writing and how will you use it?

In teams, students take turns responding orally.

Examples:
* What makes a good listener?
* List objects that float?
* What clubs or societies are you a member of?
* What is one of your favorite movies?

Partners take turns, one solving a problem while the other coaches. Then partners switch roles.

* Useful for any process or procedure with a definite right/wrong.
* Solve multi-step word problems in math.
* Change each decimal into a simplified fraction.

Students stand up, put their hand up and quickly find a partner with whom to share or discuss.

This structure is perfect for classbuilding, processing and reviewing information, energizing the class, forming random pairs or teams, lesson starts or wraps.

Of course it goes without saying, this Essential 5 is in no way a substitute for completing a multi-day Institute on Kagan Cooperative Learning. Participating in a multi-day course will show you how to build powerful learning teams in your classroom. You'll learn Kagan methods for teambuilding, classbuilding, classroom management, dozens more Kagan Structures for mastery, higher-level thinking, and social skills. Kagan Institutes are extremely practical, hands-on classes packed with great ideas all grounded in sound research and theory!

About the Author

Gavin Clowes heads up Kagan UK, an organization dedicated to bringing Kagan Structures and methods to United Kingdom teachers and schools.

For details on Kagan Institutes, workshops and conferences go to www.T2TUK.co.uk and www.Kaganonline.com

End Notes
Thank you to Rob Jutras for inspiring me with the initial idea for this article.

I came across Ron Clark's story, and book, The Essential 55 an approach that saw Ron create a visible and lasting improvement in students' behavior and manners. After hearing about Ron's passion and his students' gratitude for what he had taught them I wanted to do the same for Kagan Cooperative Learning Structures, hence my reworking of his title.

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kagan publishing teaching catalog teacher resources school supplies music games cooperative learning differentiated instruction educational products esl ell foreign language posters multiple intelligences textbooks math books science literature social studies

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Kagan specializes in staff development and educational resources for teachers. Visit our online store, magazine and message board the leading authority on cooperative learning, classroom discipline and multiple intelligences.

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The Four Corners Strategy - Model Teaching

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The Four Corners Strategy - Model Teaching

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In this article, we discuss the Four Corners Strategy, a simple verbal strategy to help engage your students and improve class discussion.

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Problem-Based Lesson Plan

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The Anxious Generation

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Coming in March, 2024: The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness

In the summer of 2022, I was working on a book project - Life After Babel: Adapting to a world we can no longer share - about how smartphones and social media rewired many societies in the 2010s, creating conditions that amplify the long-known weaknesses of democracy. The first chapter was about the impact of social media on kids, who were the "canaries in the coal mine," revealing early signs that something was going wrong. When adolescents' social lives moved onto smartphones and social media platforms, anxiety and depression surged among them. The rest of the book was going to focus on what social media had done to liberal democracies.

I quickly realized that the rapid decline of adolescent mental health could not be explained in one chapter-it needed a book of its own. So, The Anxious Generation is Volume 1, in a sense, of the larger Babel project. The book will be published March 26, 2024. ( You can pre-order it now on , , Barnes & Noble , Bookshop.org , or you buy books.)

I begin The Anxious Generation by examining adolescent mental health trends. What happened to young people in the early 2010s that triggered the surge of anxiety and depression around 2012?

The sudden increase wasn't merely due to a heightened willingness to talk about mental illness. The rise was showing up in behavior as well, including self-harm and suicide.

It showed up internationally too: the rise in anxiety, depression, and self-harm is found in all of the main Anglosphere countries , and in many other European countries as well, indicating that a broader phenomena is sweeping over the developed Western world. (The story in Asia, Africa, and Latin America is less clear.)

Gen Z (those born after 1995) has been hit hardest, although Millennials (born 1981-1995) haven't been entirely spared, as you can see here:

What happened to young people in the early 2010s?

The Anxious Generation offers an explanation by telling two stories. The first is about the decline of the play-based childhood , which began in the 1980s and accelerated in the '90s. All mammals need free play, and lots of it, to wire up their brains during childhood to prepare them for adulthood. But many parents in Anglo countries began to reduce children's access to unsupervised outdoor free play out of media-fueled fears for their safety, even though the "real world" was becoming increasingly safe in the 1990s. The loss of free play and the rise of continual adult supervision deprived children of what they needed most to overcome the normal fears and anxieties of childhood: the chance to explore, test and expand their limits, build close friendships through shared adventure, and learn how to judge risks for themselves.

The second story is about the rise of the phone-based childhood , which began in the late 2000s and accelerated in the early 2010s. This was precisely the period during which adolescents traded in their flip phones for smartphones, which were loaded with social media platforms supported by the new high-speed internet and unlimited data plans.

The confluence of these two stories in the years between 2010 and 2015 is what I call the " Great Rewiring of Childhood. " Few of us understood what was happening in children's virtual worlds and we lacked the knowledge to protect them from tech companies that had designed their products to be addictive.

For this reason, we ended up overprotecting children in the real world while underprotecting them in the virtual world .

The book is split into four parts:

1. The Tidal Wave: In this section, I show the basic statistics on the mental health of young people.

2. The Decline of the Play-Based Childhood: In this section, I discuss the nature of childhood and how we messed it up by depriving children of play and role-models, damaging attachment systems, and erasing any clear path from childhood to adulthood.

3. The Rise of the Phone-Based Childhood: In this section, I discuss the harms that result from the new phone-based childhood, with a chapter devoted to harms to girls, a chapter on harm to boys, and a chapter on the "spiritual degradation" that is happening to all of us--including adults--from our new phone-based lives.

4. Collective Actions for Better Childhood: In this final section, I explain what we must do to reverse the damage. I explain how parents, school, governments, tech companies, and young people are trapped in "collective action problems" and how these can be resolved when individuals organize and act together.

As a parent of two adolescents myself, I worked especially hard to offer useful and non-obvious advice to other parents. My most important suggestions:

Give children far more time playing with other children. This play should ideally be outdoors, in mixed age groups, with little or no adult supervision (which is the way most parents grew up, at least until the 1980s).

Look for more ways to embed children in stable real-world communities. Online networks are not nearly as binding or satisfying.

Don't give a smartphone as the first phone. Give a phone or watch that is specialized for communication, not for internet-based apps.

Don't give a smartphone until high school. This is easy to do, many of your child's friends' parents are doing the same thing.

Delay the opening of accounts on nearly all social media platforms until the beginning of high school (at least). This will become easier to do if we can support legislators who are trying to raise the age of "internet adulthood" from today's 13 (with no verification) to 16 (with mandatory age verification).

In The Anxious Generation , I explain the major causes of the international epidemic of mental illness that hit adolescents in the early 2010s, and I offer a path forward for parents, teachers, friends, and relatives who want to help improve the mental health of children and adolescents. Change is possible, if we can act together.

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Coming in March, 2024: The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness In the summer of 2022, I was working on a book project - Life After Babel: Adapting to a world we can no longer share - about how smartphones and social media rewired many societies in the 2010s, creating conditions that amplify the long-known weaknesses of democracy.

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Graffiti Lesson Plan

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Interviews 1 and 2

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Four Theories Research

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Reading Notes- Understanding How We Learn

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Reading Notes- Understanding How We Learn

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Book Review

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Dr. Jonathan Haidt: How Smartphones & Social Media Impact Mental Health & the Realistic Solutions

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Dr. Jonathan Haidt: How Smartphones & Social Media Impact Mental Health & the Realistic Solutions

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How to Study Effectively for School or College

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How to Study Effectively for School or College [Top 6 Science-Based Study Skills]

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Teaching a Growth Mindset - Carol Dweck

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Growth Mindset Introduction: What it is, How it Works, and Why it Matters

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Growth Mindset Introduction: What it is, How it Works, and Why it Matters

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Grit: the power of passion and perseverance | Angela Lee Duckworth

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Grit: the power of passion and perseverance | Angela Lee Duckworth

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Learning Online: The Student Experience (Tech.edu: A Hopkins Series on Education and Technology)

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What's it really like to learn online? Learning Online: The Student Experience

Online learning is ubiquitous for millions of students worldwide, yet our understanding of student experiences in online learning settings is limited. The geographic distance that separates faculty from students in an online environment is its signature feature, but it is also one that risks widening the gulf between teachers and learners. In Learning Online , George Veletsianos argues that in order to critique, understand, and improve online learning, we must examine it through the lens of student experience.

Approaching the topic with stories that elicit empathy, compassion, and care, Veletsianos relays the diverse day-to-day experiences of online learners. Each in-depth chapter follows a single learner's experience while focusing on an important or noteworthy aspect of online learning, tackling everything from demographics, attrition, motivation, and loneliness to cheating, openness, flexibility, social media, and digital divides. Veletsianos also draws on these case studies to offer recommendations for the future and lessons learned.

The elusive nature of online learners' experiences, the book reveals, is a problem because it prevents us from doing better: from designing more effective online courses, from making evidence-informed decisions about online education, and from coming to our work with the full sense of empathy that our students deserve. Writing in an evocative, accessible, and concise manner, Veletsianos concretely demonstrates why it is so important to pay closer attention to the stories of students-who may have instructive and insightful ideas about the future of education.

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Learning Online: The Student Experience (Tech.edu: A Hopkins Series on Education and Technology)

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Buy Learning Online: The Student Experience (Tech.edu: A Hopkins Series on Education and Technology): Read Kindle Store Reviews - Amazon.com

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Metaphoric Model - Learning is Like Playing A Video Game

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Metaphoric Model Learning is like playing a video Game-2

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Barbara Oakley - How Neuroscience Is Changing What We Know about Learning.

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Barbara Oakley - How Neuroscience Is Changing What We Know about Learning. INTED2019 Keynote Speech

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Information Processing Learning Theory Presentation

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Information Processing Theory Group Presentation

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Behaviorism Learning Theory Presentation

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Social Learning Theory Presentation

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The Constructivism Learning Theory Presentation

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How Do We Learn? Book Review

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The Science of Reading in Action Book Review

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Learning with AI Book Review

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Learning with AI Book Review Presentation-2

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Age of Opportunity Book Review

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Final Exam Presentation