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https://izzit.org/events/

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Every school day (except holidays) we offer 2 lessons, often at different reading levels. Articles are selected from various major news sources (we don't write 'em, folks!) to encourage debate and critical thinking. Sometimes they might push buttons or present uncomfortable or unpopular stances. We think students need to see, read, process, debate, and think critically about these issues. Selection of an article doesn't imply izzit.org agreement with the article or its perspective.

The questions are a critical part of the lesson. Without those, there is no lesson - only an article, and you could find that on your own!

Articles & Discussion Questions can be printed from the page. Articles are posted for one week due to copyright issues. After that, it's archived with the questions and a link to the original source of the article.
PLEASE NOTE: Lessons are archived for one year from posting date. If you might want to use a lesson in the future, we recommend you print it or otherwise save it.
About Readability Scores

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Keep your students up-to-date on what's happening in the world, and sneak in some reading comprehension practice and awesome vocabulary words. Great discussion and debate starters, too.

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DOGO News - Kids news articles! Kids current events; plus kids news on science, sports, and more!

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DOGO News has fun articles for kids on current events, science, sports, and more! There are also lots of stories, pictures, videos, games and the DOGO news map for kids! Add your comments, read reviews of cool websites, and more!

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Science News features daily news articles, feature stories, reviews and more in all disciplines of science, as well as Science News magazine archives back to 1924.

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Welcome to howtosmile

Search over 4,000 of the very best STEM activities on the web. Find handpicked activities from your favorite science museums, public television stations, universities, and other educational organizations. All activities are available to anyone, free of charge. Start searching now and filter by age, material costs, and learning time to find exactly what you need for your educational program, class, or family.

After launching in 2010, and serving millions of web visitors, howtosmile has become the largest and longest running online collection of STEM activities for educators and learners from all over the world. Let us know what you think and send any suggestions for new resources by emailing us at questions@howtosmile.org.

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Search over 4,000 of the very best STEM activities on the web. Find handpicked activities from your favorite science museums, public television stations, universities, and other educational organizations. All activities are available to anyone, free of charge. Start searching now and filter by age, material costs, and learning time to find exactly what you need for your educational program, class, or family.

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Resources | The Partnership in Education

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It's all here! Explore a wide variety of interactive apps, movies and shows, teaching materials, and student readings.

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Educational Resources | Science Education Partnership Award

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Yoga can help bring about a sense of calm and focus. Try this easy yoga routine for a quick and relaxing way to unwind from your day. Slow-paced and meant to inspire a sense of calm, this routine is perfect… [More]

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Early science education is crucial for children's academic success, yet is too often missing from California schools. CRS empowers teachers and scientists to bring science and engineering learning to life for children. Children build understanding of their world through exploration, while discovering their own talents and interests. We all benefit from a more scientifically literate citizenry and a diverse, creative STEM workforce.Our goal is simple: help teachers give students more opportunities to "do science" - to ask questions, test ideas, get their hands on real science activities.
We need to inspire the next generation of thinkers, makers, problem solvers, and leaders!

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Community Resources for Science - Practical Support for Great Science Teaching!

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Early science education is crucial for children's academic success, yet is too often missing from California schools. CRS empowers teachers and scientists to bring science and engineering learning to life for children. Children build understanding of their world through exploration, while discovering their own talents and interests.

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Our demonstrations are fun and messy-and are great opportunity for learning science, technology, engineering, and math at home or in the classroom. Be careful, though-try these at your own risk.

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Demonstrations | Mind Trekkers | Michigan Tech

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A list of activities and emonstrations that teachers can use to bring STEM into the classroom. Visit our Amazon Local Associates page, for links to the products we use to replicate our demonstrations at home, in the classroom, or your next outreach event!

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Act now! For Giving Tuesday, your gift to the National Geographic Society will be matched dollar-for-dollar. Make your tax-deductible contribution today and make TRIPLE the impact for Explorers working to preserve threatened species around the world.

Donate today!

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Education Resources | National Geographic Society

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Inspire learners to explore National Geographic through interactive lesson plans, maps, storytelling and a wide variety of resources to illuminate their world.

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We teamed up with Esri to create a reimagined version of National Geographic MapMaker that is more accessible, more flexible and more relevant. The new MapMaker 4.0 is available now for you to rebuild your maps and access all of the exciting new features.

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MapMaker Launch Guide - National Geographic Society

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Where the Wonders of Learning Never Cease

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Do One Thing - Heroes for a Better World

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Heroes for a Better World - DoOneThing.org - Do One Thing and Better World Kids Clubs are projects of The EMILY Fund. Featuring more than 5000 FREE printable resources on more than 60 social issues for kids, youth and adults that want to make a difference.

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Our popular collection of animations that examine studies about learning and surface findings that matter for teachers and students, all gathered in one place.

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The following charts displays the array of inquiries developed for each New York grade level along with New York Framework Key Idea. By viewing the topics for each inquiry, curriculum teams can begin planning their work to develop additional inquiries for the remaining grade-level topics.

Kindergarten-Grade 4 Inquiry Topics and Key Ideas

*annotated inquiry

Grades 5-8 Inquiry Topics and Key Ideas

*annotated inquiry

Grades 9-12 Inquiry Topics and Key Ideas

* annotated inquiry

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The following charts displays the array of inquiries developed for each New York grade level along with New York Framework Key Idea. By viewing the topics for each inquiry, curriculum teams can begin planning their work to develop additional inquiries for the remaining grade-level topics. Kindergarten-Grade 4 Inquiry Topics and Key Ideas K [...]

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The following collection of lesson and unit plans, primary source sets, and secondary resources are designed to provide teachers (and parents who homeschool) with tools to support student learning.

About Copyright: All CHSSP-created materials are copyrighted by the Regents of the University of California. These materials, however, are designed for K12 educational purposes, and as such, teachers have the right to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format. This use is predicated on the assumption that educators will give appropriate credit, provide a link to our site ( http://chssp.ucdavis.edu), and indicate if any changes were made. Educators may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the University or the California or the California History-Social Science Project endorses said teacher, school, or related organization. Finally, educators or any members of the public may not apply any legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from accessing the materials or doing anything that this agreement permits.

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The following collection of lesson and unit plans, primary source sets, and secondary resources are designed to provide teachers (and parents who homeschool) with tools to support student learning.

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Welcome

Lit2Go is a free online collection of stories and poems in Mp3 (audiobook) format. An abstract, citation, playing time, and word count are given for each of the passages. Many of the passages also have a related reading strategy identified. Each reading passage can also be downloaded as a PDF and printed for use as a read-along or as supplemental reading material for your classroom.

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Lit2Go is a free online collection of stories and poems in Mp3 (audiobook) format. An abstract, citation, playing time, and word count are given for each of the passages. Many of the passages also have a related reading strategy identified.

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5 Engaging AI Classroom Activities to Try With Your Students

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5 Engaging AI Classroom Activities to Try With Your Students

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Personalization is a goal many teachers strive for, but actually delivering it consistently for every student? That's the hard part. Time and bandwidth are the biggest barriers. We want to customize activities, differentiate, and support diverse needs, but too often those plans get left behind in the rush of day-to-day demands. That's why I turned to AI. It didn't just save me time-it helped me design classroom activities that truly connected with my students where they are, while amplifying their learning in ways that surprised even me.

Curious? Here are five simple ways to use AI to tailor learning activities you may already be using in your classroom to the needs of your students. Skeptical? Start small by just trying one and see how that works.

The Great Debate

Debates can be a powerful assessment tool-allowing students to express themselves while strengthening their critical thinking and communication skills. The social pressure of speaking aloud in front of the class, though, can fill students with dread. Plus, conversations are limited to students' perspectives and evidence they deem helpful. AI can assist them when preparing so they feel ready for the big day, and it can push them to think more deeply and critically than a peer.

After choosing a debate topic, assign or allow students to pick a character (real or fictional) to portray. Say, Thomas Jefferson versus Alexander Hamilton. Have students research their character's perspective and prepare arguments.

Use an AI chatbot (like ChatGPT or Gemini) to simulate the opponent. Here's a sample prompt base you can add on to: "You are Alexander Hamilton and I am Thomas Jefferson. Let's debate the role of the federal government. You open the conversation."

Encourage students to pause and ask the AI clarifying questions mid-debate to deepen their understanding. After the debate, ask the AI to analyze student responses for clarity, adaptability, evidence quality, and persuasiveness. Check out this sample debate where Jefferson (student role) and Hamilton (AI role) debate about the role of the federal government in our new nation (scroll up to the top to read the exchange).

Wrap up with class reflection or a quick write: What did you learn? How did your perspective shift?

Story Collaborator

If the goal is to get students to write more-which ultimately leads to their becoming better writers-sometimes they may need a little jolt to spark the process. Writer's block can stop students in their tracks, but AI can help generate targeted writing prompts or ideas that keep their creative juices flowing.

Have students ask AI to provide an interesting opening line or first few sentences of a short story. For example: "No one believed that Leo's cat could talk-until it demanded pancakes at breakfast." Students then use this as a jumping-off point, continuing the narrative in their own tone and style, developing their own characters and determining how the story progresses from there. This activity is about overcoming the initial hurdle of starting a story, not about having the AI do the writing. Students build confidence and improve their writing skills by taking AI-generated ideas and making them their own. The more they practice, the more they'll develop their writing style and voice.

Alternatively, consider a more call-and-response activity (scroll up to the top to read the exchange). As they're writing, students can ask AI to periodically introduce an unexpected twist that prompts the story to go in another direction, then adjust their story in response to the AI's suggestion.

Mock Career Interview

Access to real-world experts is powerful-but often limited. Finding the right people, coordinating schedules, and ensuring that every student gets personalized time? Tough, even on the best day. While nothing replaces real human connection, students can flex their career-readiness muscles by using AI-generated simulation interviews tailored to their desired careers. Want to be a nurse? Interview with a digital hospital administrator. Want to be a journalist? Chat with a news editor bot who wants to test your research skills and reporting instincts.

Students choose a career and role they want to be interviewed for. Creating a sample prompt that students can edit and input into their chatbot is helpful here. For example: "I'm a high school student interested in becoming a nurse. Can you act like a hospital administrator and give me a practice interview to see if I'm ready for a future health care career?"

Students respond to and ask their own questions by typing or using the voice feature in a tool like ChatGPT. Have students reflect on the feedback they receive and write a reflection on what they learned, as well as a plan for how they would improve in a real interview setting.

Study Buddy

Students aren't always the best study partners for each other. Some overestimate what they know, others would rather chat about nonacademic topics, and few are trained in using evidence-based study strategies like retrieval or spaced practice. An AI study buddy, though, never gets tired, distracted, or off-topic. Whether students need help quizzing themselves, breaking down complex topics, or identifying where their understanding falls short, AI can provide real-time support. Ideally, for this task, they're using a teacher-created chatbot that you specifically instruct to only provide hints without directly giving the answer.

Students choose a concept to start with. Using a chatbot, they can ask the AI to generate open-ended or multiple-choice questions to help them better understand the topic.

Alternatively, students can ask the AI to simplify and explain tricky concepts using terms they'll understand. For example: "I'm a fifth grader who loves baseball. Can you explain photosynthesis to me in terms I'll understand?"

Consider asking students to explain a concept to the AI. If the AI gets confused, the student revisits and clarifies: "I'm a fifth grader and I'm going to explain [INSERT CONCEPT HERE] to you. Listen carefully, and if I get something wrong or seem confused, ask me follow-up questions to help me understand better."

After the session, encourage students to reflect on what they've mastered, as well as what they misunderstood and still need to review.

Call-In Radio Show

Deep understanding comes from asking great questions, challenging assumptions, and digging beneath the surface. This activity turns your classroom into a radio talk show, where students don't just listen, they investigate and participate. After feeding curated sources (like articles, YouTube videos, and websites) into Google's NotebookLM, the AI turns them into a podcast-style summary with an interactive host. Students can practice crafting and asking effective questions while dissecting the host's answers, and they can surface misunderstandings of their own in the process-all using content you've vetted and selected.

Choose your sources. You or your students collect primary and secondary sources-think: articles from History.com, PDFs of scientific research, YouTube explainers, encyclopedia entries or textbooks, and even class notes or slides.

Upload to NotebookLM. Add a prompt like this: "Summarize the major causes of World War I using these sources. Include insights about alliances, militarism, imperialism, and the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand." Hit Generate, and NotebookLM creates a custom podcast-style summary based on your sources and prompt. Engage in Interactive Mode.

While students listen, have them jot down questions they'd ask the host, fact-check and critique the explanations, and identify gaps or biases in what's shared.

If you're ready to dive deeper, check out my growing collection of AI Activity Cards -21 classroom-ready ideas (and counting) built to help you make the most of AI, without the overwhelm.

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5 Engaging AI Classroom Activities to Try With Your Students

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From targeted writing prompts that get pencils moving to an interactive radio show where students join as the co-host, these AI classroom activities help students take learning to the next level.

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Feeling curious about AI but overwhelmed by options? Edtech specialist Eric Curts cuts through the noise with five tools you can start using today.

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Whether you're a seasoned professional or a new teacher, we offer professional learning resources to help you flourish in a world infused with technology. The courses below address today's most pressing issues, from promoting AI literacy to protecting students' data privacy.

Visit our main professional development page to find all of our PD offerings, including our live webinars, in-person trainings, and more.

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Self-Paced Courses | Common Sense Education

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Common Sense Education provides educators and students with the resources they need to harness the power of technology for learning and life. Find a free K-12 Digital Citizenship curriculum, reviews of popular EdTech apps, and resources for protecting student privacy.

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Shifting the Math Mindset: A Teacher’s Transformation with Building Thinking Classrooms

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USM Blog - University School of Milwaukee

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Strategies to engage students and transform the middle school math experience | IES

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Learn about five evidence-based themes for improving middle school students’ math engagement and learning, as featured in a REL Midwest documentary produced in collaboration with WTTW Chicago Public Broadcasting Station and featuring educators at Jonathan Burr Elementary School in Chicago.

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Artificial intelligence tools can be integrated into math class and teacher-preparation programs, educators and researchers say.

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Listen to the interview with Melanie Meehan and Maggie Roberts (transcript):
Sponsored by Renaissance and Erikson Institute

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

Literacy has always been a hot topic in education, and the intensity surrounding it has really ramped up in the last few years. But in most of those conversations, we rarely bring up writing. There's no shortage of debate about phonics, fluency, and reading comprehension, but writing instruction is almost never mentioned, even though reading and writing are so deeply intertwined.

This glaring omission was something Melanie Meehan and Maggie Roberts wanted to address. Meehan is a former curriculum coordinator who recently opened her own in-person writing center. Roberts is a literacy consultant and former middle school teacher who spent nearly two decades supporting teachers in classrooms. Earlier this month, they published a new book together called Foundational Skills for Writing: A Brain-Based Guide to Strengthen Executive Functions, Language, and Other Cornerstones for Writers. In the book, they explore what the brain actually has to do when we ask kids to write, and what gets in the way.

The book breaks the larger task of writing into smaller skill categories, including transcription skills like handwriting, keyboarding, spelling, and large and small motor development, oral language - the speaking and listening skills that are a precursor to writing and include sentence construction, and executive functioning, which includes working memory, cognitive flexibility, and inhibitory control. To be a proficient writer, a person needs to develop and practice all of these skills, and in the book, Meehan and Roberts show teachers how to develop them in students.

On the podcast, they shared eight of the strategies from the book. Each strategy is from a collection they call "Minute Moves," short, flexible activities that take just a couple of minutes and can be dropped into transitions, used as warm-ups, or slipped in on the walk to lunch. They're designed to help students automatize the foundational skills that, when underdeveloped, eat up the cognitive energy they need for the real work of writing. You can listen to the interview in the player above, read the transcript, or browse the summary below.

Spelling Minute Moves

1. Word Family Brainstorm

This one comes from spelling researcher Rebecca Treiman, whom Meehan describes as someone who genuinely believes that words are cool. The idea is simple: take a word and start uncovering its relatives.

Take the often confused homophones two, to, and too. Instead of teaching all three together as a cluster, have students consider the connection between two (the number) and words like twin, twine, and twenty. Suddenly there's a pattern: the TW combination has a relationship with the concept of twoness.

Meehan gave another example from her own tutoring work. A student was struggling with the word decision, and she pointed out its connection to decide. That led to incision, concise, and a surprising one: scissors. All of them trace back to a Latin root meaning "to cut." Once you see that all those words belong to the same family, the spelling for decision makes more sense.

"The more that you can get kids curious and thinking words are cool," Meehan says, "the better."

2. Word Family Stretch

This one is closely related but has its own distinctive shape. Give students a root like struct, meaning "to build." Set a timer for 60 to 90 seconds, and challenge them to brainstorm as many related words as they can: structure, destruction, construct, structural, instruct, instruction ...

The key move that comes after the brainstorm is the debrief: What stayed the same? What changed? How did the meaning shift when you added a prefix or suffix? Through these discussions, students start to internalize that word parts carry meaning, and that patterns show up across academic vocabulary.

Roberts noted that some roots are "bound" (like struct, which can't stand alone) while others are "free" (like form, which works on its own and also becomes reform, transform, inform, deform). Helping students understand that distinction deepens their feel for how words work.

3. Prefix Swap

This one builds directly on the previous two, and Meehan is quick to point out that all three spelling minute moves are essentially doing the same underlying work: building neurological pathways, one quick activity at a time.

The focus here is specifically on prefixes and what happens when you swap them out. Give students a base word and have them generate as many variations as they can by changing the prefix: form becomes reform, transform, inform, deform. The meaning shifts each time, and that's the discovery students are after.

This turns out to be especially powerful for multilingual learners. Meehan mentioned working with students who immediately understood benevolent and malevolent because they recognized bene and mal from their other languages.

Taken together, Meehan observes, these three activities "are really building the neurological pathways" that helps students lock words in rather than constantly struggling to retrieve them.

Sentence Construction Minute Moves

4. Sentence Scramble

Take a sentence and break it into its component words or phrases, written on index cards (one word per card). Scramble them, then ask students to put the sentence back together.

Using physical cards allows students to move them around and experiment. Once students have settled on a sentence, ask them questions about their process, like How did you figure out the order? What clues did you use? Which words had to stay together, and why?

You can raise the stakes by removing punctuation, adding a distractor word that doesn't belong, or asking students to extend the sentence with words and phrases of their own. The goal, Roberts says, is for students to build "an internalized understanding of sentence patterns and sentence construction" that they can carry into their own writing.

5. Sentence Expander

Start with a kernel sentence; something like The cat purrs. Then build on it together by asking students a series of questions: Which cat? What color? Where? When? Why?

Meehan's favorite way to frame this is to use the terms "doer" and "doing" rather than subject and predicate, which she finds too abstract for most kids. Once they can reliably identify who's doing what in a sentence, they can begin to understand why it's so hard to follow a sentence when those two elements get separated by more detail.

Once the sentence is fully expanded ( The orange cat is sleeping on the couch in the afternoon because he is tired), experiment with rearranging the words to make new variations. Giving students a chance to play with that helps them learn to develop richer, more complex sentences.

6. Sentence Combining

"Sentence combining is a really high-impact, quick way for kids to graduate from writing a series of simple sentences to ones that are more syntactically complex, interesting, and precise," Roberts says.

With this activity, you give students two short, bare-bones sentences and ask them to combine them into one. For example, My cat is orange. and My cat is big. becomes My big orange cat... You can scaffold this for beginners by underlining the word to be "harvested" from one sentence and inserted into the other. As students grow more confident, they can move to combining three sentences and adding different conjunctions ( because, and, but...) to change the meaning.

When students get practice like this, they then naturally transfer it to their own writing, merging short, choppy sentences into more sophisticated ones.

Executive Functioning Minute Moves

7. What's Another Way?

One of the executive functions the book places at the center of the writing process is cognitive flexibility, the ability to shift approaches, consider alternatives, and revise your thinking. This minute move practices it directly at the sentence level.

Give students a sentence and ask them to rewrite it a different way. What if you started with the dependent clause instead of the independent one? What if you replaced the noun with a pronoun? What if you made it shorter?

Meehan points out that writing is not only about learning to write longer, more complex sentences. Sometimes the most powerful move is to write a very short one. "The whole art and the craft of writing is varying them and having that skill set to be able to intentionally go from long and complex sentences when they're impactful to short sentences when they're impactful and have the wherewithal to vary that."

She adds that giving students the vocabulary to describe this skill has a big impact. "When you start naming that as cognitive flexibility for kids," she says, "that's exciting to them." There's something genuinely empowering about being told you're practicing a sophisticated cognitive skill - especially for students who have struggled to see themselves as capable writers.

8. New Angle

This one also targets cognitive flexibility, but zooms out from the sentence to the story level. Ask students to retell a familiar scene from a book they're reading, a shared class text, or a short film, from a different character's perspective.

Roberts illustrated it with a real memory: the cafeteria food fight she witnessed as a ninth grader looks very different when you retell it through the eyes of the teacher who had applesauce poured in her hair. Taking on a different perspective requires holding multiple viewpoints in mind simultaneously, and making real choices about voice, detail, and interpretation.

Meehan uses short videos for this with the students she tutors. One of her favorites is Snack Attack, a three-minute Pixar short that tells the same event from two very different points of view. In one session, she and a student each wrote one character's perspective in scenes, then they swapped documents and continued writing from the other character's point of view. The student got competitive about keeping up with Meehan's pace, which was an unintended bonus. But more than that, he was genuinely practicing something that matters far beyond the writing classroom: the ability to understand how other people think.

"It's not just about writing and it's not just about watching this show," Meehan said, "but it's also about democracy and thinking about how other people think and what their perspectives are."

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

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8 Ways to Squeeze Writing Instruction Into a Few Minutes

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These short, flexible activities take just a few minutes and help students automate the foundational skills they need for the complex work of writing.

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Mathematical Mindset Teaching Guide, Teaching Video and Additional Resources - YouCubed

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We have designed a Mathematical Mindset Guide to help teachers create or strengthen a growth mindset culture. This guide contains five Mathematical Mindset Practices along with links to teaching videos. […]

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WWC | Teaching Secondary Students to Write Effectively

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This practice guide presents three evidence-based recommendations for helping students in grades 6-12 develop effective writing skills. Each recommendation includes specific, actionable guidance for educators on implementing practices in their classrooms. The guide also summarizes and rates the evidence supporting each recommendation, describes examples to use in class, and offers the panel's advice on how to overcome potential implementation obstacles.

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The American Revolution | Ken Burns in the Classroom | PBS LearningMedia

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This twelve-hour series examines how thirteen colonies on the Atlantic Coast united in rebellion, won their independence, and established a republic that still endures. The film follows dozens of figures from a wide variety of backgrounds, drawing on thousands of images, maps, archival documents, as well as interviews with leading scholars of the Revolutionary era. It offers an expansive, evenhanded look at the virtues and the contradictions in the fight for independence and the birth of the United States.

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A collection of NGSS-aligned formative assessment tasks across elementary and middle school performance expectations.

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To help put the right book in each reader’s hands, use the following tools to implement comprehensive text complexity analyses within your instructional plans.

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Lesson Design Institute
Learn more about the Lesson Design Institute, where you will learn how you can support California educators in high quality lesson design to be shared and showcased with educators across the state.

Learning Resources
Classroom-ready materials from high-quality providers free for educators to blend with their own instructional strategies and share with students and peers.

Collaboration
Group tools help local teams collaboratively develop and share learning materials, instructional strategies, and leadership approaches.

Leadership Support
Resources, programs, and strategies to guide leadership teams in promoting educator excellence, student success, and community support.

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Lesson Design Institute Learn more about the Lesson Design Institute, where you will learn how you can support California educators in high quality lesson design to be shared and showcased with educators across the state. Learning Resources Classroom-ready materials from high-quality providers free for educators to blend with their own instructional strategies and share with students and peers.

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CA Collaborative for Educational Excellence

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CA Collaborative for Educational Excellence

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Slow Reveal Graph is an instructional routine that promotes sensemaking about data. This highly engaging routine uses scaffolded visuals and discourse to help students (in K-12 and beyond) make sense of data. As more and more of the graph is revealed, students refine their interpretation and construct meaning, often in surprising ways.

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For many students, math class is the subject of nightmares. Many who enthusiastically show off their counting skills in pre-school years later consider math class the most loathed hour of the school day. The problem, according to a Stanford education professor, is a matter of mindset.

"All children are different in their mathematical thinking, strengths and interests," said Jo Boaler, a professor of mathematics education at Stanford Graduate School of Education.

Boaler has studied how students learn math, to identify why so many students end up hating or fearing math, and, too often, underachieve. She has followed thousands of students through middle and high schools to ascertain exactly how they learn and what are the most effective ways they reach their potential.

In her new book, Mathematical Mindsets, Boaler describes how society has traditionally valued one type of math learner - one who can memorize well and calculate fast - as opposed to others who have the same potential but may be deeper, slower and more creative. The book offers research evidence and resources for teachers and parents to help children learn math well, in the classroom and at home.
Test-taking pressures
The "testing culture" in American schools is a major problem for math learners, Boaler said, noting that exams and tests are far more pervasive in math than other subjects.

"Students from early ages realize that math is quite different than other subjects, and that it depends heavily on taking tests and answering uninteresting questions," she said.

This combination of frequent testing, procedural teaching and uninteresting questions disconnected from students' lives causes many students to regard math as a "cold, lifeless subject" without a human connection, she said.

Many students, she said, believe incorrectly that to be good at math they need to be fast at math - too many classes emphasize speed in math and memorization.

Boaler has published research and strategies on the best ways for students to learn math "facts" without the fear and anxiety that many students feel when given timed tests and flash cards.

For example, speed pressure in math causes the early onset of math anxiety for many students, she said. And children who think more slowly and deeply are often turned off by math because they see it as a subject of shallow recall of facts and rules.
Opening up mathematics
The good news is that any student's negative perception of math can dramatically change, Boaler said. In her recent summer math camp for seventh- and eighth-grade students, which can be seen in this video, students learned to enjoy math and they improved their achievement dramatically through open, creative math lessons.

Boaler works with Stanford psychology Professor Carol Dweck to deliver growth mindset interventions to teachers and students. Students who have a growth mindset believe their intelligence can be developed.

"When we open up mathematics and teach broad, visual, creative math, then we teach math as a learning subject instead of as a performance subject," Boaler said.

Boaler offers resources on how to develop growth mindsets for math learners. Her new Stanford center, youcubed, which is funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, provides free mindset math lessons that were used in over 100,000 schools last fall. The website has attracted millions of visitors in the last month alone. She also has online courses for teachers and parents and for students to help them teach and learn math.

When schools teach young people growth mindset mathematics, Boaler said, the outcome is that the subject becomes deeper and filled with more connections, so students enjoy it more and achieve at higher levels.
Math for today's tech world
Boaler has also worked with the Program for International Student Assessment tests team, analyzing their data set of 13 million students worldwide. They found that the lowest achieving students are those who use a memorization strategy. The highest performers are those who see math as a set of connected, big ideas.

Boaler agrees with high-tech leaders such as Conrad Wolfram, who support "broad, multidimensional" mathematics, which involves problem solving, modeling, reasoning, making connections and thinking deeply. She points out that students entering the 21st-century workplace need to be able to ask questions of data, map out mathematical pathways and reason quantitatively - routine calculations, after all, will be performed by machines. She cites research studies that demonstrate how such an approach can engage more young people and put them on a path to success.

"The last decade has seen a nation of children emerge from our schools who are terrified of failing in math and who believe that only some students can be good in math - those who effortlessly achieve on narrow tests," Boaler wrote in her book.

Society needs to free young people from the "crippling idea that they cannot fail, that they cannot mess up, that only some students can be good at math and that success should be easy and not involve effort," she said.

"We need to introduce students to creative, beautiful mathematics that allows them to ask questions that have not been asked, and to think of ideas that go against traditional and imaginary boundaries," she said. "When we give students mathematical freedom, everything changes for them."

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Cultivating a growth mindset in mathematics

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For many students, math class is the subject of nightmares. Many who enthusiastically show off their counting skills in pre-school years later consider math class the most loathed hour of the school day. The problem, according to a Stanford education professor, is a matter of mindset.

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Hard Texts, High Stakes: How to Improve High School Reading

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Four evidence-based reading strategies can help high schoolers tackle more rigorous texts.

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A four-part series breaking down unit planning from start to finish: writing objectives, planning assessments, building lessons, and differentiation.