“Don’t take this the wrong way,” my 15 year old daughter said, pressing pause, “But I really expected this to be boring. I’m kind of pleasantly surprised.” We were in the car. “This” was an interview I’d done with Amy Forrester and Adam Boxer, two teachers from the UK whose help I’d asked comparing the…
We know that attention is central to every learning task and the quality of attention paid by learners shapes the outcome of learning endeavors. Part of attentiveness is individual. Some people are more attentive than others and have better skills/habits in terms of their attention. But is attention also partly social? Does the environment in which…
Yesterday I posted about the challenges of managing limits on Working Memory for teachers. We know we’ve got to design our teaching to respond to the challenges the classrooms presents for student’s Working Memory, but we’ve also got to be thinking about the under-acknowledge issue of our own working memory overloads. Walking around the classroom…
42,000 students and counting… In October, our Consulting & Partnerships team completed a 30-month partnership (March 2021-September 2023) with Texas’ largest charter school network, Harmony Public Schools. Our role was to help the network refine its vision for instructional leadership, then build training and systems to study progress across its 55 (now 60) schools. …
You’re probably familiar with Turn and Talk… it’s one of the most popular techniques in Teach Like a Champion and you can delve into some of the details here, here and here. This is a video of a variation on that idea: Turn and Task. Instead of discussing a relevant question students complete a task-say…