The benefits of using Cold Call in the classroom are pretty clear. It helps ensure that students are always mentally ‘on’ during a lesson and it allows teachers to question quickly and efficiently, especially to make sure that students know what they need to know—to Check for Understanding. These ideas are critical in a coaching…
A year or so ago I wrote a post about Alex Laney’s Do Nows at Smith’s Wood Academy in Birmingham, England. Since then Alex has kept in touch and he recently shared some insights about the school’s new approach to Do Nows or (as they call them) DNAs. Most notably, given the very compelling research…
Ulrich Boser’s new book Learn Better is a kind of Yin to Teach Like a Champion’s Yang. Like TLAC it attempts to study what goes right when learning is successful. And like a lot of the writing my team and I do on this blog, it draws on the findings of cognitive science. But Learn Better…
We’ve been reading up a lot on retrieval practice lately. Hopefully we’re not alone in that. From a cognitive science standpoint it’s absolutely central to improving learning. You might recall Daniel Willingham’s assertion about the importance of knowledge: Data from the last thirty years lead to a conclusion that is not scientifically challengeable: thinking well…
I had the chance to visit a highly successful sports franchise earlier this week. It was the second time in a month I got to visit an elite organization in the sports sector and both visits were amazing because I learned so much- even in the ‘classroom,’ because in both cases the organizations had also brought…