Goal writing is an important skill for students of all ages. Hear one teacher’s perspective on teaching goal-writing. On the first day of classes two years ago, I had students in my professional and technical writing course send me an email with their goals for the semester. I discovered they had no understanding of goals, expectations, or objectives. The next semester I explained that goals should be specific, measurable, attainable, positive, and have a time…
You try to fake it, but it limps out of your mouth, barely alive: “How was school?” You might use a slight variation like, “What’d you learn in school today?” but in a single sentence, all that is wrong with ‘school.’ First, the detachment–you literally have no idea what they’re learning or why. You leave that up to school because that’s what school’s for, right? Which means you know very little about what your children…
As a teacher watched a video of a classroom discussion she recorded, she kept noticing places where discussion would be on the verge of beginning, only to see it die almost immediately. The students were prepared, and they were often asking the types of questions teachers want them to ask–so why did the discussion keep faltering? She had to start looking at their pedagogy. What she discovered was that they didn’t know how to build…
With Indiana’s college-going rate at a historic low, Ivy Tech Community College is piloting a new program to keep students on campus by making sure they have 10 specific habits. The program — called Ivy Achieves – aims to ensure that once students go to college, they complete their degrees. Retention is top of mind for those in higher education, especially coming out of the pandemic, said Dean McCurdy, provost for Ivy Tech Community College.…
There’s no ironclad proof that sports build character. The results of a meta-analysis on the connection between athletics and character development make that clear: “Forty years of research, conducted by more than 20 researchers studying tens of thousands of athletes and non- athletes from youth, high schools, collegiate and Olympic levels, simply does not support the notion of sport as a character-building activity, particularly as it applies to sportsmanship behaviors and moral reasoning ability.” It’s…
The challenge of college can be an eye opening experience for even the brightest student, but many high schoolers are finding they don’t know basic college skills like how to manage time or prepare for a test. These are skills they missed while attending high school during the pandemic while taking classes virtually for more than a year, rarely having homework, and most tests being open book. These struggles can hit college students hard in…
Many migrants, especially unaccompanied youth, face uncertain paths in detention and after their release in local communities. Schools are often the first and sometimes the only places they can turn for resources. Research shows that everyday educators have been left to deal with the aftermath of recent political charades, as well as a broken immigrant system, racialized immigration surveillance, deplorable detention facility conditions, and lack of access to educational and social resources for young people.…
If you’ve ever looked for a new job, you’ve probably seen skills like attention to detail, customer service and collaboration listed in job postings. These skills, like digital literacy, fall into a broad category of abilities that are fundamentally important to success, and yet are sometimes easy to overlook. Digital literacy is everywhere, and everyone possesses some level of it. Have you ever seen a child pick up a smartphone and start using it intuitively?…
When we think about the school library as a place where reading communities begin and are nurtured, we have to remember that a school is a place where many students do not inherently feel welcome. Historically speaking, school systems have sometimes been an instrumental part of systems of colonization and indoctrination, and culturally relevant libraries are not something everyone has access to. The tendency to demonize the unique parts of us that make us individuals,…
Learning transfer is the practice of applying knowledge or meaning from a familiar context to an unfamiliar context. This movement requires re-contextualizing what students know, which first requires that they strip ‘what they know’ of all context, consider it in isolation, then adapt it to work elsewhere. This is a cognitively demanding practice. Of course, this doesn’t happen by admonishing students to transfer their knowledge, but rather is the result of transfer-by-design. This entails continuously…
