Education & Teacher Conferences

Can AI teach creativity? This question feels oddly self-contradictory. Creativity feels like the most human of human characteristics — how could a chatbot teach it? A recent study put that assumption to the test, and arrives at helpfully provocative conclusions. Here’s the story: How Many Ways Can You Use an Umbrella? “Creativity” poses a fascinating […]

When I hit the trigger words “Don’t be a victim” I knew I was not arriving to Rise Above in a neutral headspace. Anything that uses this phrase carries a certain weight—it’s one of those ideas that can either feel clarifying or quietly accusatory depending on the day you’re having, and if I’m being honest, […]

Research doesn’t often sound fun, so you can imagine my enthusiasm when I came across a study exploring Minecraft. Yes, that Minecraft – with the blocks and the digging and the building. And those fluffy animals that bound around the screen. Specifically, a research team in Ireland – led by Dr. Eadaoin Slattery – wondered […]

We teachers have LOTS to learn from cognitive science: No doubt, we want to pass many of these ideas on to our students. As they learn geometry and spelling and the atomic mass of carbon, they can also learn when to use retrieval practice. One specific example: we have many reasons to think that note-taking […]

Today’s book review is by Dr. Rob McEntarffer “Without… [a] mental model of how students learn, the teacher will not be able to identify the key elements of a teaching method or may implement it improperly.” During my first years teaching high school, I was anxious about whether I was teaching “right.” I often wondered […]

I spoke recently with an AWESOME group of primary school teachers. When our conversations turned to students’ attention, a hot-button topic emerged. They asked: “What does the research show about classroom seating arrangements? Should our students sit in rows or in clusters?” In my experience, many teachers have a strong emotional commitment to one answer […]

A colleague recently asked me this thoughtful question: I’ve seen research on the ‘Production Effect.’ It tells us that students remember words better when they say them out loud. Following this logic, will students understand ideas better if they explain them out loud? For instance: will an oral presentation to the class help my students […]

Educators have long rejected the idea of a Brave New World version of schooling—students programmed, standardized, and engineered for compliance. We resist the image of children treated like interchangeable parts in a system optimized for efficiency. And yet, despite that resistance, we often participate in a quieter version of the same logic. We design instruction, […]

Imagine I told you that “we have research showing that SINGING leads to more learning.” I suspect you would not feel surprised, but you would have a few follow up questions: And so forth. You might have the same set of reactions if someone says to you “we have research showing that HUMOR helps in […]

When our students learn — or pay attention, or feel motivated — all sorts of amazing things happen in their brains. Neurons connect and neurotransmitters zip. The prefrontal cortex (PFC) coordinates executive functions; the default mode network (DMN) helps consolidate prior learning. It’s all so cool! A recent study invites us to reconsider: how do […]