Teaching: Best practice ideas

Published on May 6, 2014

Pluto Media's Koala Band helps kids learn musical concepts, connecting with each other IRL to meet up in tablet-based games they can play together and create their own content for.

A familiar routine: A teacher asks the class a question, several students raise their hands, the teacher selects one of those, the student responds, the teacher evaluates the student's response, and the cycle begins again. Teachers use this routine to assess where students are. Yet just about every aspect of this scenario actually gets in the way of learning—and it doesn't provide enough information on what most students in the class know and need to learn.

Sir Ken Robinson outlines 3 principles crucial for the human mind to flourish -- and how current education culture works against them. In a funny, stirring talk he tells us how to get out of the educational "death valley" we now face, and how to nurture our youngest generations with a climate of possibility.

Creativity expert Sir Ken Robinson challenges the way we're educating our children. He champions a radical rethink of our school systems, to cultivate creativity and acknowledge multiple types of intelligence

Many parents are beginning to grasp the idea that maybe what grandpa is always railing about off in the corner – “using your noodle,” and “good old American ingenuity,” and “we never threw anything away,” and “back in my day we started working in the farm/factory right when we was out of diapers” – is not so far off the mark.

Austin Tinkering School (ATS) is addressing just that idea. As one possible antidote to “helicopter parenting” (over/hyper protective, super competitive, and controlling of every aspect of the child’s life, taking away their innate problem-solving and coping abilities), the school gives kids the place and space to mess around with power tools, saws, hammers, paint, and design problem solving starting as young as 3 years old. The school says, “Adults serve as collaborators rather than teachers for maximum engagement, interest, enthusiasm, and enjoyment.”

What are the best ways to combat the trend toward plagiarism?

How can we best teach our students to value and practice original thinking?

How can we structure research so that students must make answers rather than just finding them?

It took a life-threatening condition to jolt chemistry teacher Ramsey Musallam out of ten years of “pseudo-teaching” to understand the true role of the educator: to cultivate curiosity. In a fun and personal talk, Musallam gives 3 rules to spark imagination and learning, and get students excited about how the world works.

As a high school chemistry teacher, Ramsey Musallam expands curiosity in the classroom through multimedia and new technology.

Leader and educator Sumantra Ghoshal contrasts his birthplace (Kolkata) and his hometown (Fontainebleau). "Typical of Ghoshal's colourful communication was what he called his “springtime theory”. He would tell his audiences about his annual visit to Calcutta to see his parents in July. “Imagine the heat,” he would say, “the humidity, the noise, the dirt. It sucks up all your energy, drains your brain, and exhausts your imagination.” And then he would take them to the forest of Fontainebleau, near INSEAD, where he was a professor at the time, and point to “the smell of the trees, the crispness in the air, the flowers, the grass underfoot. How one's heart lifts up, how the energy and creativity bubble away.” Go through the door of any business, he would say, and you can tell whether it is Calcutta or Fontainebleau. A manager's task is to create a working environment that is like Fontainebleau, not Calcutta." From The Economist http://www.economist.com/node/13760551

Jim Peterson and William & Pérsida Himmele provide practical suggestions on how to get our students participating more in class more of the time.

Leaving a high-flying job in consulting, Angela Lee Duckworth took a job teaching math to seventh graders in a New York public school. She quickly realized that IQ wasn’t the only thing separating the successful students from those who struggled. Here, she explains her theory of “grit” as a predictor of success.

At the University of Pennsylvania, Angela Lee Duckworth studies intangible concepts such as self-control and grit to determine how they might predict both academic and professional success

 Living rooms, dens, kitchens, even bedrooms: Investigators followed students into the spaces where homework gets done. For a quarter of an hour, the investigators from the lab of Larry Rosen, a psychology professor, marked down once a minute what the students were doing as they studied. A checklist on the form included: reading a book, writing on paper, typing on the computer—and also using email, looking at Facebook, engaging in instant messaging etc. Although the students had been told at the outset that they should “study something important, including homework, an upcoming examination or project, or reading a book for a course,” it wasn’t long before their attention drifted: Students’ “on-task behavior” started declining around the two-minute mark as they began responding to arriving texts or checking their Facebook feeds. By the time the 15 minutes were up, they had spent only about 65 percent of the observation period actually doing their schoolwork. “We were amazed at how frequently they multitasked, even though they knew someone was watching,” Rosen says. “It really seems that they could not go for 15 minutes without engaging their devices,” adding, “It was kind of scary, actually.”

The strawberry yogurt smacked my arm, gushing down my dress. As the class of high schoolers erupted into laughter and tears burned my eyes, a thought erupted in my mind: "My teacher education program did not prepare me for this first year." Not only was I miserable, but students could not learn in the classroom I had created.

Ten years—and two times almost quitting—later, I now love my teaching career and can do it well. Last month the National Council on Teacher Quality released a report evaluating teacher-prep programs, and the deficiencies found in so many of them reminded me of how ill-prepared I was. Rather than pile on, I want to share a few elements of what I think a quality teacher-preparation program should have for the sake of new teachers and the kids in their classes.

Until recently, many teachers only got one word of feedback a year: “satisfactory.” And with no feedback, no coaching, there’s just no way to improve. Bill Gates suggests that even great teachers can get better with smart feedback -- and lays out a program from his foundation to bring it to every classroom.

A passionate techie and a shrewd businessman, Bill Gates changed the world once, while leading Microsoft to dizzying success. Now he's set to do it again with his own style of philanthropy and passion for innovation.

Why, why, why does our education system look so similar to the way it did 50 years ago? Millions of students were failing then, as they are now -- and it’s because we’re clinging to a business model that clearly doesn’t work. Education advocate Geoffrey Canada dares the system to look at the data, think about the customers and make systematic shifts in order to help greater numbers of kids excel.

Geoffrey Canada has spent decades as head of the Harlem Children’s Zone, which supports kids from birth through college in order to break the cycle of poverty.

Among the many challenges teachers face, often the most difficult is how to engage students who seem unreachable, who resist learning activities, or who disrupt them for others. This is also one of the challenges that skilled teachers have some control over. In my nine years of teaching high school, I've found that one of the best approaches to engaging challenging students is to develop their intrinsic motivation.

The root of intrinsic is the Latin intrinsecus, a combination of two words meaning within and alongside. It's likely that our students are intrinsically motivated—just motivated to follow their own interests, not to do what we want them to do. Teachers' challenge is to work alongside our students, to know their interests and goals, and to develop trusting relationships that help students connect their learning to their goals in a way that motivates from within.

Rita Pierson, a teacher for 40 years, once heard a colleague say, "They don't pay me to like the kids." Her response: "Kids don't learn from people they don’t like.’” A rousing call to educators to believe in their students and actually connect with them on a real, human, personal level.

Rita F. Pierson has spent her entire life in or around the classroom, having followed both her parents and grandparents into a career as an educator.