Researchers measured the impact of student-directed project weeks on their sense of motivation over the course of a school year. We reflect on the importance of consistently prioritizing learner agency throughout the year, rather than sequestering it to a single week of freedom. Later, we read a review of research on learning math in bilingual… Read More »

This month we talk with Dr. Elisabeth Tipton about the research support for growth mindset interventions, and the flaws in last month’s meta-analysis. Together we consider how growth mindset should be part of a more comprehensive approach to helping students improve. Later, we read how listening to music reduces our ability to use our working… Read More »

A meta-analysis of co-teaching showed that it benefits students to have more than one adult in the classroom, regardless of the specifics. We reflect on what it could mean to successfully build a co-teaching classroom based on trust among the teachers and students. Later, we read another meta-analysis that is sharply critical of the current… Read More »

This month we reflect on our year of reading scholarship and growing as humans. First we’ll return to the segments we felt had the greatest impact on our practice and our thinking from the research we read. Later, we’ll reflect specifically on our praxis. We share some of the changes we’re making in our classroom… Read More »

Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (PBIS) is a framework being adopted by many schools, and some claim it can integrate trauma-informed pedagogies. However, we read scholarship that shows how PBIS is fundamentally incompatible with trauma-informed education. Later, we discuss a large-scale reciprocal reading study with significant impacts for some students is still not effective for… Read More »

Many schools have adopted new instructional standards in recent years, but some schools have struggled in helping teachers align their instruction. We talk with author Morgan Polikoff about his team’s work studying why flexible specificity is so important for success. Later, we look at a very large study of a belonging intervention that helps students… Read More »

Feedback is an essential component of professional growth, and teacher evaluation has changed in most places across the US over the last 15 years. What do we actually know about how those changes impacted school performance? Later, we read a study that showed retrieval practice is only beneficial when we have working memory resources to… Read More »

Universal Design for Learning represents a framework that can impact every part of the school. We read research looking at how UDL can contribute to more effective MTSS Tier 1 interventions… if teachers have an accurate understanding of UDL. Later, we look at an eye-tracking study to examine how students process feedback differently. The authors… Read More »

This month we are joined by two authors of a piece on constraints that fuel creativity. They share how limits on our writing help us focus on new parts of the writing process and make interesting connections along the way. Later, we read about how errors are essential to the learning process and what we… Read More »

This month we look at professional development. A fresh framework for PD lays out how we need to consider teacher learning in-context, with definite answers to the “for whom” and “when” when discussing whether something works. Later, we look at norms for co-teaching by examining the role of a mentor teacher while a student teacher… Read More »