Education
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Why Some Students Think They Dislike Reading
by Terry Heick We tend to teach reading in a very industrial way. We focus on giving kids ‘tools’ and ‘strategies’ to ‘make’ sense of a text. To ‘take the text apart’. To look for the ‘author’s purpose’—to bounce back and forth between a main idea, and the details that ‘support’ the main idea, as if the reading is some…
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Teach Students To Think Irrationally
Teach Students To Think Irrationally by Terry Heick Formal learning is a humbling thing. As planners, designers, executors, and general caretakers of public and private education systems, we are tasked with the insurmountable: overcome a child’s natural tendency to play, rebel, and self-direct in hopes of providing them with a ‘good education.’ Reading, writing, arithmetic, etc. And this isn’t wrong.…
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What Is Education Technology? – TeachThought
Introduction As a culture (and society and nation and species), we use language and words and phrases so often that they can be emptied of meaning. They kind of just fly out of our mouth: education technology and it’s just a noun that precedes another noun and predicate and off we go, leaving it in behind. Education technology. But exactly…
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On Teachers And Teaching And The Essential Criticism Of It All
In 2015 (and updated most recently in 2024), I wrote a post about helping students learn more from ‘others’ than they do from you (the teacher). The general premise is that modern learning is, in large part, about access, networks, spaces, and personalization–and there’s simply no way for a single teacher to ‘do’ this. In fact, it’s important to note…
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Things You Can Say To Encourage A Child
by TeachThought Staff There are many ways to encourage a child, but for students of any age, honest, authentic, and persistent messages from adults that have credibility in their eyes are among the most powerful. The National Center on Quality Teaching and Learning has put together a graphic below–50 Ways To Encourage A Child. It was designed for younger students (head…
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Some Thoughts On Knowledge And Knowledge Limits
Knowledge is limited. Knowledge deficits are unlimited. Knowing something–all of the things you don’t know collectively is a form of knowledge. There are many forms of knowledge–let’s think of knowledge in terms of physical weights, for now. Vague awareness is a ‘light’ form of knowledge: low weight and intensity and duration and urgency. Then specific awareness, maybe. Notions and observations,…
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Wendell Berry And Preparing Students For “Good Work”
by Terry Heick The influence of Berry on my life–and thus inseparably from my teaching and learning–has been immeasurable. His ideas on scale, limits, accountability, community, and careful thinking have a place in larger conversations about economy, culture, and vocation, if not politics, religion, and anyplace else where common sense fails to linger. But what about education? Below is a…
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Periodic Table Song – Video & Lesson Ideas
The New Periodic Table Song In Order (To Make You And Your Students Crazy) by TeachThought Staff There once was periodic table song whose frenzied pace and extraordinary organization made it seemingly irreplaceable–a classic among classics. There was no need for another. But in an answer to a question no one asked, the good folks at asapSCIENCE have gone back to…
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The Difference Between Children And Students
In 2013, I wrote a post for edutopia exploring the difference between students and learners. As ‘learning trends’ become the basis for full-on institutions of learning (see the Avenues: World School and North Star: Self-Directed Learning for Teens for two examples), these kinds of ideas are being field-tested, moving them from wishful thinking and feel-good rhetoric to actual real-world application. Education constantly…
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20 Examples Of Project-Based Learning – TeachThought
by TeachThought Staff In 13 Brilliant Outcomes Of Project-Based Learning, we gave a quick example of project-based learning to illustrate the relationship between learning objectives and the products and artifacts produced by project-based learning. “As the name implies, project-based learning is simply learning through projects. What is being learned and how that learning is being measured isn’t strictly dictated by…
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