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Learning science is always advancing, yielding new insights about how people gain and retain knowledge and skills. How can classroom teachers keep up—and even conduct their very own research to improve their instruction, day-by-day and week-by-week? We dig into these questions and more in this week’s episode of the EdSurge Podcast. It was recorded during … Read more
As homebound students and teachers looked for online resources during the pandemic, many turned to Scratch, a free coding system for kids developed by the MIT Media Lab. Scratch was already a popular option. It’s been around since 2007 as a way to make animations and simple video games by combining Lego-like icons representing different … Read more
It sounds at first like a typical assignment for a high school English class. Students at Belmont Hill School are asked to think of someone they encounter in their daily lives who might need a financial boost and record a short video essay about them and why they’re important in their lives. Then comes the … Read more
The pandemic has made clear the deep inequities in our society, especially within the educational system. And it became clear the many roles schools play beyond academics: like getting lunches to those who can’t afford them and providing a robust childcare system that makes it possible for parents and guardians to be employed outside the … Read more
Imagine yourself in a kindergarten classroom. Amidst bright walls and happy chatter, students are bustling about, moving from station to station to explore different concepts related to shadows and light. At one station, a little boy named David is holding a stick up to a lightbulb to form shadows, and using Unifix Cubes to measure … Read more
Fresh out of college with a mandate to effect change through the gift of educating the nation’s youth, teachers of every level come into the profession with great intentions. So many of them, however, have come through educator preparation programs that have not properly prepared them for the diversity they will face in today’s classrooms, … Read more
Long before the advent of personal computers, inventors and researchers created what they called “teaching machines” in hopes of revolutionizing education. Some of these creations date back to the 1920s, and were made from wood and brass. Yet today’s edtech leaders often ignore or choose to forget this history, argues Audrey Watters, a longtime critical … Read more
About a month into each semester, Gayle Golden sets aside a little time to ask her students about their learning. The journalism instructor at the University of Minnesota keeps the process simple, with brief questions similar to these: What should keep happening in this class? What should we start doing in this class? What should … Read more
A few weeks after Kali Klingler—and millions of other students across the country—had started remote learning last spring, her district announced that its school buildings would remain closed for the rest of the academic year. They would finish out the semester online. It came as a bit of a shock to most. Some students experienced … Read more
The following is the latest installment of the Toward Better Teaching advice column. You can pose a question for a future column here. Reader Question: Dear Bonni, I know that both you and your husband have podcasts and that you love not only producing them, but consuming them. Do you use podcasts in your teaching, … Read more