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The problem comes when the database and the engine go from )ach to oracle. It happens quite often that I will ask one of the students about a move from one of their games, and why he made it. If the move comes early on, the answer is almost always, "Because that's the nain line." That is, that's the theoretical move…
As our modern dinosaurs crash down around us, I sometimes wonder what kind of humans will eventually walk out of this epic transformation. Trump and the populism that’s rampaging around the world today, marked by xenophobia, racism, sexism, and rising inequality, is greatly amplified by the forces the GDE has…
She remembered psychologist Erik Erickson's exhortation about teenagers: they need a "psychosocial moratorium," he wrote, an environment and a stretch of time in which they can explore different aspects of their personality and try on a series of identities without fear of consequence. In a way, that was what school…
A student's skill level should be a private matter, between him and the teacher, and students who are behind should be able to work comfortably, without embarrassment. "They know they should know more. They know they should not be working on tens and ones when their friends are doing division and fractions and all…
According to Devlin, teachers have a responsibility to learn about kids' interests. "It's not the students' responsibility to put themselves in our place. As teachers, it's our responsibility to put ourselves in the students' place. And if they are in a digital world, where they will invest many hours solving…
The 2016 paper, “Off-task behavior in elementary school children,” was published in the peer-reviewed journal Learning and Instruction, and was funded by the Institute of Education Sciences, an arm of the Department of Education. The researchers also kept track of how the teachers were instructing students during…
A prominent author who recently disagreed with me on a technical matter quickly labelled me as belonging to a ‘department of bullshit’. Ouch! How is it possible not to get offended by this sort of thing, especially when it’s coming not from an anonymous troll, but from a famous guy with more than 200,000 followers? By…
Teachers should create situations where the students are required to locate the facts and information specifically related to the context of the question at hand, and then to utilize that information effectively. An example is the Jasper Mathematics series created by the Vanderbilt University's Peabody College of…
Teachers are partnering with students to establish a new rhythm in classroom questioning. This rhythm provides teachers and students with a silence for thinking at two crucial junctions in the questioning process: • Wait Time 1: After a question is posed but before a student is called on to answer. • Wait Time 2…
Most real-world numbers aren’t always so nice and neat, with wholenumber multiples. If, say, Plant A grew from 2 to 3 feet, and Plant B grew from 6 to 8 feet, then we would say that Plant A grew 1/2 of its original height, whereas Plant B only grew 1/3 of its original height. Such reasoning exemplifies multiplicative…
Great Cooperative games make the play experience deliberately difficult; the game shouldn't be a cake walk. Mr. Glass's decision, therefore, is for him to assume the role of the game and present himself in opposition to his students—the players. He does this by instructing his students (working in groups designed to…
They had five days to play (Ultima IV), and I asked them to make as much progress as they could in that time. When we gathered to debrief in class, a few students explained how they’d overcome some of their difficulties, but the vast majority was utterly flummoxed by the game. As one of them put it, “I’d say for…
Choral reading gives students the experience of reading aloud without the stress of reading alone. Based upon the previously described research demonstrating that repeated stimulation of neuronal networks increases their efficiency, it makes sense that the experience of reading aloud together reinforces patterns. When…
Words are fundamentally conceptual—although they are physical objects, they represent something ideational. Just giving students definitions of words or having them evaluate the context of word use does not fully use the brain’s patterning style of identifying information. Th e value of word pattern sorting extends…
Students appear to use a different kind of thinking when they create original patterns following rules they create (Grabowski, Damasio, & Damasio, 1998). Activities that engage students in building categories can start as early as preschool. Building category practice can be done with a bag of mixed buttons. After…
...students learn by doing. Testing for abstraction on an exam can’t be the only way we’re evaluating student learning. If I had taken an exam on leadership in World of Warcraft, I would have likely failed, because the way I was engaged was through the practice of performing the leadership, not by talking or quizzing…
When we make the standards and objectives transparent for students, we empower them to be active in our learning choices as well. I have found that when students know what the previous year’s standard is and where we were headed in our learning, they are eager to co-construct our learning. Students care about being…
Dr. Mays uses the Simultaneous Action Selection mechanic to structure his lesson. He creates two decks of cards—one with names of different cellular components (e.g., ribosomes, endoplasmic reticulum) and another with a wide assortment of cellular functions and processes. He seats students in groups of five or six and…
Ms. Spooner, a long-time game player, realizes that the Racing/Grid Movement mechanic is the right choice for her students because it is particularly good at helping to assess highly granular pieces of content or skills. She envisions a game in which her students are divided into two- or threeperson teams. She wants…
Dr. Boxer decides to create a game board that depicts a cell and pieces for 12 different materials that might be transported into or out of the cell. Students are assigned to teams and given the opportunity to place certain materials either in the cell or in the bloodstream (which surrounds the cell and through which…