iPads, MakerEd and More in Education

"To reap the benefits of music on learning, kids need consistent and abundant musical practice, according to the latest cognitive research."

If you find yourself frustrated trying to keep up with the school packets, video chats, and virtual office hours, take a deep breath and a step back. Official school activities are important, but there are plenty of everyday activities that count as learning too. These kinds of activities have their limits (kids aren’t going to learn calculus from cooking dinner), but overall, you can feel good about kids furthering their learning through these at-home activities.

“A boy at my table made fun of me during math today,” my second-grader told me one evening after bedtime. Worries tend to spill out after lights out.

“He said, ‘What?! You are still working on that packet? I finished that yesterday.’ ”

Swallowing my fierce first reaction, I said, “Oh, so how did you handle it?”

“I told him, ‘I like my learning pace. Your fast pace doesn’t work for me. I take my time.’ ”

I was stunned by her courage and her practical insight: speeding through the material is not the path to academic mastery.

In my work as an education journalist, I often take research about learning and the brain and translate it into usable chunks of information for parents and teachers. But this fall, I took on a personal challenge. Could I teach my 8-year-old about how the brain learns? And could this knowledge help her strengthen her academic confidence and agility?

An important part of learning and teaching is the art of reflection. As teachers, we need to be reflective in our practice so that we can continue to grow, be prepared to meet our students’ needs, and evaluate our own skills and growth. It is important that we model this same practice for our students so that they can develop their own reflective practices and build skills of metacognition in preparation for their future. Metacognition enables students to reflect on who they are, what they know, what they want to know, and how they can get to that point. I’m not an expert but this is a topic that I’ve become more interested in so I started to look into multiple resources to learn more.

“[Adolescence is] a stage of life when we can really thrive, but we need to take advantage of the opportunity,” said Temple University neuroscientist Laurence Steinberg at a Learning and the Brain conference in Boston. Steinberg has spent his career studying how the adolescent brain develops and believes there is a fundamental disconnect between the popular characterizations of adolescents and what’s really going on in their brains.

Because the brain is still developing during adolescence, it has incredible plasticity. It’s akin to the first five years of life, when a child’s brain is growing and developing new pathways all the time in response to experiences. Adult brains are somewhat plastic as well -- otherwise they wouldn’t be able to learn new things -- but “brain plasticity in adulthood involves minor changes to existing circuits, not the wholesale development of new ones or elimination of others,” Steinberg said.

Adolescence is the last time in a person’s life that the brain can be so dramatically overhauled.

Teachers know that students learn a tremendous amount from scrutinizing their mistakes, but getting them to take the time to stop and reflect is a challenge. Some teachers have stopped giving grades altogether to try to refocus class on learning instead of on grades. For others, that's too extreme. Leah Alcala, a seventh- and eighth-grade math teacher at King Middle School in Berkeley, California, developed a grading strategy that falls somewhere in the middle.

"What I was finding when I was handing back tests the old way, where I put a grade on it, was kids would look at their grade, decide whether they were good at math or not, and put the test away and never look at it again," Alcala says in a Teaching Channel video featuring her strategy.

Now when she returns tests, Alcala highlights mistakes and hands the tests back to students without a grade. She doesn't tell them what they did wrong; they have to figure that out.

"By not putting a grade on the test, I feel like what I'm allowing them to do is wrestle with the math they produced for me first and think of the grade second," Alcala said.

Today, if you asked me about my most memorable learning failures, I will tell you I am glad they happened.

My errors have made me a better teacher and learner. I can now relate to students who have a difficult time understanding a concept.  The failures themselves may not have been my strongest point, but what I learned from them was invaluable.  Mistakes can be excellent learning opportunities.

There have been a lot of predictions about the future of work, particularly around the growth of an automated work presence and how people might be replaced by or work alongside artificial intelligence. But what impact will the future of work have on the future of learning?

The #DLNchat community recently explored this question of work and learning, and while there was some disagreement about how much society can predict about specific jobs in the coming decades, there was agreement about how higher ed institutions can help prepare its students for whatever careers lie ahead.

Technology is rapidly changing the world around us. Nowhere is this more evident than at work where jobs and the skills they require are evolving on a seemingly daily basis. Advancements in analytics, artificial intelligence, and automation promise to help tomorrow’s workers get more done more quickly, freeing them up for more meaningful tasks. The problem: While today’s young workers are ready to embrace Industry 4.0, many don’t feel equipped to do so.

According to the 2018 Deloitte Millennial Survey, just 36% of millennials and 29% of Gen Z believe they are fully prepared with the skills and knowledge required to thrive in tomorrow’s workforce. And 10% and 8%, respectively, fear they lack the necessary skills entirely. Many of these skills are, of course, specialized technical ones such as coding and project management. But young workers say they want to brush up on their soft skills as well. These include interpersonal skills, emotional intelligence, critical thinking, creativity, and, for Gen Z in particular, aptitude in integrity and ethics.

This focus on soft skills makes sense given where work is headed. As technology takes over and augments basic work tasks, jobs will become more service-oriented. That will put a premium on second-level skills such as adaptability, creativity, and agility, which is why young people are so invested in learning them.

American teacher Timothy Walker learned more effective ways to teach when he moved to Finland and pulled back from cramming too much into one day.

I’ve often heard students tell me they studied for hours on a test only to fail. Why? It is not unusual for some students to review what they already know and skip more difficult tasks. Yet evidence exists that providing timely, effective feedback is particularly beneficial for struggling learners. It is this feedback that allows students to differentiate what they know from what they don’t—metacognition.

Last semester I lived through one of the most profound and sudden changes to education in modern history - the release of ChatGPT at the end of November. When I introduced my students to the new technology a week later, there was an extraordinary amount of excitement and creativity, and also a lot of anxiety (mostly from me) about what this means for the future. That anxiety has spread everywhere in education. And now I am teaching in the first full semester in a post-ChatGPT world. I have written extensively in the last month about the need to embrace this new technology in education. Now, I am trying to do just that.

All of my classes have become AI classes. And I wanted to share with you the experiments I am running to integrate AI into class (I will update you later in the semester about how they are going).