Cultivating a Love for Self-Directed Learning

Recently I’ve been using the internet to learn about Google Apps for Education in order to pass at least five tests to become a “Google Educator.”

I’ve spent the last two months studying, and one of the biggest takeaways upon reflection is how important it is to cultivate within young students a willingness to learn on their own.

With so much information at our fingertips, developing new skills has never been easier. Young people must understand that learning never stops. Too many programs are being created and changed on a continual basis, making it impossible to exit college and never participate in another lecture, tutorial, how-to book, etc.

Learning is not always easy. Sometimes it’s very difficult, so the educational system must instill a willingness to keep learning so students will never cease their intellectual and skill set growth.

How can this be done?

That’s the trillion dollar question. The best place to start is to teach content the students find relevant and even enjoyable. Give them tools that foster creativity. Allow them to publish their work to a wider audience than just the teacher or classroom. Make learning 24/7. These are essentials for today’s young generation.

I’ve been a proponent of teaching students how to code. It will always be important to provide young people with the most recent technological skills so they can have a foundation to build upon as they progress through their education until the day they enter the workforce.

 

It’s also apparent, however, that computer programming is changing – perhaps to a large extent even disappearing. The tools that are being created now such as Adobe’s Muse, which allows designers to create websites without writing a line of code, can very well make website creation much more ubiquitous.

Here’s what’s happening: The tools for communication, creativity, and production are becoming more sophisticated and easier to use. Programming will be important for creating these tools, but more and more people will be given the power to create professional websites that they couldn’t have created years, or even months, ago.

It’s because of this that we need to teach students how to think, not necessarily how to do a particular skill. I repeat, I’ll always support teaching students how to code, but there are important goals educators must have, and they include:

• Developing a love for learning
• Being able to teach students how to learn, unlearn, and relearn as times change
• Teaching students how to have the wherewithal to think critically and on their feet

These are the foundations we build skills such as coding upon, and it’s important to note that coding can help train someone how to think, so there’s definitely a dual purpose there.

The bottom line, however, is that students must know that learning never ceases.

The Right Attitude is crucial for learning

 

After teaching for the past one year, I got the first-hand experience of the meaning of “You can lead the horse to the water but you cannot make the horse drink it if it doesn’t want to.”

We can teach students the means of scoring, spot questions for them and give them as much practice as we can, but if the heart is not willing, there’s nothing we can do. I am sure a lot of parents had such frustrations.

Earlier this year, when we first started classes, we got to know this smart boy in Primary 6. His grades were not satisfactory- when I gave him extra assignments, he would get all of them wrong. However, he would be able to answer them if I asked him again in person.

I knew that if I didn’t do something about it, no amount of training would be useful, so I requested to have a private dinner with him. Just the two of us.

I brought him to a fancy restaurant with a sea view and asked him to order any food that he wanted. I told him I was spending time outside my work and classes because I care and we have faith in him. I fed him with my grandfather stories and tried to convince him that he should study hard.

Fortunately, in the months to come, I saw a change in him. He tried to improve. We play games in class where I test my students on their past mistakes. Very often, he would be the pillar in his team as he would be the one who remembered the correct answers.

His attitude has changed and he had become more industrious and sensible. And that’s most vital. Regardless of the eventual grade, I believe one will succeed in life if he has the right attitude.

That’s just one of the ways I try to get my students interested in studying.

I don’t talk down to my students and I have never scolded someone for not doing their homework (as that will probably backfire.)

We are equals in class and students can point out my mistakes. We play games to get them interested and camouflage the fact that they are doing drills.

If we have daily assignments, I try my best to return the work to them by the next day at the latest- I want them to know I am working hard with them and they can rely on me.

More importantly, just like how I want them to study with their heart, I care for them from the bottom of my heart. It makes a difference to have an adult/mentor figure genuinely concerned about your welfare.

I can’t say I will be successful in motivating every student I meet but I will definitely try my best for everyone. I aim to help as many students as I can and change them for the better within my means.

I think, that should be the approach to education.
 

How a Bigger Purpose Can Motivate Students to Learn

A few years ago, psychologist David Yeager and his colleagues noticed something interesting while interviewing high school students in the San Francisco Bay Area about their hopes, dreams and life goals.

It was no surprise that students often said that making money, attaining fame or pursuing a career that they enjoyed were important to them. But many of them also spoke of additionally wanting to make a positive impact on their community or society — such as by becoming a doctor to take care of people, or a pastor who “makes a difference.” What’s more, the teens with these “pro-social” types of goals tended to rate their schoolwork as more personally meaningful.

Given this information, Yeager and his colleagues wanted to know: could such a bigger sense of purpose that looks beyond one’s own self-interests be a real and significant inspiration for learning? They believe the answer is yes. And they’ve devised a new social psychology intervention to foster a “purposeful learning” mindset as another way to motivate pupils to persevere in their studies. Yeager, now based at the University of Texas (UT) at Austin, conducted the work in collaboration with UT colleague Marlone Henderson, David Paunesku and Greg Walton of Stanford, “grit” guru Angela Duckworth of the University of Pennsylvania, and others.

They recently explored purposeful learning in a series of four studies and put their intervention to the test against one of the banes of learning: boredom. Initial promising results suggest the psychology strategy could encourage pupils to plug away at homework or learning tasks that are challenging or tedious, yet necessary to getting an education that’ll help them reach their greater life goals.

Can Drudgery Be Eliminated from Learning?

The idea of drudgery in schoolwork is anathema to many progressive educators these days. Game-based approaches to learning are far favored over “drill-and-kill” exercises. And while an emphasis on fortifying students’ academic “grit” and self-discipline in their study habits has been explored in depth, it’s controversial. Along with criticisms about deeper implications relating to race and poverty, some observers say the buzz over grit neglects the need to make dull classroom lessons more compelling to today’s learners. As education author Alfie Kohn has written, “not everything is worth doing, let alone doing for extended periods, and not everyone who works hard is pursuing something worthwhile.”

It’s complicated, though. At Stanford’s Project for Education Research that Scales, Paunesku believes that teachers and educators should make learning more engaging wherever possible. “However, the reality is that schoolwork is often neither interesting nor meaningful,” he said — at least, not in a way that students immediately get. “It’s hard for students to understand why doing algebra, for example, really matters or why it’ll help them or why it will make a difference in their life.” Yet, he noted, such work is often key in building basic skills and knowledge they’ll need for a successful future.
With that in mind, Yeager and Paunesku designed an intervention that subtly guides students to connect their academic efforts with pro-social long-term goals, to see whether it might help inspire them to plow through assignments that are “boring but important.”

As a baseline, the research team first investigated a mindset of “self-transcendent” purposeful learning by surveying 1,364 low-income high-school seniors at 10 urban public schools in California, Texas, Arkansas and New York. The teenagers sat down at a computer and took an “academic diligence task” devised by Duckworth and Sidney D’Mello of the University of Notre Dame. For a few minutes, the participants had the choice of either doing lots of simple, tedious math subtraction problems, or watching YouTube video clips or playing Tetris.

The students with a purposeful-learning attitude (who agreed with socially oriented statements like “I want to become an educated citizen that can contribute to society”) scored higher on measures of grit and self-control than classmates who only reported self-oriented motives for learning such as wanting to get a good job or earn more money. The purposeful learners were also less likely to succumb to the digital distractions, answering more math problems on the diligence task — and they were more likely to be enrolled in college the following fall, the researchers found.

The Potential of a Purposeful Mindset

Next, a pilot experiment tested the sense-of-purpose intervention to see if it would improve grades in math and science (two subjects often seen as uninteresting): The researchers asked 338 ninth graders at a middle-class Bay Area high school to log online for a 20- to 30-minute reading and writing exercise. The teenagers read a brief article and specific quotes from other students, all conveying the message that many adolescents work hard in school not just to gain knowledge for, say, pursuing a career they like — but also because they want to achieve “something that matters for the world.”

Study participants then wrote short testimonials to other, future students describing how high school would help them become the kind of person they want to be or make an impact on society. As one teen explained, “I believe learning in school will give me the rudimentary skills to survive in the world. Science will give me a good base for my career in environmental engineering. I want to be able to solve our energy problems.” Another ninth grader wrote that having an education “allows me to form well-supported, well-thought opinions about the world. I will not be able to help anyone without first going to school.”

A few months later, at the end of the grading quarter, the researchers observed positive effects from the intervention, most notably in the weakest students: Underachieving pupils saw their low GPAs go up by 0.2 points. That’s a helpful improvement, said UT Austin’s Henderson, because many pivotal educational decisions hang in the balance based on a GPA cutoff. A few tenths of a point can make or break a student’s acceptance into a program or a school, which could in turn affect what type of job she ends up getting and ultimately, the salary she earns, Henderson said.

“GPA is really a better long-term predictor of not just educational outcomes but all kinds of positive life outcomes,” commented education researcher Camille Farrington of the University of Chicago. A 0.2 point gain in GPA could bump a B to a B+ or a B+ to an A-, she noted, which is an important impact given how brief and relatively inexpensive the sense-of-purpose treatment was. Many other education interventions take a lot more time, energy and money, yet “don’t give any more of a bump than that,” she said.

How Does It Work?

As with other kinds of academic mindset strategies, the benefit from the sense-of-purpose intervention “almost seems like magic,” Henderson said. But it’s not, (as Yeager and Walton have previously elaborated). The research team ran two other experiments (with college undergrads) that helped unpack how the intervention might work: by motivating students to engage in deeper learning, and by bolstering self-control in resisting tempting distractions from schoolwork (as measured again by Duckworth and D’Mello’s diligence test).

What a purposeful mindset does for students is that “when they encounter challenges, difficulty or things that could potentially be roadblocks to learning, it motivates them to persist and barrel through,” Henderson said. The psychology researchers don’t know how long the positive effects last, but they speculate that just a small shift in students’ attitudes could spark a chain reaction of stronger academic performance and confidence that builds upon itself and endures over time.

Such a payoff can be hard to believe. After all, grownups have forever been telling children any number of reasons why a good education is important for their future. But here’s the thing: The technique for nurturing a sense-of-purpose mentality is designed so that “the student owns that and kind of puts those pieces together in their own heads, for themselves,” Farrington noted. “And that is a different thing than your mom or your teacher telling you, it’s important to do this because blah, blah, blah, blah.”

Other, self-oriented goals such as making money or getting out of their parents’ house didn’t seem to inspire students as much as the self-transcendent goals did in the studies. That’s worth noting, Farrington said, especially considering that youths from low-income backgrounds are often exhorted to study hard so that they can get out of their disadvantaged neighborhoods and go to college or find a good job. If the research results are right, these kids may get more motivational mileage out of the goal of making a meaningful contribution to the world. “That’s consistent with what we know in social psychology: that people are motivated by, they care about having meaning in their life,” she said.

The sense-of-purpose work is just in its beginning stages, Henderson said, with the psychologists still tinkering to improve the intervention. They want to explore whether the technique can reduce student cheating, and whether teachers can “activate” the purposeful-learning mindset by writing simple, subtle and carefully tailored messages of feedback on classwork, he said.

Finding Meaning in Schoolwork

The experiments with the new strategy beg the question of whether the researchers are implicitly endorsing drill-and-kill-style learning. They aren’t, Paunesku is quick to say. He’s all for project-based learning and other efforts to make school more relevant and alluring for students. Yet, he added, it isn’t practical or possible to render every lesson or assignment in K-12 “super fun and game-y” for kids — and even if it were, doing so could be a disservice to them later. What would they do when they get to law school and are faced with having to memorize long lists of laws? Or when they land a job that calls for mastering information that no one has “gamefied” to make it exciting to learn?

Students go to school not just to learn specific facts, he pointed out. They’re learning how to learn, how to practice self-discipline and motivate themselves through frustrating roadblocks, and thus are preparing for adulthood. That’s important even if it isn’t always fascinating, he said. But having that bigger sense of purpose, that personal mission of making a positive difference in the broader world, might help students to find meaning in difficult or mundane schoolwork. “If you think about it the right way, you can actually be motivated and you can find it interesting, even if on the surface it’s not fun,” Paunesku said.

Can Everyone Be Smart at Everything?

 

When a student gets a good grade, wins an award, or proudly holds up a painting, we all know by now that we’re not supposed to say, “Good job!” Praising the achievement rather than the effort will backfire.

 

To a kid, “Good job” means “You’re smart” or “You’re talented” — the praise goes to inherent, natural-born abilities or intelligence. But that immediate spark of self-pride will turn into deep self-doubt when the child invariably comes across a bigger challenge and doesn’t immediately succeed.

 

 

Kids who are praised for their intelligence end up caring more about grades, trophies, and awards than those who are praised for their effort, according to the famous 1998 Stanford report “Effects of Intelligence and Effort Praise” by Claudia Mueller and Carol Dweck. The study showed that “after failure, kids also displayed less task persistence, less task enjoyment, more low-ability attributions, and worse task performance than children praised for effort.”

 

 

But there’s another by-product: children praised for intelligence “described it as a fixed trait more than children praised for hard work, who believed it to be subject to improvement.”
 

Why is that such a bad thing? Because telling kids they’re smart when they get good grades encourages them to continue focusing on the grade rather than the learning process. They just want to keep being smart. 

 

BEYOND SMARTS

 

In more recent years, research on how the brain learns is building on those studies. “How we learn shapes what we know and what we can do,” writes author Annie Murphy Paul in a recent Time column. “Our knowledge and our abilities are largely determined not by our IQ or some other fixed measure of intelligence, but by the effectiveness of our learning process: call it our learning quotient.”

 

The idea that anyone can learn, regardless of their inherent IQ — with emphasis on the process, the work, the effort — is at the heart of the work of Rodolfo Mendoza-Denton, associate professor of psychology at UC Berkeley.

 

Mendoza-Denton extends the idea that what’s harmful about emphasis on achievement and intelligence can also be applied to emphasis on learning styles (audio, visual) or “multiple intelligences,” a theory by Harvard professor Howard Gardner who distinguishes between different kinds of learners: spatial, linguistic, logical-mathematical, and so on.

 

Mendoza-Denton believes that emphasizing “native intelligences” reinforces the belief that kids are good at some things and conversely, bad at others.

 

“It’s pervasive in our cultural narrative,” Mendoza-Denton said at the recent Innovative Learning Conference. “‘I’m not this kind of learner or that kind of learner. I’m good at words, but not math.’”

Taking that idea one step further, kids might think that if they have to work hard at something, that must mean they’re not smart. “It’s a theory about how the world works,” he said.

 

A recent story on NPR somewhat backs up Mendoza-Denton’s theories. Although “an entire industry has sprouted based on learning styles,” a review of learning style studies led psychologist Doug Rohrer to believe that there is “no scientific evidence backing up the idea.”

 

“We have not found evidence from a randomized control trial supporting any of these, and until such evidence exists, we don’t recommend that they be used,” he told NPR.

 

Another researcher added more nuance. In a recent story by California Watch, a researcher questions the effects of calling out native abilities. “Clearly, people have distinctive abilities and aptitudes. Some people have higher visual ability, and some have higher auditory ability,” said UCSD professor Hal Pashler, lead author on the report. “But the question is whether that predicts anything about the most effective way to teach them. … There is a complete lack of evidence of the sort.”

 

This has caused a big debate in education circles by those who question the motivation of those debunking learning styles. But Mendoza-Denton maintains that reinforcing the idea that effort and elbow grease are as important or more than innate smarts will place kids on the best path of learning.

“Instead of saying, ‘I’m not good at math, why bother trying,’ she’ll say, ‘I didn’t study enough, so I should try harder,’” Mendoza-Denton said. “The meaning of difficulty changes. Difficulty means trying harder, trying a different strategy. They understand that change is possible, and progress occurs over time.”

 

And just as importantly, that mistakes are part of good learning. As a Wired article recently reported about why some are more effective at learning from mistakes, “the important part is what happens next.” People with a “growth mindset” — those who “believe that we can get better at almost anything, provided we invest the necessary time and energy” — were significantly better at learning from their mistakes.

 

This also touches on social justice issues, of course, that bring up stereotype beliefs about gender and race — Asians are better at math, girls are worse at math, African Americans don’t do well on tests like the SAT. Mendoza-Denton cited a number of studies that showed students live up (or down) to the expectations set for them. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.

 

All of this is not to say that people don’t have specific talents, he said. “People have aptitudes that are undeniable,” he said. “We can’t all be geniuses, but we can all access learning.”

 

So what should parents and teachers take away from this? What we might consider ancillary to learning — things like bonding with the teacher or mentor, words of praise about working hard over good grades — are actually crucial to achievement. “Simple things can affect achievement in a deep way,” he said.

 

All of this raises further questions. What values about learning do we want for our kids? Is it important for them to be naturally smart to be ultimately successful? What does this say about our school assessments? How do we measure and define “achievement” without grades? 

 

The Art of Praising to aid Learning 

 

Being smart means learning comes easy is one of the myths that haunt students. This fixed mindset leads students to avoid challenges for fear of looking stupid. Dweck says teachers can challenge students’ fixed mindset beliefs by using effort or “process” praise — for engagement, perseverance, strategies, improvement, and the like.

Below are some examples:

• You really studied for your English test, and your improvement shows it. You read the material over several times, outlined it, and tested yourself on it. That really worked!
• I like the way you tried all kinds of strategies on that math problem until you finally got it.
• It was a long, hard assignment, but you stuck to it and got it done. You stayed at your desk, kept up your concentration, and kept working. That’s great!
• I like that you took on that challenging project for your science class. It will take a lot of work—doing the research, designing the machine, buying the parts, and building it. You’re going to learn a lot of great things.
• For the student who gets an A without trying: “All right, that was too easy for you. Let’s do something more challenging that you can learn from.”
• For the student who works hard and doesn’t do well: “I liked the effort you put in. Let’s work together some more and figure out what you don’t understand.”

Creating Confident Students

Are You Creating Confident Students?

One approach to great teaching is facilitation: de-centering yourself. Standing to the side, out of the students’ way, and moving to more of a facilitative role. And one critical ingredient in such an approach is student confidence and self-efficacy.

The primary difference between confidence and efficacy has to do with application. Confidence (which is more of a general and persisting belief about the self, applying to a variety of domains (school, athletics, relationships, etc.) This can also be parsed within an academic context as well: the belief that one is able to pass tests, participate in discussions, complete and hand in work on time, and so on.

Self-efficacy is similar, and can be thought of as confidence in a particular area. For example, a student may be confident about school because of a sense of self-efficacy about completing academic work, or forging relationships with peers and teachers. These “minor” episodes of self-efficacy can lead to increased confidence.

In the classroom, teachers obviously look for both: self-efficacy (I am capable of completing this task or project) and confidence (I believe in myself to finish tasks or projects in general), and realize the taut relationship between the two. Simply put, students that lack confidence or a strong sense of self-efficacy are far less likely to self-direct themselves in their own learning, or to fulfill a teacher’s requests (read this article, write this essay, solve this problem).

5 Signs Your Students Are Growing More Confident

A student’s own belief about their chances for successful attainment of a goal factor massively in their success. Self-confident and efficacious students are able to persevere in the face of obstacles and challenges. In a classroom of 30+ students, the kind of interaction between student and teacher that reveals the dynamic and fluctuating levels of confidence and efficacy is difficult. But there are some signs you can look for that can highlight their growing or decaying belief levels about their own ability.

5 Signs You’re Creating Confident Students

1. More students complete higher-quality work.

This one is the easiest to see. Students that lack confidence and self-efficacy don’t complete work, much less do so with “quality” (a troublesome word here that we’ll just leave alone for now). While a bit obvious, more students doing better work is a sure sign of confidence.

2. They ask better questions.

Students that lack confidence may ask about due dates, assignment details, or scoring criteria, while confident students, generally speaking will ask about possible extensions of the assignment, inquire about the teacher’s personal preference for resources, immediately start pitching thesis ideas, or ask questions that get at the “big picture” of the assignment.

3. They riff off of your ideas.

Confident students take your theories, stories, resources, and other academic fodder and run with it – perhaps even changing the assignment in the process. While this seems like a simple thing, shifting from “What does the teacher want me to do here?” to “What’s most interesting about this content and how should I respond?” is a critical change.

4. They want different feedback.

As students grow in confidence, they’ll want different feedback – something other than letter grades and quick notes-in-the-margins.

In short, they’ll want learning feedback that’s meaningful and personal to them. All students need this type of feedback, but confident and self-efficacious students are more likely to recognize their own needs, advocate for themselves, and establish a rapport with teachers that helps them improve.

5. They are pro-active and pre-emptive.

As described above, confidence encourages recognition, action, and general advocacy. While this could also be proof of an organized student, a competitive student, or a student being pushed to achieve by some extrinsic force, confidence can allow learners to look ahead, anticipate barriers, and be pre-emptive in their navigation.

Conclusion

While the above aren’t necessarily proof of confidence and self-efficacy, little is. Even the most seemingly confident learner could be feigning these traits to mask insecurity and uncertainty. Ultimately the goal of such confidence is a comfortable learner that deeply understands content, rather than confidence for the sake of confidence.

The role of confidence and self-efficacy in learning is broad, but not fully understood. Neither can substitute for content mastery, but they almost always precede it.

Believing in Students: The Power to Make a Difference

To make a difference to a child's learning, teachers and parents ought to believe in them and trust that they are capable to take charge of their own learning.

However, believing in students is not simply telling them that you believe in them. These words matter only if they are true and if you demonstrate them by your actions. There is no way to fake it, because kids have built in crap detectors, and they can tell if you don't mean it. Here are some ways to express it.

1. Stop Using Rewards

Rewards are not needed if you believe in a student. The reward implies to them that they only way you can get them to do something is to pay them. That is the opposite of believing.

2. Encourage Effort More Than Achievement

Not every child can meet the unrealistic goals of a test-mad curriculum. Every child can try to do his or her best. Ironically, the harder students are encouraged to try, the better they do on our crazy high-stakes testing.

3. Give Second, Third and Fourth Chances

In many states, the law says, "Three strikes and you're out." In most schools, the most troubled kids get only one strike. The message is, "Be the way we want or we don't want you." School is for all children and mistakes are part of the learning process, not just for academics, but also for behaviour. Rather than strike them out, teach them the skills they need to overcome their deficiencies.

4. Don't Say "You Failed" - Say "You Haven’t Done It Yet"

Encourage hope by letting students know that, no matter what they do, they can still do better. Safety always comes first in a school environment, of course. Sometimes safety concerns override points 3 and 4, but not as often as we think.

5. Increase Opportunities to Learn

The children who need recess the most are the first ones to lose it. Being removed from field trips, the cafeteria, library and all other learning opportunities only makes students less able to handle them in the future. No one would say to a basketball player, "You missed too many foul shots. You can’t practice until you get better." It is time to stop giving more opportunities to those who have already proven they are successful while denying opportunities to those who need them the most.

Raising Responsible Digital Citizens

Do you remember when you were first allowed to go to the playground without adult supervision? You would be given some rules to follow – Be kind to others. No fighting. Do not talk to strangers. Come back by dinner. As you headed down to play, you might have been aware that your parents had been continually looking out for you from the window.

Today, the Internet is akin to the new playground for teenagers, and it has become a lot more difficult for you to protect your children from afar as your parents once did. Hence, it is important to educate your child on the proper usage of the Internet so as to ensure they do not become troublemakers or victims of online abuse. You will be surprised at how the same set of playground rules you were given as a kid can be applied to the online world:

Online or offline, be kind

When we teach our children to be kind to others, we also have to teach them to apply the same kindness online – having online anonymity does not mean that they can be mean or harsh with their words.

At the same time, they should be taught to look out for people who are being mean online. Should they happen to meet such people, let them know that they should not take to heart what has been said to them, but neither should they respond with mean words. Instead, teach them to ignore such people, who will stop these actions once they realise that their words have no effect on your children.

Think twice before you post anything

As it becomes more common for people to share their thoughts online, teach your children to take responsibility for what they post on online platforms. Legal actions can be taken against any defamation made online. Thus, they should understand that inappropriate comments posted online may result in dire consequences in time to come.

Do not leak personal information

Educate your teenagers on the dangers of giving out their personal information to strangers online, as spilling personal details online can be as dangerous as letting a stranger into the house. It may seem harmless, but you do not know what they may take from you, or do to you.

While it is fine to give teenagers the freedom to surf the Internet, it is our responsibility to exercise house rules with them so as to encourage responsible usage. The Internet, like the playground, can be a fun public space where learning and bonding can take place when used appropriately.

3 key takeaways

1. The Internet is the new playground for teenagers. While it can be fun, teach your child to use it responsibly.
2. Teenagers may not know that under the cloak of online anonymity, they still have to be responsible for their actions.
3. It is important to educate your teenager that divulging personal information online can be dangerous.

How do digital portfolios help students learn?

Digital portfolios for learners is a relatively new concept. Anyone who has been in the classroom for some time knows that assessment for learning and assessment of learning don’t always have a clear distinction while we are engaged in instruction. The teaching/assessment cycle ebbs and flows, based on learners’ needs and our responses to their needs.

The same concept can be applied to digital student portfolios. During instruction, we are always on the lookout for students showing progress toward the learning target. Teachers will attempt to capture this learning in order to respond to it during instruction.

What digital tools such as iPads and Evernote provide are ways to efficiently capture this learning through a variety of techniques, including audio, images, and text. This allows the teacher to both respond to the student in the present moment, as well as look back later on artifacts of learning to prepare for instruction in the future.

Something else I know: When students finally meet the learning target, thanks in part to the teacher’s ability to document student progress and respond with personalized instruction, their performance should be celebrated.

For instance, one practice many of our teachers adhere to is taking pictures of their students who master their basic math facts. This image is placed in their digital portfolios, to be shared with their families. The child’s parents know this is a big deal, because prior to this celebration, they had access to their child’s portfolio and followed his or her progress through the math facts learning journey.

What Digital Portfolios Look Like in Action

Instead of totally distinguishing between performance and progress portfolios, let me recall Chris Tovani’s formative and summative assessment table.  Consider this :

Now, what if instead we visualized the two different types of portfolios in the context of a learning cycle:


This learning cycle, similar to Regie Routman’s Ongoing Cycle of Responsive Teaching, might better represent how performance and progress portfolios connect and support each other. We set a clear learning target (the performance), and provide support and scaffolding for students (the progress) as they work to meet the expectations.

Sometimes students will have to go backward in order to go forward. Maybe they weren’t clear on the directions, or they were still in the planning stages for their work. Other times, we leave the learning cycle completely. This may be due to the learning task being too difficult and the student not being developmentally ready. When do we know this? We might find out through a quiz or exit slip, but after a whole lesson, it might be too late. We then spend an additional period reteaching the content the next day.

By capturing student learning progress and performance in the moment, using digital tools, we can bring learning to life. Here’s an example from Evernote – a note documenting work by first-grader Morgan. Academic growth is represented by the work they have produced at any given point in time, collected in progress portfolios. We can show students, through audio or images, where they are in their learning progression and help them become more self-aware of current reality. This understanding can lead to improved performance when they are ready.

To be clear: Performance portfolios contain the best examples of a student’s work and are summative in nature. Progress portfolios are more fine-grained; the contents collected in these portfolios show growth over time; the ups and downs, the struggles and breakthroughs, that are always part of the learning process. Although we consider progress portfolios as formative assessment, we do have an end goal in mind. They are also products that will be placed in the students’ performance portfolio and become part of his or her summative assessment.

It’s all about progress

A teacher may create a progress portfolio to document students’ progress in a particular area associated with a learning target (e.g., informational writing). Like Morgan’s image of her writing plus her audio, meaningful artifacts are collected in their portfolios over time. They can happen both on the fly, like the Morgan example, or more systematically, such as during a grade level meeting when teachers bring student work with them to analyze and score .

These portfolios of student work take shape according to what we need them to be. If a teacher is working on a fairly narrow piece of curriculum, such as informational writing, then she might consider one Evernote note with several pieces placed chronologically over time. For a more comprehensive “historical” portfolio that the teacher and student might examine together, they can collaboratively select pieces each quarter that best represent achievement and growth toward a student’s personal goals.

In terms of digital management, a student would typically have a single overarching portfolio that contains both artifacts showing growth over time (progress) and final work to celebrate (performance). It is important that the audience – the, teacher, the students themselves, other staff, the parents – see the growing and culminating pieces side by side. Learning is a process. We should be aware of all the steps it took to get to our goals.

Digital student portfolios can provide what other assessment tools cannot: Real, unabridged, minimally processed artifacts of learning that make sense to all the learners in the classroom, including the teacher. Technology used in this way can bring us as close as we can get to peering inside our students’ hearts and minds to find out what they currently know and are able to do.

The impact of technology on kids' learning


Technology has become a seamless part of students’ lives in and out of the classroom, and schools must find ways to integrate it. This is one of the conclusions in a report by the National Association of State Boards of Education (NASBE), which states that policymakers at the highest level need to understand the trend and form a cohesive course of action for schools to follow.

“Our kids are digitally savvy when it comes to gaming, texting, and social networking, but when it comes to information, even the best students can be digital doofuses.”

Up until now, much of the enthusiasm for education technology, blended learning, online courses and other digital aids in the classroom have come from teachers themselves. In fact, many ed-tech companies are pursuing a teacher-first strategy, opting to hook the educator and avoid the complicated bureaucracy of selling to school districts. That has left a patchwork of tools and uncertainty among some teachers who would like to take advantage of new tech tools, but aren’t sure how to get started.

“State boards of education along with their state education agencies are key to providing the leadership on education technology issues our school systems need to ensure students are ready for life and work in a digital era,” wrote the NASBE study group tasked with investigating emerging tech trends. At the same time the report acknowledges that the current landscape is a “wild, wild west” of various products and approaches. “Because of their formal responsibilities, state education systems are the only entities able to offer a sustainable platform for aligning these promising—but still fragmented and rapidly changing — forces,” the report said.

CHAPTER 1: ADDRESSING THE VOICE AND NEEDS OF TODAY’S STUDENTS

Much has been written about the cohort of students in school today, who are generally considered digital natives. Commentators frequently point out how these children have always lived with computers in their homes, cell phones in everyone’s pocket, and hundreds of channels available on their televisions. They easily adapt to every new piece of technology that arrives in the marketplace and can text as easily and quickly as adults can talk. They are constantly “plugged in.” For this generation, there is no divide between “technology” and their daily lives.

Ideally, we need school leaders who help communities think very carefully about what learning goals they have for their students, their faculty, and themselves, and then look at how technology tools can support those learning initiatives. It’s not about “using more tech” or even about “using technology to boost engagement,” since what is engagement without direction? The fundamental issue is how do we think about the kind of learning experiences that will prepare people for work, for our democracy, and for a well-lived life, and to what extent can technology support those kinds of learning experiences. – Justin Reich, Education Week

Today the combination of immense portable computing power, digital communications, and the Internet presents education with an enormous number of opportunities, challenges, and imperatives. There is the imperative, for example, that all students be digitally literate, which will require educators to meet students in the technological world where they now live in order to bring them to a new place. There are the challenges that come with ensuring students are good digital citizens—that they understand the potential consequences, negative and positive, of anything they put out on the web, understand plagiarism, and how to harness the power of technology safely, respectfully, and responsibly. Finally, there are the vast opportunities technology brings as a vehicle for enhancing the learning process through greater personalization of instruction—something leaders may need to address through policies that provide the flexibility and incentives needed to allow educators to take advantage of these opportunities.

 

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Today’s students have never lived in a world where the internet wasn’t in their homes and cell phones weren’t in everyone’s pockets. For them, there is no divide between “technology” and their daily lives.
• “Our kids are digitally savvy when it comes to gaming, texting, and social networking,” one expert told state board members, “but when it comes to information, even the best students can be digital doofuses.” In other words, just because they have a more intuitive grasp of how to make technology “work” doesn’t mean students automatically know how to use it as a tool for learning. Students still need to be taught foundational research skills and processes that can be enhanced by technology use. This means  students—and educators—need to understand that doing research is more than just sorting through what pops up via online search engines.
• Internet information often does not have the ordered structure provided by textbooks or other resources for students. Educators need to be sensitive to this, and to their students frame of reference in regards to online searches, when integrating technology into their lessons.
• With increased access to many different types of tools for learning and socializing and ever-increasing multitasking, it has become even more important to teach students how to focus their attention.
• One of the great advantages of technology is its potential for personalizing instruction. Students are used to being able to personalize how they receive information—and when schools don’t present information in the same way, they sometimes become bored and disengaged. Instruction should be designed to take advantage of each student’s personal style of learning.
• Because online problems can cause disruptions at school, there is a role for schools to help students learn to be safe, responsible, and respectful digital citizens. But in order to do so, school teachers and staff have to be prepared and equipped to monitor and instruct students in safe environments that are close to what they will experience once the filters and monitoring are removed.

RECOMMENDATIONS

1. Address digital citizenship and digital literacy. These are relatively new areas for education leaders to address through the creation of policies and programs. It is important for policymakers to realize that every school community is different and each is starting at a different place. Some will be ready to institute integrated curricula, while others first need to create common definitions. The study group recommends that state boards urge their districts and schools to address the critical areas of digital citizenship and digital literacy and ensure that the state education department is prepared to offer resources and guidance for these discussions.
2. Design instruction to take advantage of how each student learns now. It is time to revisit what “school” is and how education policymakers can ensure that their decisions create a learning environment that best fits current learners’ needs. Policies at the state and local levels should be responsive to student’s lifestyles and behaviors at home and in the classroom.
3. Create policies that allocate resources based on data, student needs, and student, parent and stakeholder voices. These key stakeholder groups understand the complexities of the issues involved, and can provide the most accurate feedback about what solutions might work best. Additionally, providing access to student performance data to parents and students can also help them serve as an informed partner in ensuring that student study habits, methods and schedules are most conducive to learning outside of school hours.

Sometime ago, I witnessed students that were taking computer-based classes. It surprised me that they were passing their tests with ease until I figured out what they were doing. They had two screens open -- one was the computer-based course and the other screen was Google, Wikipedia, or Ask Jeeves. When they ran across a question they did not know, they just looked up the answer on one of those other sites (we had to shut that capacity down in a jiffy).

This incident made me think a bit. What do teachers have to offer students when students can learn anything they want from searching for it on the Internet? Why should a student sit in class (or classes) all day long when they can find all the information they need instantly? With so much knowledge everywhere, aren't we trying to sell a product they already have?

Come to think of it, I'm no different than those students in the computer-based learning class. When I wanted to install radiant barrier insulation in my attic all I had to do was go online and look it up. Hundreds of videos, websites, and resources popped up. I read through a few, saw that they were selling more than explaining and I went on to others. I watched a couple of how-to videos that seemed to know what they were talking about and so I used them as my model (disclaimer: installing the radiant barrier is not as easy as the videos make it appear). Voila! So with a little bit of research, I became an instant expert on something I did not know anything about previously.

Here’s another example. The other day in class, I couldn't remember how to spell a word and before I could turn around and find a dictionary, a student had already looked it up on her phone. I had it right, but it got me thinking again. How is the instant knowledge (that is available almost everywhere) changing how students learn and view education? Deep stuff. We are not quite to the point of the science fiction concepts of instant knowledge, though rapidly science fiction becomes science fact. It seems to me that we are in a transition period, primarily because we still have a huge digital divide -- some students and schools have access to technology resources, while others do not.
Even if the technology were ubiquitous (I really like that word) in school and out of school, the answer to that question is simple: Instant knowledge has changed how everyone learns because the questions we need to have answered are just a few clicks away, and this brings up more questions—Can I trust the answers? How can I double check for accuracy? What information is missing?

In the Classroom

With so much knowledge available, good and bad, for students, it boils down to a consistent focus on what they need to know. What is the role of a teacher in such a scenario? Well, we need to put aside the traditional knowledge acquisition model, “You need to know this just in case” to a new model, “You need to know this in order to (build, create, resolve, discover…) that.” The main effort of teaching shifts to designing learning environments that enable the students to realize they "need to know" certain things in order to accomplish others. How do we do this? Let me illustrate:

In my Spanish II classes, I create scenarios that motivate students to learn Spanish. For example, in order to have a reason to learn the vocabulary and phrases for travel, we recreated a hotel and the students were the employees and the guests. They created the registration forms, brochures, letter head, menus, television guides, and most importantly they researched, designed, and practiced the interactive dialogues that typically occur in hotels across the Spanish speaking world. This learning environment gave them an authentic reason to learn the verbs and the Spanish phrases that pure book-work could not provide.

The same kind of thing happens in an English class when they create newspapers, or publish books, and in social studies or history when they role-play the armistice of World War I, or the debates between Lincoln and Douglass. Science teachers do this when they design inquiry lessons about the nature of salt, or experiments concerning plant growth and fertilizer. Math teachers create rich learning environments for students to practice their skills when they set up a bakery business and students have to make financial decisions that can make the shop successful or can make it go out of business.

When the micro-computer came into vogue in schools, doomsday prophets predicted the demise of the public school teacher. Now, we have so much more technology in schools and student's pockets, and we still have teachers. What then, will be the role of the teacher when each student can look up every answer on their wrist phone, or with their eyeglasses? My answer is that we will always need great teachers. The teacher's role will be to motivate and inspire the students to want to learn, but for this to happen, the teacher must first provide a compelling answer to the oft-repeated question, "Why do I need to know this?"

How do you create learning environments that motivate students to learn?  In my opinion, the best learning environment is beyond the 4 walls of the classroom. It is important for students to learn by experience. If they are made to see, hear, feel, taste, and smell the environment around them, people will learn to appreciate nature when they have seen it first hand, are amazed by it, and that's when they start to care about it.

We've just launched our organization, but we'll be running our first Youth Environmental Ambassadors Program this summer on an arctic expedition. In my view, that is just about the best learning environment. We get students engaged using a unique approach - we teach students how to take photos and videos and teach them how to use those to create their OWN visual presentations about their experiences and about environmental preservation. On the smaller scale on which I've done this before, kids are so much more engaged by this full-on experience. And teaching them to use technology to communicate is a great way to help kids to express themselves, tell their stories and share their experiences. When you combine this with inspiring them to care about the environment, kids become passionate about nature conservation.

Making Learning more connected

Teachers know that the classroom is a complex ecosystem and that they constantly draw from the best of various models at any given moment in their teaching in order to tailor instruction to the needs of their students; plus, many models overlap to the point that teachers could be adhering to several of them simultaneously. Hence, the concept of "Connected Learning" is just but another school of thought for educators to consider.

The principles of Connected Learning ought to be discussed with classroom teachers as the model often gravitates to informal learning spaces in order to avoid the constraints of classroom learning. As Antero Garcia notes in the introduction to the aforementioned eBook, “Teaching in the Connected Learning Classroom”: “While connected learning principles are seen flourishing in out-of-school spaces, there are fewer articulations of how connected learning can help inspire and shift existing teacher practices”.

In that spirit, Ms Nicole Mirra had shared some of the activities that she had done with a group of amazing teacher leaders from the UCLA Writing Project during their summer institute in the hope that others can share the ways that they have applied Connected Learning principles to the classroom space.

The National Writing Project believes that teachers of writing must be given the opportunity to write themselves, so Ms Mirra began her 90 minutes with the 16 educators by asking them to consider a quote by Herman Melville (“A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men . . .”) and respond to the following prompt: “What does it mean to be connected? Who/what are you connected to?” It was found to be useful to stress the importance of connections in our own lives as a springboard for thinking about the crucial importance of connections in creating powerful learning experiences for young people.

Here are some of the teachers’ responses:

To be connected means sharing a common experience, a thought or feeling. I am connected to physical things like members of my family, friends and colleagues but I am also connected to intangible things like feelings and emotions that could either be felt by my or shared with another person. Not like Facebook connected but really connected.

 

Being connected means to be interrelated and independent. You are connected to family because they help you and vice versa.  You are related to each person differently but yet still a family. It means that nothing is isolated or alone. Nothing exists or came into being on its own.

 

Ms Mirra had used these pieces of writing to transition into an exploration of Connected Learning as defined by the Connected Learning Alliance itself, stressing the fact that they had already discovered its essence through their writing. Because she knows that in any room of teachers, she will find huge variation in comfort with technology and she wanted to highlight the point that Connected Learning is not about the “shiny devices” as her fellow Connected Learning Ambassador Bud Hunt puts it, but about the learner — devices simply give us a new set of tools that we can use to facilitate the connection that we want to encourage between young people.

Below is a sampling of the hurdles that teachers are negotiating as they work on making their learning more connected:

• Misunderstanding of technology by administrators/teachers as a purely recreational tool
• Teacher discomfort with using technology themselves/fear of messing up
• Pressures of curriculum that prevent extended project-based learning
• Teacher workload that makes it difficult to organize community networking
• Overcoming zero tolerance policies regarding student cell phones/devices
• Malfunctioning Internet infrastructure

Importantly, the teachers did not list these barriers as a way of opting out of integrating more Connected Learning principles into their instruction; instead, they voiced the barriers as the first step to finding ways to skirt or overcome them.

As one of the efforts meted out for the Connected Learning project, a new media site, Popplet, which allowed teachers to create mind maps while adding a new tool to their repertoires was created. Check out some of the Popplets below (all works in progress, of course) and consider ways that you can help support classroom teachers as they strive to make their work more connected.



For more examples of Connected Learning in action in classrooms, download the “Teaching in the Connected Learning Classroom” eBook for free.

Kinesthetic Learning: A New Model for Education

How do people learn? Research has found that it is our learning process, not our intelligence, that is the most important factor in determining our abilities -- making it vitally important to examine how we teach our students. So we must ask: how are we most effective at learning and retaining information? Is it when we are hearing, seeing, doing, creating, or some combination of the above? Recently, multi-disciplinary learning has become the trend in education, allowing students to make connections between seemingly disparate subjects. Kinesthetic learning takes this model to the next level by connecting the different ways in which we learn, and this process enables a more effective understanding and retention of information.

In Kinesthetic Learning, movement and action replace more passive forms of learning, such as listening to a lecture. Everybody has probably experienced the effectiveness of this style of learning. No matter how many years it has been since you learned, most people can still ride a bike and swim across a pool. I am able to play piano pieces that I once knew, and I remember the moves to dances I performed when I hear the music. Yet I can no longer recite the capitols of all the states or the elements in the periodic table -- all information that I had memorized. No matter how much we memorize, recite, and study, our muscle memory seems to trump our brains alone. We learn best when we combine mind and body. So let's use our bodies to their fullest advantage and bring kinesthetic learning into our classrooms.

Math and Movement

Kinesthetic learning is founded on creativity, which makes math a natural pairing. There is a widespread misconception that STEM fields stifle creativity. But math also requires creativity and a willingness to approach a problem from multiple angles. In fact, STEM fields are about creative problem solving, not rote memorization. Certainly, math requires rigor and discipline to master. But so do dance, sports, or writing a paper.

Because movement allows a student an alternative approach to the information, it can help put students in the receptive state required for learning. This breaching of mental barriers is especially significant for young women, who are more likely to self-limit their abilities because of the social stigma associated with mathematics and STEM fields. STEM is increasingly shaping our future, and kinesthetic learning can help encourage students to pursue STEM.

Creating Confidence

Two years ago, I created an after-school program, SHINE for Girls, that utilizes kinesthetic learning by combining math with dance. The unique curriculum focuses on building both mathematical facility and self-confidence in young girls, and has been recognized by CBS Evening News, FOX 25, and The Boston Globe for its work in equalizing the gender gap in STEM fields. It is targeted to a middle school audience, an age at which studies have proven that girls lose interest in STEM. Kinesthetic learning has seen incredible results -- the girls showed a 273 percent improvement in math scores and a 110 percent improvement in confidence as measured by pre- and post-tests. Success is due to a combination of factors:

1. Turning the "I Can't" Around

Using kinesthetic learning, girls are able to learn math in an environment when their mental barriers are not up. For example, algebra can be introduced through choreography. Girls can create a simple dance of three twirls followed by a jump, and will write it down as: "3x+y where x = twirl, y = jump." Through dancing, girls realize that 3(x+y) = 3x + y + 2y. Before they can say, "I can't do algebra," they already have. This begins the positive feedback loop of girls believing in themselves, and their confidence stems from knowing that they have the ability to succeed.

2. Team-Based Problem Solving

We believe that students shouldn't know the answer to questions before they are asked, and we deliberately give them hard questions that they have to solve together in teams. Realizing that they are up to the challenge creates students who are more curious and more motivated. Throughout the program, girls began volunteering to lead solving problems on the board, and teachers reported that the girls began to raise their hands in classes. Team learning and cheering each other on is a large part of the supportive environment we seek to create.

3. Learning Without Boxes

An important part of the way we teach is by encouraging each girl to be who she wants to be, without regard for previously conceived notions of who she is or what is cool. By showing students that they can succeed in a subject they were struggling with, kinesthetic learning is able to transcend the boundaries of what kids think they like. Having the mentors as women pursuing STEM fields provides the younger generation with role models.

Changing the Story

We can combine action and intellect to revolutionize learning. Our education system should be a beacon of creativity that encourages curiosity. Let's not fall behind, but instead leap forward with education that allows kids to confidently throw both their minds and bodies into learning.

The Neuroscience Behind Stress and Learning

The realities of standardized tests and increasingly structured, if not synchronized, curriculum continue to build classroom stress levels. Neuroimaging research reveals the disturbances in the brain's learning circuits and neurotransmitters that accompany stressful learning environments. The neuroscientific research about learning has revealed the negative impact of stress and anxiety and the qualitative improvement of the brain circuitry involved in memory and executive function that accompanies positive motivation and engagement.

The Proven Effects of Positive Motivation

Thankfully, this information has led to the development of brain-compatible strategies to help students through the bleak terrain created by some of the current trends imposed by the Common Core State Standards and similar mandates. With brain-based teaching strategies that reduce classroom anxiety and increase student connection to their lessons, educators can help students learn more effectively.

In the past two decades, neuroimaging and brain-mapping research have provided objective support to the student-centered educational model. This brain research demonstrates that superior learning takes place when classroom experiences are relevant to students' lives, interests, and experiences. Lessons can be stimulating and challenging without being intimidating, and the increasing curriculum requirements can be achieved without stress, anxiety, boredom, and alienation as the pervasive emotions of the school day.

During my 15 years of practicing adult and child neurology with neuroimaging and brain mapping as part of my diagnostic tool kit, I worked with children and adults with brain function disorders, including learning differences. When I then returned to university to obtain my credential and Masters of Education degree, these familiar neuroimaging tools had become available to education researchers. Their widespread use in schools and classrooms globally has yet to occur.

This brain research demonstrates that superior learning takes place when classroom experiences are motivating and engaging. Positive motivation impacts brain metabolism, conduction of nerve impulses through the memory areas, and the release of neurotransmitters that increase executive function and attention. Relevant lessons help students feel that they are partners in their education, and they are engaged and motivated.

We live in a stressful world and troubled times, and that is not supposed to be the way for children to grow up. Schools can be the safe haven where academic practices and classroom strategies provide children with emotional comfort and pleasure as well as knowledge. When teachers use strategies to reduce stress and build a positive emotional environment, students gain emotional resilience and learn more efficiently and at higher levels of cognition.

Neuroimaging and EEG Studies

Studies of electrical activity (EEG or brain waves) and metabolic activity (from specialized brain scans measuring glucose or oxygen use and blood flow) show the synchronization of brain activity as information passes from the sensory input processing areas of the somatosensory cortex to the reticular activating and limbic systems. For example, bursts of brain activity from the somatosensory cortex are followed milliseconds later by bursts of electrical activity in the hippocampus, amygdala, and then the other parts of the limbic system. This data from one of the most exciting areas of brain-based learning research gives us a way to see which techniques and strategies stimulate or impede communication between the parts of the brain when information is processed and stored. In other words, properly applied, we can identify and remove barriers to student understanding!

The amygdala is part of limbic system in the temporal lobe. It was first believed to function as a brain center for responding primarily to anxiety and fear. Indeed, when the amygdala senses threat, it becomes over-activated. In students, these neuroimaging findings in the amygdala are seen with feelings of helplessness and anxiety. When the amygdala is in this state of stress-induced over-activation, new sensory information cannot pass through it to access the memory and association circuits.

This is the actual neuroimaging visualization of what has been called the affective filter by Stephen Krashen and others. This term describes an emotional state of stress in students during which they are not responsive to learning and storing new information. What is now evident on brain scans during times of stress is objective physical evidence of this affective filter. With such evidence-based research, the affective filter theories cannot be disparaged as "feel-good education" or an "excuse to coddle students" -- if students are stressed out, the information cannot get in. This is a matter of science.

This affective state occurs when students feel alienated from their academic experience and anxious about their lack of understanding. Consider the example of the decodable "books" used in phonics-heavy reading instruction. These are not engaging and motivating. They are usually not relevant to the students' lives because their goal is to include words that can be decoded based on the lesson. Decodability is often at the expense of authentic meaning to the child. Reading becomes tedious and, for some children, confusing and anxiety-provoking. In this state, there is reduced passage of information through the neural pathways from the amygdala to higher cognitive centers of the brain, including the prefrontal cortex, where information is processed, associated, and stored for later retrieval and executive functioning.

Additional neuroimaging studies of the amygdala, hippocampus, and the rest of the limbic system, along with measurement of dopamine and other brain chemical transmitters during the learning process, reveal that students' comfort level has critical impact on information transmission and storage in the brain. The factors that have been found to affect this comfort level such as self-confidence, trust and positive feelings for teachers, and supportive classroom and school communities are directly related to the state of mind compatible with the most successful learning, remembering, and higher-order thinking.

The Power of Joyful Learning

The highest-level executive thinking, making connections, and "aha" moments of insight and creative innovation are more likely to occur in an atmosphere of what Alfie Kohn calls exuberant discovery, where students of all ages retain that kindergarten enthusiasm of embracing each day with the joy of learning. With current research and data in the field of neuroscience, we see growing opportunities to coordinate the design of curriculum, instruction, and assessment in ways that will reflect these incredible discoveries.

Joy and enthusiasm are absolutely essential for learning to happen -- literally, scientifically, as a matter of fact and research. Shouldn't it be our challenge and opportunity to design learning that embraces these ingredients?