When we work with teachers, we ask them to report student improvement results at each professional development session. The teachers with the most impressive results have at least one practice in common. They explain to their students what learning practices they are changing and why.
When we work with teachers and school leadership, we use Learning Principles as foundations for Design Strategies. Principles in something as essential as learning should have application for all students, in all subjects, and all grade levels. In addition, they should extend well beyond the classroom.
In 2018 we had a contract with the Rochester Public Schools. On one of our visits to the district we stopped by the Kodak Museum and there in one of the exhibits was the world’s first digital camera. It was made by Kodak in the 1970s for a space mission.
In the late 1870s there was no such thing as a cognitive psychologist but a philosopher named Hermann Ebbinghaus was about to do some groundbreaking work in cognitive psychology and a few years later publish a book, Memory, that to our knowledge has never been out of print.
Remember data-driven decision making? It was a great idea but its future was doomed from the beginning. Let’s look at a quick example to explain why. Read the paragraph and answer the question before going further.
For those of you who do not live in California, imagine that you move there. You want the climate, the outdoors, the food and restaurants, the colleges and universities and finally the entertainment, from sports to theater. You get there and enjoy all of it
The Power of Collective Efficacy by Jenni Donohoo, John Hattie, and Rachel EellsWhat Drives Collective Efficacy? by Jenni Donohoo and Steven KatzThe Design and Validation of the Enabling Conditions for…
Most of us operate from the premise that decisions are deliberate thought processes. Unfortunately, that is not usually the case. The problem is that the brain is wired to conserve energy. Even deliberate thinking is guided by this mission. As a result, deliberative thinking is often replaced by intuitive, automatic responses, or deliberate thinking frames the problem in a manner that makes the decision easier, when, in fact, it is very complex.
So many things about decision making seem paradoxical. A person is promoted to a leadership position because of what they know, how they have performed, and their potential for leadership. Yet, the research on bias suggests that they should view their own knowledge as inadequate.
All decisions ultimately come down to a Yes or No choice; yes we will do this or no we won’t, but too often we allow the process of deciding to also be binary. By binary, we mean a ‘whether or not’ process that examines only one course of action or an ‘either-or’ decision in which two options are considered but only in an all or nothing context. Paul Nutt, author of Why Decisions Fail, released a study in 1993 of 183 decisions.