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A few years ago, one of my colleagues suggested we take advantage of the gym in the basement of our office building and bring in a trainer. While I’d always been active, I found group training intimidating. Somehow I always [...]
In an earlier post on the interdependent relationship between talkativeness and cognitive development, I shared Vygotsky’s theory on vocabulary acquisition as the defining moment in cognitive development, as well as the classic 1965 Hart & Risley study that validated [...]
“Please see if I am grokking this properly.” (Angel, 2016) Admit it, before reading further, you thought about jumping to Google, dictionary.com, or even Wikipedia to see what “grokking” is, and more importantly, to learn what is required to grok [...]
When I go into schools and talk to teachers, there’s a lot of rich dialogue going on around testing. I’ve only recently come to the Marysville district, but I’ve been in the business for over 15 years and have seen [...]
I want to tell you about a person who has been described in many ways: an “outstanding scientist,” an “eminent scholar,” and even a “genius.” I want to tell you about Lev Semenovich Vygotsky. –Gita Vygodskaya And so begins Gita [...]
It all comes down to the first sentence. That’s how I decide. If the writing pulls me in, I’ll buy or borrow the book. If not, it remains on the shelf, whether physical or virtual. No matter how riveting a [...]
In recent years, we’ve entered a new era of education—one that leverages data, insight, and, yes, testing to understand what learning looks like for every student and to meet new state standards. One of the new exams is the summative [...]
At my first introduction to measurement error, the word error gave me pause, and I silently wondered what good could possibly come from it. To most of us, an error usually means something is terribly wrong! It doesn’t help either [...]
Differentiation has been an education buzzword for some time, and yet, in a January 2015 Education Week commentary, James R. Delisle writes that “differentiation doesn’t work.” His commentary was met with a swift response from Carol Ann [...]
MIT Professor Steven Pinker made a statement that has stuck with me. He observed that math is “ruthlessly cumulative” (1997). Phil Daro expanded on this by noting that, when studying history, you can surely learn a great deal about World [...]