Education & Teacher Conferences

When our students learn — or pay attention, or feel motivated — all sorts of amazing things happen in their brains. Neurons connect and neurotransmitters zip. The prefrontal cortex (PFC) coordinates executive functions; the default mode network (DMN) helps consolidate prior learning. It’s all so cool! A recent study invites us to reconsider: how do […]

Every semester, a student catches us after class or during office hours with some version of the same complaint: I read the chapter, I did the homework, I even made flashcards, and I still bombed the quiz. What went wrong? The diagnosis is rarely laziness; it’s that “studying” has become a catchall word covering activities […]

A colleague recently asked me this thoughtful question: I’ve seen research on the ‘Production Effect.’ It tells us that students remember words better when they say them out loud. Following this logic, will students understand ideas better if they explain them out loud? For instance: will an oral presentation to the class help my students […]

As we strive to make classrooms helpful for all our students, we often hear advice about adapting instruction for our introverts and extraverts. Odds are good you’ve gotten suggestions like these: You might even hear suggestions that go beyond the classroom’s social dynamics: This kind of advice feels intuitive. We don’t want to make our […]

Should our students teach their peers? The obvious answer to this question is: “yes, of course.” Experience shows that teaching leads to greater understanding for the person who did the teaching. After all, when I figure out how to explain “tragedy” to my sophomores, I end up knowing more about tragedy than I did before. […]

As AI changes the education landscape moment by moment, we can expect a steady flow of studies offering us guidance about its use. We’re happy to have all that research, but it does come with a probable danger. Every month or so, we will likely hear that a study has DEFINITIVELY concluded Like Celine Dion’s […]

“Some people are just naturally good teachers.” I’ve heard some version of that sentence more times than I can count—in hallways, workshops, and conversations about colleagues everyone admires. It’s so familiar that it usually passes without question. And I understand the impulse: we’ve all known instructors who seem to command a classroom effortlessly, who make [&#8…

Two studies have stirred up lots of controversy in recent weeks. Although these studies focus on different topics, they follow a roughly similar pattern: I will start by summarizing the studies, then shift focus to the right way to respond to them. My ultimate argument: “when you start to feel defensive, get curious.” Do Cell […]

If you’ve got a headache, you might find yourself reaching for some ibuprofen. If you just sprained your ankle, or your arthritis is acting up, ibuprofen can make your day much better. But: these truths do NOT mean that ibuprofen fixes pain. After all, nerve pain — such as sciatica, neuropathy, or neuralgia — doesn’t […]

Given the time constraints that all teachers face, what are the most effective strategies to help our students with reading comprehension? Should we focus on particular reading strategies: say — finding the main idea of a passage, predicting what will come next, visualizing the scene? Or do we serve students better by building overall historical, […]

Almost any teacher will say: “in our school, we want students to become critical thinkers.” Once we embrace that praiseworthy goal, we’ve got some questions to ask. How, exactly, do we help students think critically? Or, here’s a bigger question: Can we do that? Is critical thinking a skill that can be taught? This debate […]

If you’ve been to a Learning and the Brain conference in the last 26 years, you’ve heard at least one speaker talk about the importance of working memory. Your working memory – typically abbreviated WM – allows your mind to hold a few bits of information and then reorganize and combine them into something new. […]

Motivation is one of the holy grails of education, fitness, work, and productivity. Students of education know that nearly everything depends on this essential driving force of learning. Teachers constantly struggle to cultivate motivation in their students, while many of us notice perceived shortcomings in ourselves and others whenever willpower seems to falter, often to […]

Blog posts here typically start with research and then consider classroom application. Today’s post — more speculative than most — begins with a concept and then moves to thinking aloud. In brief: I want to explore the concept of “checking for understanding,” and propose a new category of classroom moves that should precede such checks. […]

A year ago, I found myself drawn to an intriguing question: when showing educational videos, should we turn captions on to help students learn or focus? In my experience, most video services provide caption capabilities, and many turn them on by default. For this reason, I assumed that we have good reason to use captions. […]

Few ideas in education have seen a greater pendulum swing than Dr. Carol Dweck’s concept of Mindset. When she published her book in 2006, it became the must-read text that launched a thousand posters. Even ten years later, practically every school I visited had a wall of growth mindset catch phrases, and a block-capitals sign […]

Back in January, I wrote about a study on classroom uses of humor. The headlines: All this helpful information, however, came with a drawback: the study relied entirely on students’ ratings of how they felt. Such “self-report” data isn’t nothing, but it’s not the most persuasive kind of data. What would we find if we […]

As AI changes the education landscape moment by moment, we can expect a steady flow of studies offering us guidance about its use. We’re happy to have all that research, but it does come with a probable danger. Every month or so, we will likely hear that a study has DEFINITIVELY concluded Like Celine Dion’s […]

Anna Abraham’s The Creative Brain: Myths and Truths didn’t necessarily introduce me to entirely new creativity myths—I’ve spent enough time around psychology, neuroscience, and education to already know the usual suspects. The “right-brained creative.” The tortured genius. But we may still be romanticized by ideas like psychedelics unlock some dormant creative capaci…

If you have a colleague who uses mini-whiteboards, you know the passion that these simple tools inspire. According to the fervent accounts I read on Twitter and hear at conferences, MWBs increase student participation, reduce teacher stress, and cure most cases of bursitis. (I might have made up that last one.) Up to now, I’ve […]