The most significant thing I’ve learned about teaching in the past year is this: belief drives behavior. It sounds hokey, but it’s actually the distillation of what I’ve come to find as the most actionable, robust takeaways from the vast research around noncognitive factors (or social-emotional skills or SEL or character or soft skills or […]
Instruction
Experience ≠ Practice
“[E]xperience is not the same thing as practice. Experience means only that you use a skill; practice means that you try to improve by noticing what you are doing wrong and formulating strategies to do better. Practice also requires feedback, usually from someone more skilled than you are.” – Andrew J. Rotherham & Daniel T. […]
Learning Strategy: Deep, Focused, 25-Minute Sessions
For study sessions to work their best (meaning you acquire maximum learning for the amount of time you put in), they need to be deep and focused. The only way they can be deep, though, is if we ruthlessly eliminate distractions. As Cal Newport says in Deep Work, “distraction is the destroyer of depth.” Think […]
Beware the Belabored Anecdote
When we share a story to illustrate a point or a concept, and that story becomes longer than it needs to be to bring home the point, that’s a belabored anecdote. When you’re someone who started a rocket company that now does delivery work for NASA, then you can get away with this — go […]
Learning Strategy: Think Like a Runner
Imagine two runners, physically identical, both of whom have 30 days to prepare for a big race, and both of whom are only allowed to practice for 20 hours total during those 30 days. Runner A practices for 30 minutes per day, 6 days a week. She doesn’t practice at all the 2 days just […]