My students will sometimes tell me, “I studied so much last night. I watched half of John Green’s Crash Course world history videos. We’re talking about hours of studying, Mr. Stuart.” This is problematic. The way that our kids conceptualize learning is critical, and I’m not just saying that in the folksy-wisdom sense. This is the stuff of […]
Instruction
You’re Probably Right
Student motivation begins with the internal work of teaching. We can decry the obstacles to student motivation today — kids’ tendency to either care too much about grades or to not care about them at all; our students’ access to exponentially more entertainment than ever before in world history — but there aren’t many good excuses for […]
The Five Questions Our Students Are Asking, All the Time
All of our students, throughout the school year and especially at the start, are asking five questions. The level of motivation they’ll bring to their work in our rooms isn’t set in stone on Day One, or on Day 100. Instead, student motivation ebbs and flows based on their answers to these five questions. 1. Do I have a good […]
Simple Interventions: Birthdays and Belonging
I’ve written before about how simple interventions can affect key student beliefs, so we’ll add this one to the “simple interventions” list. In 2006, Gregory Walton (Stanford researcher, substantial body of work on the Belonging belief) published a study* with some of his colleagues called “Mere Belonging.” In the study, he highlights the following experiment: Students […]
How I Prove to My Students that They Actually Can Memorize Things
First of all, I do want my students to memorize some things, even in the age of Google. Smarter people than me agree. Knowing things — rather than being able to Google things — facilitates further knowledge-building, critical thinking, and literacy. There are many ways we can come to know things — incidental learning, topic […]
