In these days of high-stakes achievement testing, it is all too common for schools to focus on the “basics” of knowledge – the “who/what/when/where” in place of the harder-to-evaluate “how” and “why.” Asking higher level questions leads to higher level thinking. As parents, we can transcend the “lowest common denominator” standards and focus on the [...]

In K-12 schools across the country, administrators, teachers, and students are preparing for an annual ritual – testing season. Some of these tests are locally created and meant to measure what the student has learned in the past year. Some are high-stakes, state-mandated. Regardless, the yearly testing season can cause frustration, anxiety, and general angst [...]

I don’t know when they began calling critical thinking skills “21st Century Skills” – I used them and taught them plenty during the 20th century, but no matter. It seems to be the educational buzzword of the day. And if the trend results in teachers and parents focusing more on communication, collaboration, critical thinking, problem [...]

I read an interesting blog post by Dan Brown, a teacher and author of The Great Expectations School: A Rookie Year in the New Blackboard Jungle. He is the also the author of an education blog called Get in the Fracas. Here is an excerpt: “I have a clutch of students who read for pleasure, yet [...]

In my years as an educator, I have repeatedly experienced examples proving what intuition has always told me: People – children included – will “rise to the occasion” when high expectations set for them, assuming those expectations are reasonable, and support is provided. Even very young students know when someone accepts less than best efforts, [...]

I just stumbled upon a learning styles quiz at Edutopia. It is interesting because it classifies intelligence according to the categories naturalistic, bodily-kinesthetic, musical, interpersonal, intrapersonal, visual-spatial, logical-mathematical, and verbal-linguistic. I found the results surprising because I have always ‘seen myself’ as a visual learner – and have read that, overwhelmingly, people are visual learners. [...]

With today’s innundation of available information, parents and students must understand how to navigate their way through the ‘rough’ to get to the ‘diamonds’ AND to know the ‘diamonds’ when they see them. So how is literacy changing in the 21st century? It is no longer sufficient to learn to read and learn to write well. Now we [...]