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Our expert researchers, evaluators, and veteran educators synthesize information gleaned from our research and blend it with best practices gathered from schools and districts around the world to bring you insightful and practical ideas that support changing the odds of success for you and your students. By aligning practice with research, we mix professional wisdom with real world experience to bring you unexpectedly insightful and uncommonly practical ideas that offer ways to build student resiliency, close achievement gaps, implement retention strategies, prioritize improvement initiatives, build staff motivation, and interpret data and understand its impact.

Feb 08
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Helping remote learners make sense of learning

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Part 5 of 8 | After absorbing a few bits of information during a relatively short period of time, our brains must pause and process that new information—connecting it with prior knowledge (which makes it easier to retain) or clustering smaller bits of information into larger concepts or big ideas (which leaves with us fewer ideas to juggle). In short, we must make sense of learning. So, how can we help remote learners do that? Here are a few tips drawn from the science of learning and education research.

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Feb 02
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Online PD: When good things happen to good content

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When online PD courses first made their appearance decades ago, educators, by and large, were not fans. But the issue was probably not bad content, according to McREL CEO Bryan Goodwin, writing in the February 2021 issue of ASCD’s Educational Leadership magazine. Rather, Bryan proposes in his Research Matters column, those online courses suffered the same fate as all content in the web’s early days: it took traditional in-person events and reformatted them in a superficial way, which just fell flat.

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Feb 01
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Helping remote learners focus on new learning

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Part 4 of 8 | Now that your students are ready to learn, how can you help them focus on new knowledge or skills? For many teachers, this aspect of remote learning—what often seems like the actual teaching part—is often the most challenging aspect, especially as many tried-and-true strategies for holding student interest during in-person learning have all gone out the window. Fortunately, two key concepts from the science of learning point to ways that remote learning can be as, if not more effective than, in-person.

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Jan 28
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Student engagement strategies for learning

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Teachers are struggling right now to maintain an engaging learning environment, whether teaching in person or online or a bit of both. For in-person classes, distancing and masks might make it seem like you cannot connect as well. For online classes, it might seem hard to find time for one-to-one conversations with students or to organize small group collaborative projects. Imagine how your students are feeling! Engagement is critical to the teaching-learning process and without it the real enjoyment of teaching and learning can fall short.

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Jan 25
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Helping remote learners commit to learning

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Part 3 of 8 | All learning requires mental effort—powering up our brains to stay focused on something long enough for new information to sink into our long-term memories. As a result, we only learn what we commit to learning, which often boils down to two simple factors, expectancy and value—that is, believing we are capable of learning something and seeing value in learning it.

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Jan 19
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Helping remote learners become interested in learning

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Part 2 of 8 | To learn anything, our brains must pay attention to it. Hence, we really only learn what we find interesting, what makes us curious, or what seems valuable to learn. If we skip this phase and jump right into learning we are, in effect, asking students to rack their brains to come up with their own reasons for being interested in what we’re teaching them. Yet as research shows, going online is already exhausting, so it’s even more important to make remote learning interesting.

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Jan 11
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Making learning stick with remote learners

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Part 1 of 8 | What have some teachers been doing to make their remote learning experiences engaging while many others are, well, unbearable? Contrary to popular perception, it  has not been an abundance of digital gimmicks or gizmos, but rather, a consistent, thoughtful focus on the fundamentals of instructional design.

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