Dear Friends,

This week's evidence comes from our friends at Johns Hopkins University. Once again, I need to let the evidence get in the way of my preconceived notions. The study is about personalized learning. 

Dear Friends,

This week’s evidence is about how teachers can make constructive use of AI to cut the amount of time they spend on instructional planning. 

Dear Friends,

This week’s evidence is about Career and Technical Education (CTE). It is often overlooked, as policymakers tend to focus only on state test scores. But on the metric that really has a life-long impact, CTE is an enormously important factor to consider.  

Dear Friends,

This week’s evidence comes from one of the most profoundly important books of the decade – Jonathan Haidt’s “The Anxious Generation.” Every parent, grandparent, teacher, school leader, and policy maker must read this. If you are on the fence about smartphones for adolescents and especially about smartphones in the classroom, the evidence in this book will settle any ambiguities that remain.

Dear Friends,

This week’s evidence comes from a new (April 24, 2024) study by Professor Onan Erdem and colleagues on the subject of “desirable difficulties.”  

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41539-024-00245-7

The authors found, not surprisingly, that students do not always seek out the path of challenge, what the Greeks called the Scholar’s Bench on the hill, but rather the value of indolence. I’m often the same way, so I can’t get very judgmental about students who prefer pleasure over pain.

Dear Friends,

This week's evidence concerns persistent disagreements among researchers about the degree of COVID-related learning loss in mathematics and reading. The New York Times claimed that students are making a “surprising surge” in learning (https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/01/31/us/pandemic-learning-loss-recovery.html while other researchers, such as Joel Rose writing in Education Next claim that learning loss – especially in middle school – remains pervasive and persistent, forecasting huge challenges for these students who will struggle with the demands of high school math classes.

Dear Friends,  

This week’s evidence comes from a wonderful new book by Indiana University Professor Mary Murphy, “Cultures of Growth: How the New Science of Mindset Can Transform Individuals, Teams, and Organizations” (2024, Simon & Shuster). Murphy was a graduate student of Carol Dweck at Stanford in the early 2000s and the exciting days of the original Mindset research. But now, almost 20 years later, Murphy provides powerful evidence that the previous emphasis on growth vs. fixed mindset at the individual level must be displaced by two realities.