Blog | Dr. Jeffrey A. Hinton, Innovative Ideas for Education

The Urgency of Addressing the Achievement Gap in the 4th Industrial Revolution: The Remediation Paradox

Thu, 09 May 2024 10:00:20 GMT

I started my teaching career over 20 years ago, teaching social studies in an expulsion school. I taught students in grades 6-12 who had been removed from their home schools for various behavior issues and infractions. Many of my students were “repeat customers,” meaning that our school's recidivism rate was high, and we saw many of the same students repeatedly throughout the year. Because many of my students had significant learning loss, my principal requested that I spend most of my time catching students up in reading and writing. Not having much classroom experience, I thought the best way to remediate students was through constant drills. While this approach can be effective in certain circumstances, my students overwhelmingly rejected the strategy and disengaged even more due to boredom and monotony. A question that I have been asking myself for many years since is how educators should remediate students while at the same time keeping their interest and prepare them for the realities of the modern technology-rich world.

The role of public education in the United States is multifaceted. It includes, among other things, teaching students to be “good citizens,” providing vocational training, and fostering personal and social development. Still, one of the most important roles of public schooling is that of the “great equalizer.

In other words, public schools are responsible for providing all students, regardless of their racial, linguistic, and economic backgrounds, with the knowledge and skills necessary for success in college, careers, and life. And while this aim is admirable, public schools have struggled to diminish the persistent disparity in academic performance between minority and disadvantaged students and their white and Asian counterparts. Federal laws, such as the No Child Left Behind Act (2002) and the Every Student Succeeds Act (2015), sought to improve the academic performance of at-risk students in reading, writing, and mathematics.

Despite their best intentions, achievement gaps still need to be addressed. The achievement gap refers to the persistent disparity in academic performance and educational attainment between different groups of students, such as White and minority students, economically disadvantaged students, English Language Learners, the physically and intellectually challenged, and neurally diverse students.

The disparity in academic performance has even larger implications today as the world of work is quickly changing in the face of transformative technology associated with the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Industry 4.0, as it is sometimes referred to, is defined as the current and developing environment in which disruptive technologies and trends such as the Internet of Things (IoT), robotics, virtual reality (VR), and artificial intelligence (AI) are changing the way people live and work. In other words, the modern workplace requires new technical and critical thinking skills beyond the traditional academic subjects of reading, writing, and mathematics.

The new “knowledge workers” must possess the knowledge, skills, and dispositions required of the new economy or face potential economic stagnation. For example, The McKinsey Institute for Black Economic Mobility found that automation and the rise of generative AI threaten to displace a disproportionate number of Black and Latino workers, as 24% of Black workers are in occupations with over 75% automation potential compared to 20% of white workers. Additionally, generative AI has the potential to widen the racial, economic gap in the United States by $43 billion each yea

r.Many educators, in their efforts to close the achievement gap through intensive remediation, have inadvertently narrowed the curriculum. This has led to a focus on testable subjects and less intellectually rigorous pedagogies like rote memorization of unrelated items and drill and practice. The result is a curriculum lacking opportunities for students to develop their “soft skills,” such as critical thinking, problem-solving, communication, and collaboration. These are crucial skills in the modern, information-driven economy and workplace. The Remediation Paradox occurs when historically marginalized students who are in need of remediation in academic subjects miss out on learning experiences that will help prepare them for the modern technology-based economy, exacerbating historical gaps.

To tackle the Remediation Paradox, educators must provide historically at-risk students with comprehensive educational opportunities. This approach should focus on remediating their skills while preparing them to compete in the technology-rich modern economy. As University of Colorado professor of education Kevin Welner aptly puts it, "Children learn when they have opportunities to learn. When denied those opportunities, they fall behind, and we get the devastating achievement gaps. But when they are provided with rich learning opportunities, they thrive, and the achievement gaps close.

"A powerful teaching approach that both strengthens skills in core subjects and gives students the opportunity to hone 21st-century skills is Project-Based Learning or PBL. PBL is a teaching method in which students learn by actively engaging in real-world and personally meaningful projects. In PBL, students work on a project over an extended period to investigate and respond to an authentic, engaging, and complex question, problem, or challenge. As a result, students develop deep content knowledge and critical thinking, collaboration, creativity, and communication skills.

There is much research to support the efficacy of PBL. For example, a study of a PBL program in a Texas school district demonstrated that 7th—and 8th-grade students participating in PBL had higher achievement in reading and math compared to non-PBL students, with the effects being particularly strong for minority and economically disadvantaged students. Additionally, because PBL taps into students' personal interests, they are more likely to stay engaged in school. This is vitally important as chronic absences have become a serious problem nationwide.

To compete in the 4th Industrial technology-based economy, today's students must have both “academic skills” and “soft skills” necessary to adapt and thrive in the rapidly changing workplace. In an attempt to remediate students, educators have inadvertently denied them the chance to cultivate the knowledge, skills, and dispositions that will enable them to thrive in the 21st-century knowledge-based economy. Shouldn’t educators do everything they can to help our most vulnerable learners?

How To Refine Your Teaching Practice With Springtime Reflection

Thu, 07 Apr 2022 19:46:02 GMT

Establishing a regular cycle of reflection allows new and experienced teachers alike to sharpen their practice.

Spring is in the air. The weather is warming and days are getting longer. Spring signifies that the end of the academic school year is quickly approaching for most teachers. While many educators eagerly anticipate the end of another challenging year and look forward to getting some well-deserved rest, now is a good time to reflect on our experiences.

Reflective practice is an integral component of effective teaching because teaching is a process that we can improve with deliberation and scrutiny. Without reflection, teachers could be potentially trapped in a cycle of unexamined judgments, assumptions, and misinterpretations about their teaching. Further, research indicates that when teachers reflect on their practice, they develop their self-efficacy, which, according to psychologist Albert Bandura, is an individual’s belief in their capacity to execute behaviors necessary to produce specific performance attainments. Increased teacher self-efficacy has been shown to increase student achievement.

Reflecting Is a Process

Reflection is more than random ruminations about your teaching practice. According to research , reflection should be a cyclical process consisting of three components. First, teachers must identify a problem they want to address. Problem-solving means reflecting on situations that didn’t go well and then coming up with solutions to address the issue. Challenges could be student behavior, lessons that didn’t work as planned, or gaps in teacher professional or content knowledge.

Teachers could ask themselves the following questions to engage in the reflection process:

What went well?
What was difficult?
What do I need to learn or do to further develop my craft?
What have I learned about myself emotionally and as a practitioner?
How can I improve my practice in the future?

Teachers can take notes of their reflections by writing them down in a teaching journal or using other methods to record their successes and utilize them in their planning for the following year, while determining action steps for the areas of teaching they need to work on to become better educators.

The second area of reflection is raising awareness about one’s own strengths and weaknesses as a professional educator. Teachers need to reflect often on what they’re doing well and areas they need to strengthen because as good as we may be, there’s always room for development. As Benjamin Franklin said, “Without continual growth and progress, such words as improvement, achievement, and success have no meaning.”

Reflection allows teachers to develop and refine their practice rather than doing things the way they’ve always done them. This is important for new and experienced teachers alike. When teachers engage in reflection, they can celebrate their strengths by acknowledging what they’re doing well. But teachers also need to recognize areas they need to work on. An excellent way to do this is to use the Johari window .

The Johari window is a technique designed to help individuals understand their relationships with themselves and others. One of the method’s strengths is that it may illuminate blind spots or areas that are not known to an individual but are things other people and students can see. The blind spot could be a barrier to self-awareness, which is essential for effective teaching. Further, teachers need to stay positively motivated despite the myriad challenges they face, especially over the last few years of the pandemic.

While negative emotions are perfectly normal, it’s essential that teachers keep them in check because they can’t teach to their full potential if they’re in a negative headspace. Flight attendants warn passengers to take care of their needs first before trying to help others. The same goes for teachers. We can’t be fully present for our students unless our needs are adequately met first. This is why self-care is critical , especially during these challenging times.

The last component of reflective practice is constructing professional knowledge through both formal and informal teaching networks. Professional knowledge consists of an in-depth understanding of subject matter, curriculum, instruction, assessment, and knowledge of students and their communities to raise student achievement. Teachers need to build professional communities of practice so that they can collaborate and learn with other practitioners. Partnerships between experienced educators and those new to the profession, or those needing assistance, are a fundamental component of teacher professionalism and growth.

Formal networks can include mentorships, professional learning communities (PLC) , and membership in various professional education organizations as they relate to the teaching field or discipline. Informal teaching networks could consist of participation in professional learning networks (PLN) , following and posting to social media hashtags , and developing informal professional relationships, both in person and virtually, within your school and district, and across the state, nation, and world.

Direct Instruction or Experiential Learning Which is the Best Approach?

Mon, 07 Mar 2022 20:41:49 GMT

“(Children) receive direct instruction from time to time about the appropriateness of various social comparisons.”

~Albert Bandura

"I believe that the school must represent present life-life as real and vital to the child as that which he carries on in the home, in the neighborhood, or on the playground."

~John Dewey (My Pedagogic Creed)

What is the best way for students to learn? This is an age-old question that is likely to ignite lively conversations among educators who hold a variety of perspectives and viewpoints. The traditionalists point out that students learn best when the acquisition of new knowledge and information is explicit. In other words, the teacher directly transmits knowledge to the students through assigned readings, lectures, demonstrations, and presentations. The student is responsible for taking notes and memorizing the information provided by the teacher. Many educators favor this approach because it capitalizes on the teacher’s expertise, it is easy to manage student learning. In addition, the material can be covered quickly and assessed simply with objective assessments that usually have a single correct answer, such as true/false, multiple-choice, and matching questions. Direct instruction has been a time-tested approach to teaching, and research supports its efficacy, especially when students need to learn skills and small chunks of information. For example, a meta-analysis of the literature published between 1966 and 2016 based on 328 studies of reading, math, language, spelling, and other academic subjects indicated that direct instruction increases student achievement (Stockard, Wood, Coughlin, & Khoury, 2018).

Pushing back against direct instruction, progressive educators believe that students learn best when they are at the center of their learning. The “hands-on” approach outlined in John Dewey’s seminal work Experience and Education (1938) points out that all learning happens in a social environment. According to Dewey, "The principle that development of experience comes about through interaction means that education is essentially a social process" (Dewey, 1938, p.58). An excellent way to engage students in “hands-on” learning is through a pedagogical technique called experiential learning.

According to Kolb (1984), experiential learning is “the process whereby knowledge is created through the transformation of experience” in other words, experiential learning happens when students have the opportunity to participate in real-life experiences at school. These learning experiences provide students with a context for their learning rather than studying topics in isolation or removed from the real world. One of the strengths of experiential learning is that it allows students to ask their own questions rather than be fed the “correct” answer by the teacher or curriculum materials. Experiential learning gives students voice and choice because they identify, investigate, and address critical issues. Further, providing students with agency in making their own educational decisions is a powerful way to develop student autonomy and responsibility resulting in increased levels of student engagement. Because students are immersed in real-life issues and situations at school, they can apply their knowledge immediately to things that matter to them. Unlike traditional approaches, experiential learning can profoundly engage students, stimulating them intellectually, emotionally, creatively, and socially, resulting in a much more impactful learning experience.

Research demonstrates that experiential learning is an effective way to raise student achievement. For example, a meta-analysis of 89 empirical studies spanning 43 years revealed that students taught with experiential pedagogies significantly outscored students taught using traditional methods (Burch et al., 2019). The increase in student achievement may be due to students being more engaged in their learning because of experiential learning activities (Szeto, 2014). Additionally, student reflection after an experiential learning activity has been shown to raise student achievement compared to students who did not have the opportunity (Hudesman et al., 2013). But experiential learning does more than just increase student achievement. When students are engaged in experiential learning activities, they are far more likely to transfer their knowledge and skills to new and novel scenarios (Drake & Long, 2009). In addition, because most experiential activities are done in small groups, students develop communication and collaboration skills, essential proficiencies for the 21st-century learner.

Experiential learning has been around since Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. But modern theories regarding the approach are often attributed to David Kolb, who in 1984 published his learning styles model to describe four concrete phases of experiential learning. The first phase is concrete experience. This is when the learner is involved in a new experience or novel situation. Next is reflective observation. In this phase learners observe others or make observations about their own experiences. After which, students move into the abstract conceptualization phase. This is when learners make theories or predictions about their observations. Finally, students engage in active experimentation. This is when the learner tests a theory or idea and plans for a forthcoming experience.

Kolb points out that the experience-reflect-think-act- model is a natural learning process that most people engage in without conscious thought. And while the learner can enter the cycle at any point, Kolb argues that experiential learning is only effective when all four components have been implemented. Kolb’s integration of knowledge, activity, and reflection is the cornerstone for many experiential learning activities, including authentic research, laboratory experiments, internships, service-learning projects, and project-based learning or pbl.

As beneficial as experiential learning is, there are drawbacks. For example, planning, implementing, and assessing experiential learning is time-consuming. This is a perennial issue for teachers who must adhere to state and local curriculum standards, pacing, and testing schedules where content is covered in breadth but only superficially. Additionally, most students will need explicit instruction on engaging in experiential learning activities. This is because many students have become dependent learners, reliant on their teachers to do most of the intellectual work at school. Most students have been conditioned to acquiesce to the teacher’s authority. They are passively involved in learning activities that require low levels of cognitive demand and rigor. Further, teaching experientially requires teachers to undergo a paradigm shift in how they think about their role as a teacher. Educators are no longer needed to be the “sage on the stage,” but the “guide on the side.” As Dewey pointed out, "the teacher loses the position of external boss or dictator but takes on that of a leader of group activities" (Dewey, 1938, p.59).

In the end, the question of the right way for students to learn might be a little more complex than teachers initially thought. It could be that students need both direct instruction when appropriate with experiential activities weaved through the curriculum. This “best of both worlds” approach may deliver the in-depth, rigorous curriculum our students need to succeed in the modern world.

References

Burch, Giambatista, R., Batchelor, J. H., Burch, J. J., Hoover, J. D., & Heller, N. A. (2019). A Meta‐Analysis of the Relationship Between Experiential Learning and Learning Outcomes. Decision Sciences Journal of Innovative Education , 17 (3), 239–273. https://doi.org/10.1111/dsji.12188

David, J.L. (2008). What Research Says About/Project-Based Learning . Educational Leadership Teaching Students to Think, 65, 5 , 80-82

Dewey, J. (1938). Experience and education. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Drake, K., & Long, D. (2009). Rebecca's in the Dark: A Comparative Study of Problem-Based Learning and Direct Instruction/Experiential Learning in Two 4th-Grade Classrooms. Journal of Elementary Science Education, 21 (1), 1-16.

Efstratia. (2014). Experiential Education through Project Based Learning. Procedia, Social and Behavioral Sciences , 152 , 1256–1260. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sbspro.2014.09.362

Hudesman, J., Crosby, S., Flugman, B., Issac, S., Everson, H., & Clay, D. B. (2013). Using formative assessment and metacognition to improve student achievement. Journal of Developmental Education , 37 (1), 2.

Kolb, D. A. (1984). Experiential learning: Experience as the source of learning and development. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

Stockard, J., Wood, T. W., Coughlin, C., & Rasplica Khoury, C. (2018). The Effectiveness of Direct Instruction Curricula: A Meta-Analysis of a Half Century of Research. Review of Educational Research , 88 (4), 479–507.

Szeto. (2014). The Impact and Feasibility of an Optional Experiential Learning Activity and Study Sessions on Student Engagement .

Creative Collisions and the Intersection Between Education and Innovation

Mon, 31 Jan 2022 20:32:47 GMT

“If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas.”

~ George Bernard Shaw

Informal collaboration in the workplace is most often associated with the water cooler effect. The water cooler effect is when employees interact with one another socially, usually while taking a break, grabbing a cup of coffee, or getting a drink from the office water cooler. During these impromptu, face-to-face meetings, employees form relationships and deepen social bonds, which according to research from MIT, can increase their overall productivity and job satisfaction by 10-15%. Additionally, these chance encounters may lead to conversations that facilitate collisions between ideas that result in inspiration, innovative thinking, and new approaches.

In physics, a collision is defined as the sudden, forceful coming together in direct contact of two bodies for a very short period in which the momentum and energy of the colliding masses change. In the vernacular, we use the word collision to describe when two objects crash into each other. In addition to the more traditional uses of the word, collisions can also explain the impact of disparate ideas, resulting in new and innovative concepts. These impacts are referred to as “creative collisions.” Enrique Rubio, the founder of Hacking HR, points out that creative collisions are “the result of heated debates and discussions among people who have different perspectives about how to solve certain issues or create new opportunities.” In other words, creative collisions could lead to novel, outside-of-the-box thinking and innovations that could generate the next big idea. As Matt Ridley writes in The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves, “It is the ever-increasing exchange of ideas that causes the ever-increasing rate of innovation in the modern world.” As a consequence of social interaction, innovation pushes against conventional wisdom that some of the greatest inventions and innovations were created in “eureka” moments by solitary individuals tinkering in their garages or isolated laboratories. This could not be further from the truth. The fact is that all innovations are the result of intersections where ideas have had a chance to collide, incubate and flower. Tony Hsieh, the late founder of Zappos, understood this principle and put it into practical application in downtown Las Vegas.

Tony Hsieh was a visionary entrepreneur and venture capitalist who helped found Zappos in 1999 and served as its CEO until 2020. In 2013, Hsieh relocated Zappos from its headquarters in Henderson, Nevada, to the old downtown Las Vegas City Hall situated in the Freemont East Entertainment District. Downtown Las Vegas at the time was mostly a blighted and neglected space that had fallen into economic despair. And even though downtown Las Vegas had seen better days, Hsieh had a unique vision to revitalize the area and began the Downtown Project, or as it is known today, the DTP. Hsieh envisioned the DTP as a community of small businesses and creatives supporting one another by creating a milieu that fostered innovation, inspiration, entrepreneurial energy, creativity, and upward mobility. Through an initial investment of 350 million dollars, mostly his own money, Hsieh saw the downtown area as a “city as a start-up” and facilitated improvements in real estate, small businesses, tech, education, arts, and culture.

Informed by Edward Glaeser’s book, Triumph of the City, Hsieh created the DTP based on the three C’s of Collisions, co-learning, and connectedness. Collision results from serendipitous meetings of people that happen when they are in the right place at the right time. These chance encounters may start new relationships that blossom into downstream impact. Co-learning is when people in the community teach each other. This includes mentoring and helping people as members of a community of learners. Finally, connectedness is the number and depth of connected relationships in a given space. The DTP facilitates creative collisions by designing comfortable workspaces ideal for working lunches, team meetings, or individuals who want to take a break in one of its numerous bars, cafes, or shared spaces such as the Downtown Container Park or the John E. Carson building’s central courtyard. These spaces allow people to socialize and serendipitously collide, resulting in a cross-pollination of ideas and creative collisions.

Designing areas to facilitate creative collisions is not just relegated to business startups and can be seen in educational spaces as well—for example, the pioneering architectural team of Michael Manfredi and Marion Weiss. Manfredi/Weiss created The Bridge now known as the Tata Innovation Center at Cornell Tech in Manhattan, New York. The Tata Innovation Center is a first-of-its-kind seven-story loft designed to connect university researchers to tech companies, startups, and venture capitalists by creating common spaces that encourage random interactions and collaboration. The pair explained that “Innovation is no longer a solitary pursuit. Rather, it occurs at the interstices between different specializations, and, in fact, the most interesting mysteries lie at the intersection of multiple disciplines.”

Disrupters in the K-12 educational space have reimagined what schools can look like by manipulating school designs to facilitate creative collaboration, which research suggests can also increase student achievement. For example, a 2015 study on classroom design conducted by Peter Barrett, emeritus professor at the University of Salford in the United Kingdom, found that variations in the classroom’s physical characteristics, what he called “clever classrooms,” can account for 16% of learning progress. Nathan Strenge, Senior Learning Designer at Fielding International, refers to innovations in school design as “thriving paradigms.” Some examples of thriving paradigms include diverse and adaptive spaces that produce a fluid environment of connected, agile learning spaces. Designing schools in this way will facilitate a community-based approach to learning where students can build relationships with peers, teachers, administrators, and community stakeholders. Further, utilizing innovative furniture and fixtures will allow movement and choice and increase students’ ability to collaborate and share ideas. Additionally, hallways, which are about 30% of a school’s total area, are transformed from circulation areas to collaborative learning spaces complete with embedded learning zones.

Hsieh’s untimely death in November 2020 cut short the life of one of Las Vegas’s most innovative entrepreneurs. But his vision of creating interconnected spaces where serendipitous meetings could result in creative collisions lives on. We in the educational space could learn a lot from Hsieh, as the modern technology-based economy requires students to think innovatively and creatively. Designing schools to facilitate these essential skills will increase students’ academic performance and help students become comfortable working in collaborative environments, where creative collisions could lead to unorthodox thinking and novel approaches.

I would love to hear what you thought was useful or valuable in this blog post, please feel free to comment.

Akilah Releford: Former Student to Successful Entrepreneur

Mon, 31 Jan 2022 09:50:41 GMT

"You don't have to be an Einstein to have a successful business. You just have to be disciplined." ~Akilah Releford, Founder of Mary Louise Cosmetics

If you teach long enough, you reach a point in your career when you see your former students reach significant life milestones such as graduating high school and college, beginning their careers, getting married, having families of their own, etc. There is an incredible sense of pride seeing them become responsible, productive adults.

And thanks to social media like Instagram and LinkedIn, former students are never far away. For example, not long ago, a former colleague of mine posted a video on LinkedIn featuring a mutual student named Akilah Releford. The video was of Akilah on the Tamron Hall Show discussing how at 22 years of age, while a student at Howard University, Akilah turned her dorm-room DIY all-natural, paraben-free, cruelty-free, skin-care creations into a multi-million dollar beauty empire called Mary Louise Cosmetics. Named after her maternal and paternal grandmothers, Mary Louise Cosmetics is a clean beauty brand that BuzzFeed has voted #1 in "21 Life-Changing Beauty Products You Should Try in 2019.

Akilah was my student ten years ago as a junior in my U.S. History class at the Northwest Career and Technical Academy (NWCTA) in Las Vegas, Nevada. I remember Akilah being a highly motivated student who gave 100% in everything she did. One memory that illustrates her commitment to excellence was the work she put into her National History Day project that year. Akilah did extensive research on Dr. Charles Drew. Drew was an African American surgeon and medical researcher who pioneered the field of blood transfusions, saving thousands of lives during World War Two. Akilah successfully tapped into her personal and professional interests to create an incredible project. But Akilah was more than just a good student. She saw opportunities when they presented themselves and took the initiative to capitalize on them, essential attributes that helped Akilah become a successful entrepreneur. I didn't have the vocabulary back then to articulate that special something that Akilah possessed, but now looking back, I realize that Akilah had an entrepreneurial mindset.

According to the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship or NFTE , "an entrepreneurial mindset is a set of skills that enable people to identify and make the most of opportunities, overcome and learn from setbacks, and succeed in a variety of settings." As an educator, I have wondered if an entrepreneurial mindset is something that one is born with or if it is something that can be taught. Akilah points out that her parents are entrepreneurs, and that helped a lot in developing her mindset. This can be seen in Akilah's early entrepreneurial endeavors. While a student at NWCTA, some of Akilah's friends commented that they liked her DIY hair bows and asked her where they could buy them. Capitalizing on her friend's interest in her fashion accessories, Akilah began to make bows for sale and soon had a profitable side hustle, complete with a website and order form. She said she loved to create products for sale to earn extra money and was an essential part of her entrepreneurial journey.

Thinking back to her high school experience, Akilah relates that giving students a choice is vital for building an entrepreneurial mindset. She believes that giving students the freedom to pick their areas of study and pursue what they are interested in can go a long way to developing students' interests, creativity, and positive attitudes. She says that schools that do not have program areas, or areas of specialization, should create space and time for students to engage in a passion project to explore their interests outside the formal curriculum without the pressure of grades. She believes that students will become more motivated and creative by providing students an outlet to be creative and explore their interests. This is what happened in Akilah's case. Akilah "majored" in biomedical science at NWCTA, intending to become a reconstructive plastic surgeon. While Akilah's products are positively transforming her customers' complexions, it is in a much different way than she initially envisioned.

Positivity is an essential component of achieving entrepreneurial success, says Releford. Despite intense competition in any given space, she points out that there is room for everyone who is passionate and stays true to themselves. "go into a store, and there are 30 different types of sliced bread. Just because you don't win this time doesn't mean you won't ever win. Failing is an opportunity in disguise." Many educators may think that Akilah is an outlier, that her spectacular success at such a young age can be attributed to innate qualities that helped her succeed. I asked her about this, is it possible to teach the entrepreneurial mindset? "I think it's something you can teach because you definitely don't have to be the smartest person in the room to have a unique brand. For example, some of my colleagues have graduate degrees and MBAs, and I technically haven't finished my bachelor's degree, but they send me emails all of the time asking me how to do ABC." She said that educators should teach students techniques to be "self-motivated, how to set goals, and to know what they want."

One of the most important things students must understand about entrepreneurialism is that it requires hard work and persistence. Akilah points out that "being a successful entrepreneur is 70% grit and determination and 30% hard work," and she says that it is not always "fun, glamorous and sexy like it appears to be on social media a lot of the time." Nevertheless, Akilah is incredibly optimistic for the future of entrepreneurialism, especially for younger generations like hers. "I feel like I'm really lucky to be living in a time where anyone can start a business and create something from nothing. I think is beautiful. And I think that it's one of the benefits of social media right now. Social media can be a very overwhelming place, but I think if it is used as a tool, in the right way. It can positively change your life."

What if all students had the opportunity to engage in lessons that offered them voice and choice while at the same time tapping into their unique skills and interests? What if schools taught students how to develop grit, creativity, initiative, and other so-called "soft skills" to help them succeed in the 21st-century knowledge economy? Teaching students to develop an entrepreneurial mindset will look very different from traditional education approaches. Still, the return on investment could be huge. Akilah Releford is an exceptional young lady, but her success does not have to be. Teaching students the entrepreneurial mindset could unlock the potential that resides in all students to make a difference.

To learn more about Akilah and Mary Louise Cosmetics, please visit Facebook , Instagram , and her website .

Teaching Students to Ask Their Own Questions

Tue, 30 Nov 2021 09:55:00 GMT

"Knowing the answers will help you in school. Knowing how to question will help you in life."

– Warren Berger

In most high school classrooms, teachers do most of the talking. A study of student engagement revealed that, on average, teachers talk between 70-80% of the time in the upper grades, using teaching methods such as direct instruction, demonstrations, and asking students questions. Even the somewhat interactive Q&A process is dominated by teacher talk as teachers usually follow a discernable pattern where the teacher initiates a question, the students respond, and the teacher evaluates the response and usually builds upon it with detailed explanations. This pattern of classroom talk that consists of initiation, response, and evaluation is sometimes referred to as ‘IRE’ and is the cornerstone of most classroom dialogue (Meehan, 1979). Further, teacher talk increases as students progress through the grades and academic content becomes more specialized. Thus, by the time students enroll in college, the lecture approach becomes the defacto method of disseminating knowledge. The question then becomes, when teachers talk, who is doing the thinking? In other words, in many classrooms, teachers bear most of the cognitive load, allowing students to be passive recipients of the teacher’s instruction. However, this is beginning to change as university faculty, and k-12 teachers realize that direct instruction in many situations results in poor academic performance and achievement compared with active learning strategies. For example, a meta-analysis of 225 studies indicates that when professors utilize passive learning strategies such as lectures in undergraduate STEM classes, failure rates increase by 55 percent. Further, when university faculty used active approaches to teaching and learning, there were better overall grades and a 36 percent drop in class failure rates (Freeman et al., 2014). And according to a feature published in Harvard Magazine, university professors who engage in “active learning” strategies may be beginning to outnumber those that prefer direct instruction or the lectio approach that has been utilized in the halls of higher learning for over 600 years. This trend will continue as older professors with more traditional techniques retire and are replaced by younger ones who hold more progressive views of teaching and learning.

An excellent strategy to get students actively engaged in their learning is to teach them to ask their own questions. When students are taught to ask their own questions, they become active participants in their learning. Further, they are building a community of learners, which results in high cognitive demand, student agency, and growing students into independent thinkers and learners. For example, research suggests that when students are asked to generate questions at the beginning of a unit of study, they are likely to ask a question that comes from a genuine interest to understand and focus on a topic they care about (Scardamalia & Bereiter, 1992). Teachers can then leverage this knowledge of students into effective instruction that is both personal and relevant to the learner.

Teaching Strategy: In his best-selling book The Global Achievement Gap, Harvard University professor of education Tony Wagner interviewed numerous CEOs about the essential qualities they looked for in prospective employees. One key trait that came up repeatedly was workers’ ability to ask good questions. As Wagner put it, “problem-posing is more important than problem-solving.” This makes sense in a world where almost everyone has instant access to information through the internet and related technologies. As a result, agency is no longer being able to recall or even locate the correct answer. Instead, actual worth comes from creating new knowledge and ideas by asking good questions. There are three things that teachers can do to get their students to ask good questions.

1. Building a community of learners- As discussed, the teacher's primary goal is to create a classroom community in which student questions are expected. Further, students must have a supportive environment to learn so that students feel encouraged to take intellectual risks free from ridicule. In other words, students must feel emotionally safe to make mistakes and be vulnerable.

2. Develop students’ questioning skills by providing students with questioning stems. These stems could be displayed on the classroom walls, as handouts, or posted on a class website or learning management system. Teachers should model for their students how to use the stems throughout a lesson. Some popular question stems include Why is…?, Why did…?, How might…?, How did…?, Who should…?, When might…?, What if…?, Predict…?, Why do you think…?, Where might…?, In what ways…?, What do you think about…?, Why do you agree/disagree…?, What advice would you give…?, What would happen if…?, What caused…?, What are the pros and cons of…?, Do you agree that…? Explain.

3. Question evaluation checklist- Providing students with a protocol to evaluate their questions is an excellent strategy to generate good questions that pertain to the lesson at hand. Questions include:

· Is it connected to the topic?

· Is the question open-ended?

· Is the question straightforward?

· Does it promote student thinking?

4. Make student questions a part of every lesson- There are a variety of techniques and approaches that are excellent ways to prompt students to ask their own questions. The key here is to be intentional by providing students with time. Some popular strategies are:

· Think Pair Share-This is a classic teaching strategy in which the teacher poses a question to the class. The students are then given time to think about their responses individually and share their ideas with a neighbor. For purposes of generating questions, students could pose a question to their shoulder buddy using the questioning stems previously mentioned.

· 10 by 10- In this activity, teachers give students 10 minutes to generate 10 questions. This can be done individually or in small groups. Have students implement the question evaluation checklist for each question to ensure high-quality questions.

Visual & aural prompt-Provide students with a visual or auditory cue such as a picture, painting, illustration, political cartoon, video clip, song, or speech that in some way relates to the topic of the lesson. Have students generate questions in response to what they see or hear.

Culturally Responsive Inquiry Learning

Thu, 08 Jul 2021 19:14:45 GMT

A look at one way middle and high school teachers can equip their students with the skills to become independent thinkers.

If the goal of teachers is to make themselves progressively unnecessary, to paraphrase 20th-century educational theorist Thomas Carruthers, how can they equip their students with the skills and dispositions that will transform them from dependent learners into independent ones?

A dependent learner relies on the teacher to bear most of the cognitive load in the classroom through direct instruction and other passive sit-and-get approaches. An independent learner is an active participant in their learning. They have the grit to take the initiative and are curious, critical thinkers who can transfer their learning to new and novel situations with a minimum of scaffolding. Unfortunately, race, language, gender, and socioeconomic status may prevent some students from having equal access to a rigorous curriculum that promotes independent learning .

From Dependent to Independent

Over two decades ago, Geneva Gay introduced culturally responsive teaching to ensure that dependent learners can become independent ones. This framework helps teachers connect students’ culture, language, and life experience to the classroom to increase student achievement for all learners. Gay described culturally responsive teaching as “using the cultural knowledge, prior experiences, frames of reference, and performance styles of ethnically diverse students to make learning encounters more relevant to and effective for them.”

Gay’s framework is that teachers should employ teaching approaches to help marginalized students become academically successful through learning activities with high cognitive demand such as project-based learning, which gives students the opportunity to identify, analyze, and solve real-world problems, particularly those that have resulted in legacies of privilege and oppression.

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Culturally Responsive Inquiry Learning

Culturally responsive inquiry learning blends aspects of culturally responsive teaching with the high cognitive demand of inquiry-based learning, a student-centered approach to teaching and learning that actively engages students in the learning process. There are many variations of inquiry-based learning, including project-, problem-, and design-based learning. Generally speaking, inquiry-based learning requires students to ask questions, engage in formative and summative tasks, and use primary sources as evidence as they seek answers to their questions. Each of these components requires students to engage in their learning actively and at the same time develop 21st-century skills of communication, collaboration, critical thinking, and creativity.

These 21st-century skills are the core competencies that advocates believe are necessary for students to succeed in the knowledge economy, which researchers from Harvard University define as “production and services based on knowledge-intensive activities that contribute to an accelerated pace of technical and scientific advance, as well as rapid obsolescence. The key component of a knowledge economy is a greater reliance on intellectual capabilities than on physical inputs or natural resources.”

Critical Questions

Students take ownership of their learning when they connect with it personally. In culturally responsive inquiry learning, students craft discipline-based questions, known as critical questions, that drive the inquiry process. Working in collaborative teams, students have the opportunity to generate critical questions and investigate enduring societal issues such as injustice, inequality, and discrimination. This process raises students’ critical consciousness and encourages critical thinking.

Teachers use formative and summative tasks in the inquiry-based classroom to monitor and assess student learning. Formative tasks keep students on track and provide the teacher with information about student learning; they may include student-led discussions, portfolios, learning journals, and self-reflection. With summative tasks, students demonstrate their learning by responding to the inquiry’s critical questions. In culturally responsive inquiry, the summative assessment should be an authentic application of the knowledge and skills that students learned in the lesson that will allow them to engage in a real-world task and take informed action.

Working With Primary Sources

The last element of culturally responsive inquiry learning is the source component. Primary sources of information were created during the period under investigation; they include newspaper articles, speeches, memoirs, music, art, photographs, audio recordings, and interviews. Students use primary sources as evidence as they seek to answer the inquiry’s critical questions. Using sources from multiple perspectives, particularly from underrepresented people such as ethnic minorities, immigrants, women, LGBT, and the working class, is necessary to understand a given topic’s full depth and complexity. Further, when students interpret primary sources, they develop critical thinking skills as they research and locate the source and think about its authorship, intended audience, bias, and purpose.

Cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead once wrote, “Children must be taught how to think, not what to think.” Students actively engage in their learning and become independent learners when they ask their own questions, search for answers, and take informed action to address social, political, and economic injustice. Culturally responsive inquiry learning is an effective pedagogy that can empower all students to become academically successful, culturally competent, and socially conscious learners.

Culturally Relevant Teaching: What it is and Why it is Needed

Tue, 22 Jun 2021 09:00:05 GMT

An effective teacher must master the professional skills necessary to deliver a high-quality 21st-century education to their students. In this blog post, I will discuss culturally relevant teaching for an effective 21st-century education.

An effective teacher must master the professional skills necessary to deliver a high-quality 21st-century education to their students. In this blog post, I will discuss culturally relevant teaching for an effective 21st-century education.

“Culturally relevant teaching honors the students’ sense of humanity and dignity. Their complete personhood is never doubted. Self-worth and self-concept is promoted in a very basic way, by acknowledging the individual’s worthiness to be part of a supportive and loving group.”

~Gloria Ladson-Billings

The teaching force in our public schools has remained static over the years, despite the nation’s rapidly changing demographics. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, educators are overwhelmingly female, White, middle class, and middle-aged. Women comprise 76% of all educators in the nation’s K-12 public schools. In elementary school, that number jumps to 89%. Further, 79% of teachers reported that they are White, typically earn around $63, 645 a year, and average 43 years of age (Digest of Education Statistics, 2020). On the other hand, Latinx teachers represent only about 9 percent of the teaching force, Blacks 7 percent, and Asians 2 percent (Taie & Westat, 2020). The Brookings Institute recently reported that just 20% of the public school workforce reported that they identify as people of color, while over 50% of the study body does. That is a representation gap of 30%. Further, researchers point out that a more diverse workforce provides long-lasting benefits to students of color (Hansen, & Quintero, 2021). The number of teachers from diverse backgrounds has been growing since the late 1980s but still has a long way to go before they proportionally represent the students of color they teach. As a result, the teachers leading most classrooms represent the mores, values, and points of view of the dominant culture and may have difficulty working with students from cultures different than their own. And while many teachers work tirelessly to deliver the best possible education to all of their students, without regard to their race, socio-economic, and language status. Cultural misunderstandings may cause some teachers to view their students of color through a deficit lens (Douglas, Lewis, Douglas, Scott, & Garrison-Wade, 2008).

According to professor of urban education, Richard Milner, deficit thinking can be described as “teachers’ perceptions that students of color do not already possess the necessary skills, knowledge and attitudes to succeed and learn, and can result in the development of curriculum and instruction that falls short of optimal teaching and learning” (Milner, 2006, p. 80). In other words, some educators view students of color and their communities as “problems” that need to be fixed, rather than as allies and partners in their education. As professors of education, Lori Patton and Samuel Museus (2019) point out, “deficit thinking is rooted in a blame the victim orientation that suggests that people are responsible for their predicament and fails to acknowledge that they live within coercive systems that cause harm with no accountability.” Part of the educational “system” that has contributed to deficit thinking is the inability or lack of interest on part of some educators to build cultural bridges to their students, which could be an essential factor in their students’ academic success (Douglas, et al., 2008). In her seminal work, Other People’s Children: Cultural Conflict in the Classroom, Lisa Delpit (2006) argues that there are two areas in which White teachers and their students of color experience cultural misunderstandings. The first is the teacher’s misunderstanding of their students’ “aptitudes, intent, or abilities” the misinterpretation may result from differences in language use and interactional patterns. The second area of cultural misunderstanding stems from pedagogies that are incongruent with historically marginalized students. Delpit points out that “teachers may utilize styles of instruction and discipline that are at odds with community norms,” resulting in a cultural incongruence between students and teachers (p. 167).

As a result of school desegregation in the 1960s and 1970s, educators have tried to teach students of color through various multi-cultural education approaches such as culturally appropriate, culturally congruent, culturally responsive, and culturally compatible teaching (Aronson & Laughter, 2016). These frameworks suggest that to raise student achievement for historically marginalized students, schools should reflect students’ diverse cultures by infusing the curriculum with the histories, contributions, and achievements of diverse actors. Building on the framework of multi-cultural education, two dominant strands emerged distinct from earlier methodologies. In the mid-1970s, Geneva Gay outlined the principles of culturally responsive teaching, which focused on the teaching process or what teachers do in the classroom. In contrast, Gloria Ladson-Billings developed culturally relevant pedagogy as a theoretical framework to examine multiple aspects of student achievement.

Geneva Gay described culturally responsive teaching “as using the cultural knowledge, prior experience, frames of reference, and performance styles of ethnically diverse students to make learning encounters more relevant to and effective for them” (Gay, 2010, p. 36). Gay focused her research on what teachers do in the classroom, and according to her, eight dimensions characterize culturally responsive teaching, they are:

· Validation - culturally responsive teaching validates students’ culture and believes that it is worthy of being taught in the formal curriculum by infusing cultural information, resources, and materials in all content and skills taught in school. Additionally, teachers validate students’ lived experiences and build bridges to the school by utilizing a wide range of educational approaches that capitalize on students’ interests and learning styles.

· Comprehensive and inclusive - culturally responsive teachers help students of color achieve academically and maintain students’ cultural identity and connections to their community by developing camaraderie and shared responsibility. In other words, teachers help students build a community of learners in which all students are expected to learn and achieve at high levels.

· Multidimensional - Culturally responsive teachers utilize various, overlapping factors like curriculum content that reflects the diversity of learners. Teachers understand the racial, socio-political teaching context to build a classroom climate that elevates academic achievement for all learners. Teachers utilize various instructional tools and approaches that build on diverse students’ strengths and help them improve upon their weaknesses.

· Empowering - Culturally responsive teachers empower their students to be successful by imbuing within them confidence, courage, and the belief that they can achieve their goals. These teachers encourage students to take intellectual risks and persevere in the face of challenges and adversity.

· Transformative - Culturally responsive teachers engage in the work of transformation by first identifying the strengths and accomplishments of diverse students, then enhancing these strengths through the instructional process. Students' academic success and cultural consciousness take place in tandem as students build cultural pride and awareness.

· Emancipatory - Culturally responsive teaching is psychologically and intellectually liberating for students of color because they are exposed to knowledge beyond the mainstream canon.

· Humanistic - Culturally responsive teachers uphold all students' welfare, dignity, and respect across ethnic, racial, and social groups.

· Ethical - Culturally responsive teachers are ethical in that they dismantle the hegemony of the dominant culture on educational policies and practices. They interrupt the notion that education is “cultureless” and unbiased.

Gloria Ladson-Billings introduced the idea of culturally relevant pedagogy, which she describes as “a pedagogy that empowers students intellectually, socially, emotionally, and politically by using cultural referents to impart knowledge, skills, and attitudes (Ladson-Billings, 1994, p. 17-18). She designed the framework after observing successful teachers of African-American students and noting their beliefs and ideologies towards educating students of color. The framework consists of three main components. The first and most important aspect of culturally relevant pedagogy focuses on student learning and academic achievement. Successful teachers of historically marginalized students have high expectations for all students and believe that all students can succeed academically. In other words, teachers see all of their students as being uniquely brilliant. In addition, teachers must possess knowledge and skills in developing students’ cultural competence. This means that students must be able to maintain their cultural integrity while being academically successful. Successful teachers achieve this aim by helping students navigate between their home culture and school culture by acknowledging and pushing back against the implicit bias built into the institution. Lastly, culturally responsive pedagogy means that teachers help their students engage in learning tasks that require them to “recognize, understand and critique current social inequities” (Ladson-Billings, 1995, p. 476). Critical consciousness must begin with the teacher, who must recognize sociopolitical issues of race, class, and gender within themselves before integrating them into the curriculum (Aronson & Laughter, 2016).

Despite their subtle differences, Gay and Ladson-Billings’ frameworks share four commonalities in elevating student achievement for diverse students (Aronson & Laughter 2016). The first criterion is that culturally relevant educators use constructivist approaches to help students build bridges between their life experience and new academic knowledge. In other words, they use students’ knowledge and cultural assets as a vehicle to raise academic achievement. In addition, culturally relevant teachers engage their students in critical reflection by examining issues pertaining to their own lives and society. Teachers accomplish this aim by introducing students to a culturally relevant curriculum that includes diverse viewpoints and challenges conventional norms. Further, culturally relevant teachers facilitate students' cultural competence so that they learn to value, appreciate, and take pride in their own culture and other cultures. Cultural awareness is a valuable 21st-century skill in an increasingly global economy. Finally, culturally relevant teachers help their students identify and challenge historic power differentials through critical pedagogy. Paulo Friere (2018) describes critical pedagogy as “learning to perceive social, political, and economic contradictions, and to take action against oppressive elements of reality” (p. 35).

Not only is culturally relevant teaching affective in building students' sense of belonging, inclusion, and cultural pride, but it is an effective way to increase academic outcomes for all learners. The research concludes that culturally responsive teaching has an overall positive effect on student learning across multiple content areas such as math, science, and English for historically marginalized students and students of the dominant culture (Aronson & Laughter, 2016). For example, culturally relevant approaches can increase students’ motivation and interest in the subjects they are studying, leading to an increased ability to engage in content area discourse and investigations. Increased student engagement is directly correlated to higher student achievement. Further, culturally relevant teaching can increase student perceptions of themselves as capable students. When students believe they can be academically successful, they usually are

Educational Learning Theory for the 21st-Century

Thu, 13 May 2021 19:02:47 GMT

An effective teacher must master the professional skills necessary to deliver a high-quality 21st-century education to their students. In this blog post, I will discuss the importance of understanding behaviorist, cognitive, humanistic and constructivist educational learning theory.

To create effective learners for the 21st-century, educators must take deliberate steps to develop within each student the ability to collaborate, solve unique and challenging problems, foster the spirit of inquiry, develop technological literacy, engage in multidisciplinary learning, and instill within each student educational agency and flexibility by creating learning activates that are meaningful and relevant. Teachers should offer students voice and choice in their learning based upon their unique interests, knowledge, and skills. Students well-versed in these skills and dispositions will meet and overcome the challenges of a future that will look radically different from the present. To teach students how to be effective learners, teachers must understand the learning theory that supports 21st-century approaches. Educational learning theory describes how students receive, process, and retain knowledge during learning. The four major educational learning theories are Behaviorism, Cognitivism, Humanism, and Constructivism.

Behaviorism was developed in the early 20th century and was based primarily on the work of Edward Thorndike and B.F. Skinner. In this theory, learners are mostly passive participants in their learning. They simply respond to outside stimuli provided by the teacher through punishment and rewards, rewarding good behavior while punishing undesirable ones. This approach to learning is also known as operant conditioning, and according to this theory, students are a “tabula rasa” or blank slate. Education happens when the teacher transfers their knowledge to their students through stimulation of the learner. Behaviorist teaching strategies are ubiquitous in classrooms, both past, and present. They can be seen in pedagogies such as drill and practice, question and answer, guided practice, regular review, and positive reinforcement. Behaviorist approaches may be appropriate for learning tasks that require students to memorize and recall subject content and other lower-level cognitive tasks. But are inadequate in engaging students in complex thinking such as synthesis, analysis, and application.

Cognitive Learning Theory, based mainly on the work of Jean Piaget, rejects the notion that students lack agency in their learning and simply react to environmental stimuli such as positive and negative reinforcement. Unlike behavioral learning theory, which focuses on observable behaviors that can be measured, Cognitive Learning Theory seeks to understand the learner’s thought process. In addition, this approach examines external factors that impact learning to include the role of the student’s environment and social context. Teaching approaches include asking students open-ended questions and explaining their thought process and how they came to a certain answer or conclusion. Allowing students to reflect on their mistakes and possible alternatives is another approach that can be used in various learning situations and is particularly effective in honing students’ analytical skills, comprehension, and self-regulation.

Humanistic Learning Theory, developed by Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow in the early 19th century, posits that teaching and learning should focus on the “whole child.” In other words, teachers need to consider the student’s developmental, emotional, and personal needs in addition to their academic requirements in the learning processes. Further, the aim of Humanistic Learning Theory is to develop the learners’ skills in various areas to include their social, intellectual, and artistic development. Teachers who utilize this approach believe that the end goal of learning is to cultivate students’ self-esteem and to help them achieve their goals by providing them autonomy in the classroom to explore their interests.

Most apropos to a 21st-century education is Constructivist Learning Theory. Constructivism is based on the work of Jean Piaget, Jerome Bruner, Ernst von Glaserfeld, and Lev Vygotsky. It is a learner-centered approach that suggests that students actively “construct” their knowledge. Each individual’s reality is determined by their prior knowledge, beliefs, and experiences. Because learning is based upon personal experiences, each student’s learning is unique to them. In other words, “Constructivist approaches emphasize learner’s actively constructing their own knowledge rather than passively receiving information transmitted to them from teachers and textbooks. From a constructivist perspective, knowledge cannot simply be given to students: Students must construct their own meanings” (Stage, Muller, Kinzie and Simmons, 1998, p. 35). Constructivist learning theory is based upon numerous principles such as students learn by doing. When students have agency in their learning, they build their capacity as learners and improve in their abilities, skills, and expertise. Additionally, constructivists believe that learning is a social activity and is best accomplished when students are engaged in learning activities that involve their peers, families, and communities to solve problems and accomplish learning tasks. Learning is contextual, and teachers must design learning activities that consider students’ prior knowledge, beliefs, and experiences. Finally, constructivists believe that students’ intrinsic motivation is the key to effective learning and student engagement. Students will not learn appropriately if they are not motivated to do so.

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Why Knowledge of Students is Important for Effective Teaching

Tue, 09 Apr 2019 19:21:54 GMT

An effective teacher must master the professional skills necessary to deliver a high-quality 21st-century education to their students. In this blog post, I will discuss the importance of knowing the students we teach.

One of the cardinal rules of effective teaching is to "know your students." This is because a deep understanding of the individuals we teach is essential to forming positive relationships. According to William Powell and Ochan Kusuma-Powell in their book, How to Teach Now: Five Keys to Personalized Learning in the Global Classroom , point out that building positive relationships with students can do the following: create a psychologically safe environment for every learner; determine each student's readiness for learning; identify multiple access points to the curriculum to increase engagement and success and develop and demonstrate greater emotional intelligence in the classroom. Since the average teacher spends over 1,000 hours with their students in a typical school year, the relationship between teachers and their students is highly consequential.

Developing strong relationships with learners can help teachers build a classroom climate based on trust and mutual respect. This is true of relationships between the teacher and their students and between students and their peers. This psychologically safe atmosphere will allow students to take intellectual risks by removing obstacles such as fear of chastisement or failure. And while there are criticisms of Maslow's hierarchy in that it is based more upon philosophy than scientific evidence, research indicates that strong teacher relationships are associated with short-term and long-term educational growth. This can be seen in student engagement, attendance, higher grades, fewer disruptive behaviors, and lower school dropout rates. Healthy relationships are beneficial to teachers as well. A study from the European Journal of Psychology of Education found that when teachers have strong relationships with their students, they tend to be happier and experience less stress and anxiety in the classroom.

Understanding adolescent development is a critical component of the knowledge of students. Effective teachers understand that adolescence is a time of profound change and presents many challenges to the teacher, learner, and the learning environment. Research indicates that unlike adults who cogitate using the brain's rational part called the prefrontal cortex, teens process information with their amygdala. The amygdala, or "lizard brain," is where emotions are generated. The teenage brain is not fully developed until around twenty-five, when connections between the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala are fully formed. This is why teenagers can be overly emotional and irrational leading to impulsive decisions and behavior. Effective teachers consider their students' developmental needs as they plan and implement learning activities that support their socio-emotional growth. As a child-rearing expert, Dr. Ron Taffel points out, "Even as kids reach adolescence, they need more than ever for us to watch over them. Adolescence is not about letting go. It's about hanging on during a very bumpy ride." Adolescence is about self-discovery and forgoing an individual identity while cultivating membership in various social groups. Teens are trying to make sense of the world and their place in it. They are exploring notions of fairness and justice and should be given opportunities to confront these issues in a supportive and safe environment. They are in pursuit of autonomy, and many will test the limits of authority at home and school.

There are brain-based teaching strategies that teachers should use with adolescents. This is important because teens are not little adults, nor are they children. Teachers must engage teens in developmentally appropriate learning strategies specifically designed to address their unique needs. For example, teachers should give simple and straightforward directions and explanations while using multiple models of instruction. Because every student is unique and differs in how they perceive and comprehend information, teachers should provide students with multiple representations to communicate content. Additionally, teachers should help students develop competence in their discipline. Adolescence is an awkward time in which students do not want to feel incompetent or that people are judging them. Teachers can help students develop competence by knowing their students’ strengths and weaknesses and help struggling students by offering extra help or tutoring. Teachers should try to incorporate decision-making into their curriculum as much as possible. Teenagers’ brains are rapidly developing in adolescence, and as a result, their decision-making processes are often flawed. Teachers should help their students evaluate potential solutions and think through consequences. An excellent teaching approach that allows students to think through various decisions and points of view are roleplaying and simulations. For example, in a U.S. history class, students could recreate the constitutional convention and debate the important issues of 1787 including slavery, representation, and federalism. Or students could put Harry Truman on trial for his decision to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The possibilities are limitless. And roleplay and simulations are an excellent opportunity for students to examine issues from various points of view and consider the pros and cons of historical decisions. A word of caution, however. Be sure that roleplays and simulations don’t expose students to unnecessary trauma by engaging in activities that are hurtful or insensitive, especially for students of color.

Students in most schools are grouped into grades by age and not ability. Unfortunately, this process overlooks the fact that students develop and mature at different rates. That is why teachers must provide sufficient supports for developing learners to reach higher levels of understanding. The Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD), first postulated by Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky, suggests that there are things a learner can do without assistance, and there are things that a learner can do with help from a more knowledgeable person. When students are in the ZPD, they are provided scaffolding or learning support from the teacher or more knowledgeable peer to help them accomplish a task they could not do independently. ZPD is one of the reasons that collaborative learning is so effective, especially when learners of mixed abilities are grouped together. Further, collaborative learning supports socio-emotional learning by developing self-awareness, self-management, responsible decision making, social awareness, and relational skills. All of which are critical skills as students grow and mature.

Knowledge of students can also mean understanding students' unique skills to include their strengths and weaknesses. Research conducted by the Center for Education Policy and Analysis at Stanford University reveals that knowledge of individual students' skills or KISS is an effective way to increase student achievement for all learners. Teachers who differentiate and target their instruction to meet their students' unique needs have higher academic gains. According to Carol Ann Tomlinson, author, speaker, and differentiated instruction expert, "differentiation is simply a teacher attending to the learning needs of a particular student or small groups of students, rather than teaching a class as though all individuals in it were basically alike."

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