Years ago, Steve marveled at how 15 one-hour tutoring sessions allowed him to address more than he ever could in 180 50-minute Algebra 1 classes. He didn’t just cover the math, but instead, he was able to teach it with far more understanding and achievement.
Productive Struggle Helps Students Grow Their Learning Power The following is adapted from (Re)Building Students’ Learning Power: Teaching for Instructional Equity and Cognitive Justice by Zaretta Hammond, forthcoming from Corwin Press in April 2025. To engage in increasingly complex academic work, each student must develop a more
In my early career as a science teacher, I knew the kinds of questions that I wanted students to answer: those questions would require thinking, synthesis of ideas, and the application of those ideas. An obvious place for questions like these was in the follow
This blog is Part 4 of the 4-part series on Promising Principles to Enhance Learning. Part 1: Seven Promising Principles to Enhance Learning in Your School or Classroom Part 2: Four Ingredients that Motivate our Learners to Engage Part 3: Ways to Enhance Remembering: The Role of Retrieval
How rich math tasks help to build community and culture, provide rich assessment data, and support your students in seeing themselves as mathematicians. Let’s think about our typical planning process for our mathematics lessons. We may: 1) find a task aligned to a standard, 2) make
Lately it seems that our inboxes, news feeds, and social media streams are flooded with worrisome messages about “COVID slide” and “Learning Loss.” While it’s true that the past year has been filled with challenges, we invite teachers, parents, and other stakeholders to join us in a
The importance of struggle comes into play when someone is learning to tie their shoes, drive a car, or perfect a jump shot. Working through the struggle allows the learner to be successful. A question to reflect upon: Do you value this same struggle for
Elaine doesn’t like it when her students struggle. She wants to run over to them, pick up the pencil, and show them the way. Yet she knows this is not best for them because when students productively struggle to make sense of the mathematics, they