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
Twenty-one years ago, I welcomed my first class of students to kick off my career as a classroom teacher. I learned so many lessons, both big and small that year. During that first year, both my students and Midge, an incredible mentor in the room
The word “engagement” has quickly become yet another cotton candy buzzword in education—sweet, desirable, and inoffensive, but offering little in terms of substance or sustenance. After all, it’s hard to argue against the idea that students should be awake and focused on their learning in
In the world of Visible Learning, many educators are drawn to influences with effect sizes above the hinge point of 0.40. Not only does Scaffolding fall in the zone of desirable effects, it has an effect size of 0.82 - nearly double the rate of learning. In the face of
And you have treasures hidden within you- extraordinary treasures - and so do I, and so does everyone around us. And bringing those treasures to light takes work and faith and courage and devotion, and the clock is ticking, and the world is spinning, and
Can I explicitly teach knowledge and skills in my inquiry-based classroom? Do I need to frontload everything before my students can be successful in our inquiry? Knowing that learning through inquiry is the basis of a three-dimensional Concept-Based Literacy classroom, teachers often wonder about the
I decided I wanted to write a post about New Year’s resolutions. Every year, I make three or four personal resolutions: be more punctual, respond to texts promptly instead of thinking a response and not actually typing it, clean up after myself. Basically, my personal
In my work with teachers across the country on differentiating instruction, it appears that when it comes to differentiation, teachers fall into one of three categories: teachers who want to differentiate instruction for their students but don’t know how teachers who have tried to differentiate
While we may be tempted to look at underperforming students and label them as lazy, research indicates that most students lack motivation because of three fundamental factors: Students do not believe they can succeed even if they try. Students do not feel they have any
We all know lesson planning takes time and a lot of effort. Co-planning for co-teaching requires dedicated time and collaborative effort by two or more people. Whether co-planning with another educator or a student teacher, the co-planning process involves additional tasks not found in individual