In the book Reading in the Brain: The New Science of How We Read, Stanislas Dehaene takes us on a tour of the brain that drills down to the neuron-level of…
Category: Books
The Peak-End Rule
In 1993 an interesting study run by Daniel Kahneman and other researchers investigated discomfort. Participants submerged one hand in water at 14°C (57.2°F) for sixty seconds and rated the discomfort….
You are cursed
When I was at SUNY Geneseo as a Math major, I took a course designed for high school math teachers. In addition to having to complete a New York State…
The New Education
Cathy Davidson, Senior Advisor on Transformation to the Chancellor of the City University of New York (CUNY), recently released an updated version of her book The New Education: How to Revolutionize…
Toilets, Helicopters, and Punnett Squares
Do you know how a ballpoint pen works? If you’re immediate answer was “yes”, you are in a majority that includes people who think they know how a ballpoint works (though in…
The Myth of Learning Styles
When I was in college (in the nineteen hundreds), one of my education classes explored Howard Gardner’s Theory of Multiple Intelligences. I was enamored with the idea. As a doe-eyed…
Inga and Otto and the EMT
Imagine Inga and Otto live in the city and are independently walking to the museum. Inga has a fabulous memory and knows the precise location of the museum on 53rd street….
Heutagogy, Generative Learning, and Drive
In 2009, Daniel Pink wrote Drive – a book that interrogated what we know about motivation and challenged the world with a reframing of what makes us tick. In 1949,…
Beyond the Due Date
In Blended Learning with Google: Your Guide to Dynamic Teaching and Learning by Kasey Bell, tackles different ways to leverage engaging technology. While the book is targeted for K-12 teachers, there are many…
Power of Prediction
We predict things all the time (usually based on prior knowledge, context, and experience). Have you ever attempted to complete someone’s sentence? But did you know predicting in a novel context can be a potent learning…
Teach by Example(s)?
Consider this story: A general wishes to capture a fortress located in the center of a country. There are many roads radiating outward from the fortress. All have been mined…
Multimedia for your Students
Check out this passage from Multimedia Learning by Richard Mayer: Lightning can be defined as the discharge of electricity resulting from the difference in electrical charges between the cloud and the ground….
Neuromyths – Part II
In 2018, Dr. Tracey Tokuhama-Espinosa published Neuromyths: Debunking False Ideas About The Brain, a book that interrogates roughly sixty myths about learning and teaching. She frames each myth by explaining the…
Neuromyths – Part I
In 2018, Dr. Tracey Tokuhama-Espinosa published Neuromyths: Debunking False Ideas About The Brain, a book that interrogates roughly sixty myths about learning and teaching. She frames each myth by explaining the myth, discussing the…
Developing a Classroom Technology Policy
James Lang, author of Small Teaching and Small Teaching Online has published a new book, Distracted: Why Students Can’t Focus and What You Can Do About It. While reading this…
Chance Favors the Prepared Mind
Massed practice is how I learned math growing up; that is, focusing on specific problems. On Monday, my teacher gave me 20 addition problems. The next night she gave me 20 subtraction…
Quiz Early, Quiz Often
In the book Make it Stick, the authors discuss a number of research-based strategies to help instructors create meaningful learning experiences for their students. One of the strategies – retrieval practice…