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You can choose study and practice, or you can choose to forget.
Students are often surprised by how quickly they forget things they’ve just learned. This is often because they don’t understand that the mastery path is a muddy slope: If you stop moving forward as...
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Brain Food
Disclaimer: This is about how food affects the brain. It is not health advice. Please consult your doctor before making any changes to your diet or taking any supplements. Long-time readers will know...
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The 3 P’s of Active Reading
So-called “active” reading is one of the most important skills a student can develop. Being an active reader means not just passively letting the words flow by, but deliberately engaging with them. If...
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Interleaving and Massed Practice
When researchers split a group of skilled baseball players into two groups and assigned both the goal of getting better at hitting curve balls, they discovered something interesting about learning in...
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Confidence Comes From Repetition
I often have the privilege of watching a student walk through the early stages of the mastery path: They’re trying to learn a new math topic, they arrive at an understanding of it, and then they do a...
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No Book?
We’ve already discussed the value of real, paper textbooks and what to do when schools don’t provide them. Now, let’s turn to another increasingly common problem: when schools don’t provide copies of...
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Mr. Rogers on Parenting
“Children are not simple . . . neither are adults.” –Fred Rogers, a.k.a. Mr. Rogers1 Those words of wisdom are just the tip of the iceberg that is Fred Rogers. More commonly known as “Mr. Rogers,” he...
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Expanding Your Math Comfort Zone
“It’s okay to just count ducks for a while.” That’s a phrase you probably wouldn’t expect to hear one adult say to another, but in our office, every once in a while, it happens. Here’s the context: An...
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Mastery Learning: In and Out of the Classroom
Image from https://www.ted.com/talks/sal_khan_let_s_teach_for_mastery_not_test_scores?language=en Last year, two different teachers of my students said that their classroom was using a “mastery...
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If They Covered it Ever, They’ll Expect You to Know it Forever
Most classrooms don’t force students to form long-term memories. They teach for short-term memories because of time and resource constraints. The homework that’s assigned is designed to get you from...
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What Are Planners For, Anyway?
Here’s a fun exercise: Ask a teenager who doesn’t use a planner why they don’t. They’ll probably reply, “Because I don’t need to,” followed by, “I remember everything I have to do,” or, “They put all...
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Trust Takes Time
We all know that trust takes time to develop. And when we think of this, we’re almost always thinking about relationships between people. We almost never think about this when considering the...
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“And it’s okay if the answer is no.”
Here are eight words most children have never heard except in our office: “And it’s okay if the answer is no.” This is something we say to students one breath after asking something like, “Are you...
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The Tragedy of Lost Potential
Part 1: Khan’s Talk In Sal Khan’s fantastic TED Talk on mastery learning, he pointed out a flaw in the way we think about education and human potential. To do so, he drew a parallel between the...
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The Trouble with Multitasking
People seem to always be doing two things at once. We work on projects while responding to emails. We text in the middle of conversations with friends. We scroll through Facebook while watching TV....
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The Educational Opportunity Hidden in the COVID-19 Crisis
As educators, parents, and students, we find ourselves in uncharted waters. Schools are closed, perhaps until the fall. And it all happened so quickly that no one had time to plan. While we do...
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Pretend It Counts
With schools closed, many students are facing a novel situation: Teachers aren’t requiring them to do work. True, some private schools are giving graded homework and tests, but so far most public...
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Why Leading By Example Is More Important Than Ever
I often write about the importance of leading by example, but right now, it’s more important than ever. This is true for everyone from political leaders to parents, but, of course, it’s the parents...
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9 Tips on How to Get the Most Out of Your Video Tutoring Sessions
We are having great success working with our students remotely, and we’re deeply grateful for the opportunity to continue coaching them during this period of social isolation. Now that we’ve been...
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The “Marshmallow Test” Was Debunked… Here’s Why That Matters
The Marshmallow Test If you’ve never heard of the famous “Marshmallow Test,” let me describe it for you. Back in the 1960s and 1970s, at Stanford, Walter Mischel and his team performed experiments in...
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