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Did I Need to Know What Gender My Nonbinary Interviewees Were Assigned at Birth? Maybe Not.

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Did I Need to Know What Gender My Nonbinary Interviewees Were Assigned at Birth? Maybe Not.

Lisa Reff, a Maryland lawyer who had urged her state representative to sponsor the “Gender X” legislation, said she had struggled with her teenager’s request until another parent told her it was standard for the verb to match the pronoun.

“‘I was saying ‘they is,’” Ms. Reff explained. “Saying ‘they are’ is so much easier.”

Ms. Reff, who said she disliked wearing skirts and dresses as a child, also voiced a confusion I heard from several other women who grew up as 1970s- and 1980s-era feminism was vowing to smash gender-role stereotypes. “My question was, how is this different from being a tomboy?” she said.

One scientist with whom I spoke felt ambivalent about the new convention at professional conferences that attendees write their pronouns on name tags. After decades of fighting for women in the field to be seen as scientists first, she noted, they are now literally being labeled by gender.

But Jamie Grace Alexander, a nonbinary college student who helped to craft testimony on the Maryland bill, told me there was value in having “a name for what I am” rather than trying to expand deeply ingrained conceptions of “male” and “female.’’

“I could subvert their expectations when I come into the room,’’ they said, “but why can’t I subvert their expectations with my identity itself?”

The degree to which expectations of appearance, abilities and behavior are still attached to the binary genders, many informed me, tends to become more evident in light of identities that combine, reject, partially embrace or alternate between them. Parents became aware of how often they are asked the gender of their children as a kind of small talk. Students became aware of how frequently teachers address them as “ladies and gentlemen.” The Facebook group Ah Yes, the Two Genders specializes in documenting gender-reveal party cakes, bathroom signs and other reflections of this penchant for the binary-gender classification.

Dr. Jason Rafferty, the author of the American Association of Pediatrics’ first policy statement on the care of gender-nonconforming children, which was issued last fall, said most of the bullying in middle and high school is based on gender.

Penn’s Dr. Susan Davidson on Women in STEM and New Trajectories Into Computer Science

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Penn’s Dr. Susan Davidson on Women in STEM and New Trajectories Into Computer Science

Over the past decade, computer science has gone from a topic for specialists to an essential tool for professionals in nearly every field. Dr. Susan Davidson of the University of Pennsylvania has been at the forefront of this sea change, including co-founding one of the first research centers for bioinformatics in the country.

In this Q&A, she shares insights from her long career, as well as what it takes to succeed as a woman in STEM (she is a former CIS department chair, former Deputy Dean of SEAS, and faculty founder of the Advancing Women in Engineering Program at Penn). Students from non-computer science backgrounds can learn from world-class faculty like Dr. Davidson in an affordable, online format through Penn’s Online Master of Computer and Information Technology .

Can you tell us a bit about your own journey — what originally sparked your interest in mathematics, bioinformatics, and computer science?

Dr. Davidson: I was the child of academic parents at Cornell University. My father was an applied mathematician, so I was very drawn to math as a child. And my mother was a plant scientist, so I think the intersection of math and biology was inherited from my parents.

I first took a programming course because my sister, who was also a biochemist, said presciently — this was in the mid-1970s — that the future of biochemistry was computational. So I took a programming course with her and realized it was mathematical and rigorous, but that you could actually see output (unlike proving a theorem), and I loved that about it!

What do you consider to be your biggest accomplishments?

Dr. Davidson: I am proudest of the creation of the Center for Bioinformatics [now subsumed by the Penn Institute for Biomedical Informatics] at Penn. This was in the mid-1990s, in collaboration with computer science colleagues Peter Buneman and Val Tannen, statistician Warren Ewens, and two developmental biologists, Chris Overton and David Searles. This was at the very beginning of the Human Genome Project.  While many biomedical researchers were aware that bioinformatics was a direction they needed to go in, Chris Overton understood it better than most and could articulate it — he was very visionary. And I’m very organized, so we made a great pair in co-directing the Center.

The Genomics and Computational Biology graduate degree program came out of the Center as well as the undergraduate degree concentrations in computational biology in both the Arts & Sciences’ Biology department and the Penn Engineering school. So I think I’m proudest of that work because we were way ahead of the curve.

What challenges did you encounter along the way?

Dr. Davidson: I think the biggest challenge was combining family and career. I got married right out of college, so we immediately had a “two body” problem: I went to Princeton for my PhD, my husband was based in Philadelphia, he commuted back and forth from Princeton, and we had *absolutely* no money — which was interesting when gas prices were surging!

And then, as I was graduating from Princeton, we had our first child —  it was very awkward interviewing for faculty positions when I was 7 months pregnant!   I also had no idea whether I could manage a family and a career. Starting a career with a 3-month old, having a second child three years later, and dealing with terminally ill parents (my father died of a brain tumor and my father-in-law developed Alzheimer’s before I came up for tenure) — the combination of family and career was very hard.

I think some things are easier now because most companies have better policies than were in place when I was trying to do it. But I think that no matter what, the whole tension of work and family is always difficult to play out.

How did you succeed at doing both?

Dr. Davidson: My father was not one to give advice, but the one thing he told me was, “Don’t think about it, just do it.” I think that’s actually very good advice, because people spend way too much time wondering if they can do something, and if they just try, very often they succeed! Sometimes they fail, but failure is not the end of the world.

It’s OK to fail. You’ll figure out another way around and succeed eventually. I think the fear of failure, combined with the imposter syndrome that many people have, can be debilitating. Don’t listen to the inner demons telling you you can’t do it!

What advice would you give to yourself today if you were starting out your education?

Dr. Davidson: First of all, “don’t think about it, just do it!” But I think the other thing was that I didn’t understand the value of relationships. I thought that my success in life was based on merit, which is part of it, but who you know and who they know and the connections between people are an important part of your success. I would have liked to understand that better earlier on — it probably would have made my life a little easier.

Many of the applicants for the MCIT are making career shifts — what counsel do you have for someone who is moving into the space without a STEM background?

Dr. Davidson: I haven’t been through this personally, because I grew up in STEM, it was part of my DNA. But I’ve observed a lot of students. I was recently talking to a student in our data science program, and he said that the first three months that he was here, he was absolutely drowning.  He felt that he was never going to make it or understand anything. I think my younger son, who did the MCIT degree, also had a feeling of being completely out of his depth initially.

But they persisted and found a way of stabilizing. So I think a lot of it is not listening to the inner demons, the voices that say you can’t do it or that you’re not good enough. If you were admitted into the program, someone saw something in you. It may take you a while to shift your thought process into more of a computational thought process, but you can do it. Persist, work hard, and eventually things will get easier.

There are also a lot of online resources available:  You can take online courses, and you can find tutorials on particular topics. But no matter what, when you arrive here and you’re surrounded by other smart students, some of whom have been programming for years, you may feel that you’re out of your depth — you just have to persist.

Is there anything you would tell women specifically about pursuing this career trajectory?

Dr. Davidson: It is a great career path, especially for combining family and career — unlike biology, where you have to be in the lab, you can often work remotely.  However, women have to be prepared for the fact that it’s still a very male-dominated field, and it’s going to be a different culture than what they experience here at Penn. I think that tech businesses as a whole are aware that culture is a problem they need to fix, but until then you have to be prepared for potentially being the only woman in the room, for getting spoken over, and for inappropriate comments.

What do you think is unique about the MCIT and MCIT Online experience?

Dr. Davidson: I think MCIT is one-of-a-kind, because we take people who do not know computer science and bring them up to speed. The program is also very hands-on:  It’s really hard to jump into STEM when you come from a field where you’re thinking in completely different ways, so we’ve taken that into account.

And then consider the MCIT program in the context of the university, with connections to other departments, other disciplines, the research you can get involved in, and the connections you can make — because our students are fantastic, they get great jobs and are probably our strongest recruiters!

Unlike our on-campus students, online MCIT students never leave the “campus” because the online community is the campus;  students can graduate and work for years and still be part of that same online community. So I think it will be really interesting to see the dynamics of the social networks and relationships that develop with the Online MCIT program.

Beyond becoming a software engineer at a FANG company, what are some of the other common trajectories you see among Penn Engineering students?

Dr. Davidson: I had a student who was really interested in urban planning and researched what other cities have done with data to analyze traffic patterns and the impact of various things like one-way streets, bike lanes, or stop signs. He really wasn’t so interested in the Google and the Facebook type companies — what he cared about was civic involvement. We have other students that have combined their love of medicine with computation and gone on to do work in hospitals.

It’s very individual. A lot of our students go for the “sure” thing  (the FANG companies) because that widens the opportunities they can get later, but my personal favorites are the ones that follow their passions and apply what they’ve learned to something completely new.

How have the motivations for your students changed in the last 5 or 10 years?

Dr. Davidson: I think people are now interested in starting programs such as MCIT because they understand the impact that technology has on their lives. Think back 5 years — Alexa didn’t have the impact that she has today in our daily lives, because natural language processing hadn’t evolved to a state where we could use voice-activated control as successfully as we do now. Self-driving cars were not really a thing either.

Technology has made huge, huge strides over the past decade, and is affecting absolutely everything you do. And people get it — they know computer science isn’t just sitting in a room looking at code in front of terminal all day. I think that’s the motivator: 20 years ago, you had to convince people that computer science actually had something to do with real life.   

Not everybody’s going to be a computer scientist and that’s fine, but I think that once you’ve gotten out in the real world and found your passion, you realize, “Wow, I need to understand something about computation even if i’m not going to be the programmer, ultimately.”  And that is what motivates our students today.

 

Dog in a Backpack

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Dog in a Backpack

Note: This is our last Picture Prompt of the 2018-19 school year.

What are the weirdest, most interesting or most surprising things you’ve seen on public transportation? Did they shock you, annoy you or bring you joy?

Tell us in the comments, then read the related article to see more of the oddities New Yorkers regularly encounter on the subway.

Find many more ways to use our Picture Prompt feature in this lesson plan.

Word + Quiz: bon mot

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Word + Quiz: bon mot

: a clever remark

_________

The term bon mot has appeared in 16 articles on NYTimes.com in the past year, including on July 5 in the theater review “‘The Royal Family of Broadway,’ This Time in Song” by Jesse Green:

The opposite problem confounds Julie (Laura Michelle Kelly) and her daughter, Gwen (Hayley Podschun): They want the stability of marriage without giving up the excitement of the stage. When Julie’s old lover, Gil, now a millionaire, returns from Brazil to scoop her up, and Gwen’s stockbroker fiancé, Perry, lays out his dream of a proper suburban life, both women dither over what to do.

To grande dame Fanny (Harriet Harris), their doubts are ignoble. “Marriage isn’t a career,” she harrumphs. “It’s an incident!”

That sort of bon mot — along with huge dollops of bohemian atmosphere — were enough to make the nonmusical “Royal Family” a success …

_________

Are Your Parents Addicted to Their Phones?

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Are Your Parents Addicted to Their Phones?

You’ve been on that device for hours. … Ugh, could you look up every once in a while? Put that phone down, now!

Have these words ever been uttered in your home? If yes, who said them, you or your parents?

In “Your Kids Think You’re Addicted to Your Phone,” Niraj Chokshi writes about a new report from Common Sense Media, a nonprofit children’s advocacy and media ratings organization, about families and the use of mobile devices, based on surveys of 500 pairs of parents and teenagers.

Here are a few of the report’s key findings:

Bleary-eyed moms, dads and teenagers are everywhere.

The findings that Mr. Steyer and the report’s author, Michael Robb, said were most worrying related to how parents and teenagers allow mobile devices to interfere with sleep.

“That’s important because we know that healthy sleep is associated with a range of positive outcomes and poor sleep is related to a range of negative outcomes,” said Mr. Robb, the senior director of research for Common Sense Media.

According to the survey, conducted online and by phone in February and March, 26 percent of parents said they used a mobile device, such as a smartphone or tablet, within five minutes of going to sleep. The same share acknowledged waking up to check the device at least once during the night, while a slightly smaller share, 23 percent, said they used a device within five minutes of waking up.

The rates were higher among teenagers: 40 percent said they used a device within five minutes of going to sleep; 36 percent admitted to waking up to check a device; and 32 percent said they used a device within five minutes of waking up.

But their worries are different.

Curiously, Common Sense Media found that while parents feel increasingly glued to their phones, attitudes among teenagers moved in the opposite direction.

“It’s interesting and it’s unexpected,” Mr. Robb said.

This year, for example, 52 percent of parents said they spent too much time on mobile devices, nearly twice as many as in 2016. Among teenagers, only 39 percent said they spent too much time on the devices, a steep decline from 61 percent.

The share of parents who felt “addicted” to their devices rose to 45 percent from 27 percent, while the share of teenagers who said the same fell to 39 percent from 50 percent.

Everyone is arguing less. (After all, there are more Facebook and TikTok posts to scroll through.)

One of the strangest findings of the survey, according to Mr. Robb, was that parents and teenagers were more worried about each other’s use, yet arguing about it less.

Today, about four in 10 teenagers believe their parents are addicted to or spend too much time on their mobile devices, the survey found. Among parents, six in 10 worry about their children being addicted to their phones and seven in 10 say their children spend too much time on the devices.

For both groups, though, the share who reported arguing daily over how the other uses mobile devices fell from about a third to about a fifth.

“Both kids and parents are arguing less, but at the same time they are feeling that the other is more distracted,” Mr. Robb said. “It’s a really weird finding.”

The article concludes:

There is some hope, though: About two-thirds of parents said they had family rules governing the use of mobile devices, according to the survey findings.

“We’ve been saying for years at Common Sense that you need to have ‘sacred spaces,’” Mr. Steyer said. “There are times and places where phones, in particular, but all digital platforms should not be there. The bedroom is the obvious one.”

Students, read the entire article, then tell us:

— Are your parents addicted to their phones? If yes, how concerned are you about phone use and abuse in your family?

— How much time do your parents spend on mobile devices? How does that compare with your own personal use? How does your parents’ phone use affect your family’s relationships and overall quality of life? What do you think you and your parents could be doing if they put down the phone more often?

— How often do you and your parents argue over the use of mobile devices? Whose use is in question during these arguments — yours or theirs? What is the outcome of these arguments?

— Which finding in the Common Sense Media report did you find most interesting, surprising or provocative? How does your family’s attitudes toward phone use compare with those in the report?

— Does your family have rules about the use of mobile devices? What are they? Do they apply to your parents? What new rules would you like to see adopted in your family to guide how your parents use their phones? How likely are your parents to follow them?

Further Resources:

Is Your Phone Love Hurting Your Relationships?

Could You Go a Year Without a Smartphone?

Students 13 and older are invited to comment. All comments are moderated by the Learning Network staff, but please keep in mind that once your comment is accepted, it will be made public.

Learning With: ‘Which Box Do You Check? Some States Are Offering a Nonbinary Option’

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Learning With: ‘Which Box Do You Check? Some States Are Offering a Nonbinary Option’

Before reading the article:

With which gender identity do you identify? CBS News defines “gender identity” this way:

Gender identity is an extremely personal part of who we are, and how we perceive and express ourselves in the world. It is a separate issue entirely from sex, our biological makeup; or sexual orientation, who we are attracted to. There are dozens of dynamic and evolving terms related to how people identify.

Take a look at this glossary of gender identity terms and definitions from CBS News and tell us which most closely resemble your experience and why.

Some states are beginning to offer a nonbinary gender option on driver’s licenses. Do you have, or will you be applying for, a driver’s license any time soon? Do your state’s driver’s licenses have a gender option that reflects your gender identity? How does that make you feel?

How important do you think it is to have an ID that reflects your gender identity? Why?

Now, read the article, “Which Box Do You Check? Some States Are Offering a Nonbinary Option,” and answer the following questions:

1. What has El Martinez’s experience of identifying as nonbinary been like?

2. Last summer, the Massachusetts State Legislature became one of the first in the nation to consider a bill to add an “X” option for nonbinary genders to the “M” and “F” on the state driver’s license. Why did lawmakers end up shelving the measure?

3. Why is nonbinary gender identity now being scrutinized on a new scale?

4. What are three reasons opponents have objected to bills for adding a gender-neutral option to state identification documents?

5. What are two main reasons proponents of these bills support them?

6. Why might young Americans be embracing nonbinary genders in larger numbers?

7. Why would it be so significant if the current crop of gender-neutral license bills were signed into law?

Finally, tell us more about what you think:

Revisit the activity you did before reading the article. Now, after you’ve learned more about these bills and the arguments in support of and against them, how important do you think it is to have an ID that reflects your gender identity? Why?

Do you think your state should provide a gender-neutral option on driver’s licenses? Write a short testimonial to your state’s lawmakers in which you state your position and explain why.

How We Changed Our Learning Culture and Achieved 100% Learner Engagement at Coursera

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How We Changed Our Learning Culture and Achieved 100% Learner Engagement at Coursera

By Ian Stuart, Director of Learning & Development at Coursera

Coursera is the world’s learning platform, and education is in our DNA. Our employees are life-long learners who share a passion for our mission to transform lives with access to the world’s best learning experience. For these reasons alone, you might expect Courserians to complete courses like they’re binge watching the latest season of Game of Thrones. Unfortunately, this wasn’t the case. As a fast-growing Silicon Valley start-up, we faced many of the same challenges as other companies do with making time for learning. We knew we needed to turn this around and make learning a top priority.  

The Challenge

At the start of 2018, we set out to drive deeper learning engagement amongst Courserians. In the past, we’d challenged the company to reach learning goals, but at best we’d only reached a 25% completion rate. With varying degrees of success, we tried everything from study groups and friendly competitions to marketing campaigns and regular email reminders. Like other companies, we were challenged by time constraints and competing priorities. Although they highly value learning, some of our executives even voiced concern that learning programs might divert energy away from important initiatives. We knew were going to have to up our game in order to move the needle past a 25% completion rate.  

The Solution

For 2018, we decided our approach needed to be aggressive and ambitious if we were going to make this shift happen. We put a stake in the ground by setting an aggressive goal for 90% of employees to complete at least one course on Coursera by the end of 2018. To back this up, our CEO became the ultimate champion of the goal, advocating for learning across the company and getting the leadership team onboard.  

That was just the tip of the iceberg. To hit our ambitious targets, we had to put the right engagement strategy in place. Below are a few of the most successful strategies we utilized:

  • Curated Course Collections — We met with each executive to understand near- and long-term learning needs in their organizations and mapped course collections to those needs. This gave employees a clear path to select courses that would build important skills for their roles. By aligning learning to organizational goals, leaders were able to see the value in making time for learning.
  • Executive Sponsorship and Accountability — Our executives bought in and became leading advocates who inspired their teams to learn. Each leader shot a launch video highlighting course collections, committed to completing courses themselves, and communicated progress updates within their organization and at the company-wide All Hands. At the end of the year, every executive had completed at least one course.
  • Learning Champions — Each organization appointed a Learning Champion, who became a source of expertise and helped others to learn by organizing learning groups, sharing updates and data, and holding everyone accountable. Learning Champions also met regularly with each other to share key learnings and best practices.  
  • Communication, Communication and more Communication — The company All Hands became a forum to inspire learning. As noted, leaders and Learning Champions shared progress updates at All Hands. Additionally, learners shared inspirational stories about how they applied their new skills in their roles. The L&D team inspired healthy competition across organizations through regular performance updates across teams.  

The Results

We didn’t just hit our learning goal of 90% completion — we knocked it out of the park by achieving 100% completion! We were also building critical role-relevant skills: over 50% of course completions came from courses in collections curated by our leaders. Most importantly, we achieved a true culture of learning where our employees weren’t just advocates and believers in our product, but regular users. We also created a successful and repeatable learning engagement model that can be built upon in 2019 because employees value it. As a matter of fact, when it came time to prepare our 2019 learning program, our executive team was ready to go and it took very little effort to assemble a group of new Learning Champions. Employees knew what the role was and its importance to the company, and they understood the unique leadership opportunity it provided. We’re now well on our way to repeating our feat of 100% completion, and more importantly, strengthening our learning DNA.

15

GUEST POST: The Emerging Consensus

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GUEST POST: The Emerging Consensus

By Mike Bell

Mike Bell taught science in UK secondary schools and then became interested in evidence. He now runs EBTN: the Evidence Based Teachers Network. EBTN has run dozens of training sessions in UK schools and college and about 7000 teachers receive their newsletter. He has a contract with an education publisher to write a book about the ideas he shares here.

In this article, Mike Bell suggests that there is sufficient consensus among those educationalists who look at the evidence to say that we now know how learning happens, why some students struggle and how to improve learning for any learner. By combining lists of effective methods derived from both classroom experiments and psychology and then checking them with the neuroscience to provide a brain-based explanation, it is now possible to implement the evidence in a simple, six-step process.

The experience of teachers

Karen and Kevin are both trainee teachers. They spend part of their week in college (which includes lectures from education department staff), and part in their placement schools (where they both have experienced teachers as mentors). They attend the same college, but different schools.

This week they hear a lecture on ‘Learning Styles’. The lecturer explains the theory and even puts up diagrams of the brain showing the different areas used for visual, auditory and kinaesthetic learning. It’s all very convincing and both decide to try the ideas in their lessons later that week.

They both discuss the idea with their school mentor. Karen’s mentor is dismissive. “Are they still teaching that stuff!? Don’t they know it’s disproved?” Karen quickly does a Google search and finds a Wikipedia page with links to the research. Yes, it been debunked. Kevin’s mentor listens and agrees that he should try it. “I used to use that myself, but haven’t for a while. I know that some of my students are visual learners because they struggle with reading and diagrams are better.”

Both trainees attend a staff training session at their schools. One school is single sex selective while the other is mixed comprehensive. At each school the principal extols the virtue of their school type and make a persuasive case for it. Kevin and Karen are both convinced – but in the opposite direction.

Throughout their training and teaching they find the same pattern.

Kevin reads a research paper which claims that a particular method is effective. His college lecturer warns against using individual studies and suggests research-reviews, or meta-analyses which combine the results from several experiments. Karen’s lecturer warns against the use of meta-analyses as we cannot be sure all the combined methods were actually the same.

They both watch a TV news magazine program. The education minister is outlining a new policy. She uses the same methods they had heard in their lectures: a well-reasoned argument. In response, the program gets reactions from leading ‘experts’ – but, again, they profoundly disagree. The union leader profoundly disagrees. The professor resolutely agrees. Not only the minister but also the journalist and even parents act as though they are more expert than the teacher.

The experience of other professions

How different this experience is from that of nearly every other profession. Engineers, archaeologists, midwives etc are generally respected for their expertise. Government tends to consult them rather than direct their day-to-day activities. If a disagreement arises, these professionals have a mechanism to resolve the dispute and arrive at a general consensus. They look to research and discuss the evidence, not their opinion.

Anita and Amrita are midwives in the UK and India. Despite their geographical and cultural separation, they both study their midwifery from the same textbook.

The need for consensus

Why are the judgements of most professions respected while teachers can be treated so badly? Is there a connection between the lack of shared ideas and the lack of respect? Are the politicians and journalists exploiting the lack of shared ideas in the teaching profession? What would it take to become more respected by them?

The main difference between teaching and the more respected professions is not just that we disagree, it is that there is no widely shared understanding of what we are doing. We lack a shared ‘theory of learning’ to underpin our thinking. This theory creates the questions which researchers then try to solve. The reason midwives Anita and Amrita agree is because they share a theoretical understanding of the birthing process and its complications.

The emerging consensus

The good news is that all the basic ingredients for a shared theory (and from there a more respected profession) already exist. Among those who look at the evidence there is very little disagreement. Blog posts by the Learning Scientists do not clash with the output from the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF). Hattie’s Visible Learning list is quite compatible with the EEF and other evidence compilations.

There are three main sources for the shared theory:

  • Educational neuroscience (which explains what is happening in the brain)

  • Educational psychology (where experiments are sometimes done in laboratories)

  • Classroom evidence (where the methods are tried by teachers with regular students)

Taken individually, each of the three has problems. Most scientists agree that we are very far from being able to say “The neuroscience shows…., therefore, in your classroom you should …”. We may never get there without the usual extensive trails. Psychology experiments often start out in artificial environments and so we may not be able to translate the results into the classroom right away. Classroom experiments can be problematic for the reasons Karen and Kevin found above.

But, what if we stop relying on one source and apply the evidence only if it is backed up by another? What if we only implement a classroom method if it can be explained by neuroscience? What if we don’t implement psychology research unless it has had classroom trials?

At first this may sound far-fetched. “Surely it’ll take decades to do all that extra research?” I hear you say. The good news is – we don’t have to wait; there already exists enough cross-referencing for us to explain the learning process, suggest effective ways to improve it, understand why some students struggle (in different ways) and have ways to help them.

Examples:

  1. We know from psychology that spaced repetitions work better than repetitions massed at the end of the topic. We also know from neuroscience that long-term memories are formed when the links are made permanent by a process called ‘long-term potentiation’ – and this requires spaced repetitions.

  2. We know from classroom experiments that linking the new knowledge to what the student already knows is effective way to improve learning. This is supported by the neuroscience understanding that memories are simply links to the component parts – not separate memories (as they may be on a computer).

Further support for the idea that we already have a broad consensus is the way so many bloggers, gurus and conferences are saying very similar things. A consensus is already available. Let’s join in.

EBTN has worked to compile the evidence into an easy-to-implement order. By combining several different lists of effective methods, derived from classroom psychology experiments and checking them against the brain-science we have come up with a six-step process.

The sources are:

(More info in the evidence sources section of our website.)

A tick in the box shows that this method is supported by the source in that column.

Balloon Face

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Balloon Face

What story could this GIF tell?

Use your imagination to write the opening of a short story or poem from the perspective of this floating balloon face.

Post it in the comments, then read the related article to find out the real story behind this image.

Find many more ways to use our Picture Prompt feature in this lesson plan.

Word + Quiz: expatiate

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Word + Quiz: expatiate

1. add details, such as to an account or idea

2. clarify the meaning of and discourse in a learned way, usually in writing

_________

The word expatiate has appeared in seven articles on NYTimes.com in the past six years, including on May 11, 2014, in the Bookends column “Do Critics Make Good Novelists?” in which Daniel Mendelsohn writes:

At the beginning of “In America,” Susan Sontag’s novelization of the life of a 19th-century Polish actress, the suspiciously Susan Sontag-esque American narrator takes a break from her Mitteleuropäisch milieu to talk about — well, Susan Sontag. Eavesdropping on some characters speaking Polish, she’s amazed to find she understands every word:

“I, with my command only of Romance languages (I dabble in German, know the names of 20 kinds of fish in Japanese, have soaked up a splash of Bosnian, and understand barely a word of the language of the country in which this room is to be found), I, as I’ve said, somehow did manage to understand most of what they were saying.”

If I had more space, I’d happily expatiate on what’s wrong with this mortifying passage. But two things leap out right away: the gratuitous humblebrag about the speaker’s fancy expertises (sashimi!), and the labored, self-conscious explanation of her narrative context. The author of this tortured self-advertisement wasn’t a born novelist.

_________

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