Lori Bitar Learning Solutions

Last school year, Maureen Mulvaney, AP Literature teacher at Washburn High School in Minneapolis, banned phones and laptops from her classroom. If kids needed to do an assignment, they would need to get old-school and do it with pencil and paper.

In September, only 46 percent of students reported feeling confident in their reading skills. By February, that figure had climbed to 95 percent. Students who initially struggled to write half a page by hand were producing six or seven pages. Nearly 80 percent said it was easier to think clearly and organize ideas on paper than on a screen.

Which of these do you think is most important in today’s world?

Loved this article from Tutors International! It made me smile because it confirmed so much of what I've seen throughout my career. More than 20 years ago, I founded an award-winning charter school in Florida, and families were asking for many of these same things then: rigorous academics, personalization, and learning that honors the whole child.

What parents want for their children is remarkably consistent—to be known, challenged, supported, and inspired to become confident, independent learners.

When Even Billionaires Can’t Find the Right School | Tutors International In our latest newsletter, we look at why more ultra-wealthy families are designing education around their child instead of around a school. A recent Wall Street Journal article examined the rise of billionaire-backed private schools in West Palm Beach, Florida, developed in response to growing deman...

I believe this is interesting and important information and updates with current thinking from the field of psychology. Is there anything that surprises you?

Receptive and expressive language are closely tied to executive functioning skills. Kids need receptive language to understand directions, routines, and expectations. This is key for planning and task initiation.

Expressive language helps them ask for help, explain their thinking, and self-advocate, all of which support emotional regulation and flexible thinking. When language and executive skills work together, kids can better navigate daily tasks, solve problems, and connect with others.

Receptive: https://www.theottoolbox.com/receptive-language
Expressive: https://www.theottoolbox.com/expressive-language/

JA is a phenomenal organization. The summer camp idea is great!

JA Summer Camps are Designed to Teach Youth "The Business of Life" Give your child a summer that goes beyond fun—one that builds real-world skills for life.At JA Finding My Future Summer ...

Great choice board idea for working children this summer!

💜 THIS OR THAT: NANNY EDITION 💜

Nannies, we want to hear from you! Which would you choose? 👇

Drop your answers in the comments and tag a nanny friend to play along! 🌻

A thought-provoking post from Tutors International.

I've seen firsthand how transformative the right educational fit can be for students with ADHD and learning differences. In my experience, the greatest growth often occurs when personalized instruction is paired with a whole-child approach that considers confidence, executive functioning, movement, sleep, nutrition, and learning style.

When we understand the whole child, their strengths often become far more visible than their challenges.

This aligns really well with the school mandates on reduced screen time. Summarizing is a key skill I work on with my students in every session.

A study published in January 2024 in the peer-reviewed journal Frontiers in Psychology measured something most education researchers had not looked at carefully: not just which brain regions activate during writing, but how those regions communicate with each other in real time.

Researchers F. R. (Ruud) Van der Weel and Professor Audrey L. H. Van der Meer at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim collected EEG data from 36 university students using a 256-channel sensor array — one of the most detailed brain imaging tools available outside of an MRI. Words appeared on a screen. Sometimes students wrote them by hand using a digital pen on a touchscreen; sometimes they typed them on a keyboard.

The researchers then analysed not just which regions fired, but how extensively they connected with each other during each five-second window. The Times of Israel

"We show that when writing by hand, brain connectivity patterns are far more elaborate than when typewriting on a keyboard," van der Meer said. "Such widespread brain connectivity is known to be crucial for memory formation and for encoding new information and, therefore, is beneficial for learning." When the students wrote by hand, coordinated activity spread across regions associated with movement, vision, sensory integration, and memory formation — working together simultaneously. When the same students typed the same word, that coordinated pattern was largely absent. Factually

The researchers identified the reason in the nature of the movements themselves. Writing a letter by hand requires the brain to coordinate the fingers, wrist, and visual system to solve a unique spatial problem — every letter has a different shape. Typing, by contrast, requires the same basic motor action for every key regardless of what letter is being pressed.

One significant methodological detail the study's wider coverage has often omitted: the typing task in the study had students pressing keys using a single finger, rather than the ten-finger touch typing that experienced keyboard users perform. This is a meaningful caveat for how directly the findings translate to actual classroom typing practice, and the researchers and their field are aware of it.

The 2024 study builds on and strengthens a finding that had been appearing in education research for a decade. In 2014, Princeton researchers Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer published a study showing that students who took lecture notes by hand significantly outperformed laptop note-takers on questions requiring genuine comprehension rather than surface recall.

The mechanism: handwriters, unable to transcribe quickly enough to capture everything, were forced to identify what mattered and rephrase it — an act of processing the keyboard had quietly bypassed.

A 2021 replication by Morehead et al. found the effect smaller than originally reported, but subsequent research has broadly supported the core finding about comprehension depth.

Together, the two lines of research point in the same direction. One measures the neural mechanism; the other measures the educational outcome. Van der Meer has noted that 20 US states have reintroduced handwriting instruction in schools, a policy shift her research contributed to directly.

The findings do not mean that digital tools have no educational value — they have documented advantages in accessibility, speed, and revision. The research suggests instead that handwriting and typing recruit the brain differently, and that for the specific goals of memory formation and deep comprehension, the slower process appears to engage more of what makes learning stick.

Images are generated by AI and for demonstration purposes only.

Source: Van der Weel, F.R. and Van der Meer, A.L.H. (2024). Handwriting but not typewriting leads to widespread brain connectivity: a high-density EEG study with implications for the classroom. Frontiers in Psychology, 14:1219945. — Mueller, P.A. and Oppenheimer, D.M. (2014). The Pen Is Mightier Than the Keyboard. Psychological Science, 25(6), 1159–1168. — Neuroscience News. (2024). Handwriting Boosts Brain Connectivity and Learning. NeuroscienceNews.com.