The Word Nerd

The Word Nerd The Word Nerd Page strives to be a resource for the academic development and support of all students, parents, and teachers.

10/19/2022

It's been quite a year so far in American education. Between school board battles over Critical Race Theory to protests over mask mandates, we are seeing significant social strife playing out in the context of

09/21/2022

Have you ever set students up for failure?

Well, if you’ve ever advised students to study X number of hours for every hour of class time, then you have set them up for failure. No worries. You didn’t intend to harm them.

But by encouraging students to use time to measure their learning, you have inadvertently set them up with a faulty learning metric. And this specific metric leads many students down a path of repeated frustrations and failures.

Learn more about how to help your students develop metacognitive learning metrics at https://thelearnwellprojects.com/thewell/learning-metric-quality-control/.

09/14/2022

Professionals exploit processes to do their jobs well. Students can use The Learner's Formula to consistently achieve high academic success.

08/31/2022

Why do seemingly excellent students flounder when they get to college?

Consider this: around second or third grade, students learn to distinguish different monetary values. They learn, for example, that a dime is worth $0.10, a quarter is worth $0.25, and a dollar bill is worth $1.00 cents. After nailing down the basics, they then learn that if they stack a ten-dollar bill, a five-dollar bill, and four nickels together, they have $15.20.

Intriguingly, they learned to differentiate units of money well before they possessed money. Why did they learn this skill so early? Because the skill of differentiating between monetary units is so essential that kids must learn it before participating in the economic world.

Unfortunately, such forethought was not put into the academic world. The ability to differentiate among thinking skills is a threshold skill. Students must possess this skill to do cognitively complex work. It is as indispensable to academics as differentiating among monetary units is to finances. Yet this skill isn’t usually taught.

Learn more about how to help your students differentiate their thinking skills at https://thelearnwellprojects.com/thewell/help-students-differentiate-thinking-skills-with-metacognitive-tools/.

07/23/2022

What should teachers understand about memory and learning and how should that shape the classroom?

07/05/2022

The notion of teaching experts’ habits of mind (e.g., computational thinking and scientific thinking) to novices seems to have inspired many educators and researchers worldwide. In particular, a great deal of efforts has been invested in computational thinking (CT) and its manifestations in differ...

03/25/2022

A recent article in EdWeek, which covers K-12 schools, draws on a nationally representative survey of district leaders, principals, and teachers to identify “The Teaching Strategies Educators Say Will Outlast the Pandemic.”

02/16/2022

While it sounds formal, ‘reflection’ simply means to ‘think again’ about something that happened. Reflection is a natural part of learning and in many cases doesn’t even need to be ‘promoted.” Given time and collaboration, students (and adults) tend to talk about experiences and learn from that kind of reflection. https://bit.ly/32wmLlE

02/09/2022

Instead of passing out learning style inventories & grouping students accordingly, teachers should aim to facilitate multimodal learning.

01/28/2022

In a world of messy problems & increasing specialization, no individual can possess all of the knowledge needed to make learning meaningful.

01/18/2022

The biggest benefit of using sentence stems is the way it models the language, tone, and cognitive patterns native to certain activities. If you ask a student to summarize the plot of a story, there are many tasks embedded in that request, from recalling, analyzing, and distilling the story, to articulating it in a way that satisfies both their understanding of the story as well as any specific requests from you.

https://bit.ly/3oq2DfP

11/25/2021

As educators, the idea of giving students control can seem like a crazy move, but it actually gives them ownership in their learning. Relinquishing control in some areas of the classroom makes students more receptive to instruction, keeps them engaged in what they’re learning, and makes them more willing to take on challenges. So, how do you give students control without it turning into total chaos? Here are 10 areas you can safely give your students a little wiggle room to control their education. https://bit.ly/2ItbdXG

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