Michael Zen
1.8K posts
@SoLInTheWild One of my biggest pet peeves is teachers w giant photo montages of **themselves** on the boards and walls that are supposed to have learning materials and content.
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I was recently in a “PD” on being trauma-informed and the presenters said if your walls are bare and the room is cold and sterile students will not feel safe or welcome.
Next, they advised us to put up posters for anything and everything students may need to reference or know during the day.
Finally, they recommended having every student bring in a family picture to hang up. I have over 100 students.
As an act of defiance and civil disobedience, I proceeded to go to my room and take down one of my few remaining posters.
James A. Furey@JamesAFurey
People hate when I say it, but it's true: If your classroom looks like the Pinterest board of a Ms. Rachel wannabe, it is distracting to the students. This is particularly true for the kids with ADHD. Treating your room as an outlet for your personal expression is a selfish and immature thing to do which actually has negative impact on your students.
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Michael Zen 리트윗함
@JamesAFurey I’m an adult and they’re distracting to me!! When we have staff meetings in classrooms I look at all the distractions and wonder how children can focus. I try to keep my classroom, especially the front facing part, very low key, clean and clutter free.
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Michael Zen 리트윗함
@JamesAFurey I think the obsession with anchor charts is to make up for the lack of quality textbooks. The info on the anchor charts should be in a textbook right in front of the kids.
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@intlived @JamesAFurey Also, the Christmas lights on. Windows shut. Hf dark like basement. All year. Most of them flicker but not visible to naked eye. However, the brain perceives it...
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@JamesAFurey So very distracting. And it's not just the walls. It's neon book bins, material cubbies that are visual overkill too. I inherited a slew of these in my resource room and I'm working to adopt wooden bookcases with the aim to get rid of the bins and store books.... On shelves!
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People hate when I say it, but it's true:
If your classroom looks like the Pinterest board of a Ms. Rachel wannabe, it is distracting to the students. This is particularly true for the kids with ADHD.
Treating your room as an outlet for your personal expression is a selfish and immature thing to do which actually has negative impact on your students.
Daniel Buck, “Youngest Old Man in Ed Reform”@MrDanielBuck
You know those classrooms with neon posters, dangly's on the ceiling, and 100 different displays? They're bad for learning. Children become "distracted," spending "more time off task and demonstrating "smaller learning gains when the walls were highly decorated."
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Michael Zen 리트윗함
@edudissenter Reminds me of a time when a kid was reading Dogman and had no connection to or understanding of "grime and punishment"....
Took a while to explain. Still no idea...
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We can’t teach inference making.
Christopher Such@Suchmo83
I was just listening to a podcast where someone was talking about teaching kids 'inferencing skills'. Every example they gave of an inference was one that would be automatic (or at least fairly obvious) with relevant knowledge, but impossible without that same knowledge. >>
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Michael Zen 리트윗함
And, crucially, lots of time practising a pupil's 'inference skills' often drastically decreases the time for these pacy reading experiences, impeding the exact thing that is supposedly being targeted.
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Michael Zen 리트윗함
So much advice about teaching inference forgets that kids constantly make sophisticated inferences all day long in contexts where they have relevant knowledge.
>>
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Michael Zen 리트윗함
This isn't a coincidence.
Every inference is dependent on knowledge specific to the language involved.
What fascinated me was the teaching recommendations that were made in this podcast.
>>
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@SoLInTheWild Since fragments knowledge, it also minimizes outcome, which is learning.
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So this is a great example of what I’ve been talking about with choice boards being a learning styles dog whistle while also giving novice students the freedom to opt out of integrating their learning using multiple modalities as opposed to one.
Choice boards prioritize selection when learning demands integration. If the goal is understanding, students shouldn’t opt into just drawing, labeling, or writing. They should do all three in one coherent task. Integration builds knowledge; selection often fragments it.
Here’s what I’d do differently: instead of asking students to choose between labeling, drawing, or writing, I’d have them integrate all three into a single, coherent product. For example, students create a plant life cycle diagram, label each stage, write a brief explanation for each part, and embed a short narrative that follows the seed’s journey around the diagram.
Same content, different modes, but not separated. Integrated.
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Michael Zen 리트윗함
open.substack.com/pub/richardwhe…
New Blog, a want to see if there is an appetite for a civilised discussion about the Science of Behaviour
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@ZebMic A McKinsey study found that workers using AI tools save an average of 30% of their time on routine tasks — but the bigger gains come when AI handles the 80% of work that's context-switching and searching, freeing you to focus on the 20% where deep expertise actually matters.
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It is fascinating how many ai chat bots, Curriculum planners, and assistants are available these days.
How do you start using them if you find it faster to do it yourself because the knowledge is already in your head?
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Fascinating that it is so simple and proved!
Science Magazine@ScienceExpand
The patterns of trigonometry.
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@cryptopunk7213 This seems like a science fiction story about a main character trying to find enlightenment. He goes to a monastery to learn from the master and the master is an autonomous robot who was trained by the greatest human masters in the past.
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this is insane lol
japan is running out of monks... so they're training AI robots called "buddharoid" to replace them 😂 (im not joking):
- japan's temples are closing because fewer priests are available to run them + aging population
- the solution: chatgpt robots trained on 1000+ years of buddhist scripture that answer your spiritual questions
- the robot even sits in religious prayer positions like an actual monk does.
you can literally have a conversation on life's deepest dilemmas with a robot as smart as the dalai llama
i cannot believe they're scaling these robots to run actual temples.
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@josephluria @cryptopunk7213 That is an interesting one.
"Mori explains ego like an engineering flaw: it creates distortion in perception"
Then question:
Those in charge of robots have their own interests and distort perceptions with the help of algorithms.
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@cryptopunk7213 There’s precedent. The engineer who coined the term “uncanny valley” wrote a book about it.
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Michael Zen 리트윗함
In Australia differentiation is now built into law, teachers provide differentiation strategies and if they don’t they can be held legally liable.
Most differentiation is aimed at cognitive challenged students is where lessons and assessments are basically shortened and simplified.
Differentiation in public schools for gifted students is almost non existent because time and resources is allocated to academically struggling students or those requiring behaviour management.
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@warmMagnet @HelpfulTeacher_ What are your top 3 solutions of the effective physical classroom operation to support differentiation?
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A quick response:
Differentiation on its own is challenging. However, it can actually become increasingly manageable as the school year goes on when it is used in combination with two other approaches. See the two slides below…
Slide 1
Ontario policy doc “Learning for All” (now several years old) outlines the 3 instructional approaches that are involved.
Slide 2
In my book, Ready to Learn, I go further and suggest that any teacher can learn to effectively address varied student needs by proactively anticipating them and embedding solutions into the physical classroom or how it operates. A key to success is ensuring Ss have sufficient autonomy to access these embedded solutions without involving the teacher.
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You know what doesn't work? Differentiation
Recent studies show no noticeable gains, especially compared to simple classwide explicit instruction
It spreads teachers thin, drives burnout
It's a buzzword backed by popcorn science
So scrap it. And simplify
#differentiation
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@Staffnasty2 @HelpfulTeacher_ What do you mean in this context backwards?
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@tombennett71 Critical thinking also requires the presence of innate desire to understand there is an unknown and find the answer.
Always learning. Always questioning.
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You cannot teach critical thinking. You can teach domain specific expertise, which enables you to think critically about that domain. Brilliant chess players do not make great military commanders.
More problematically, people who think they have great critical thinking skills are often the ones who get hoodwinked by any fashionable idea, because they lack the domain expertise to interrogate nonsense.
James Melville 🚜@JamesMelville
“I think critical thinking should be a school subject. I've always encouraged my kids to question absolutely everything.” ~ @sequi_simon Completely agree. Critical thinking should be on the school curriculum. But governments hate critical thinkers.
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