Stephen Merrill

1 month ago | edutopia.org | Youki Terada |Stephen Merrill

ResearchWhen students engage multiple senses to learn—drawing or acting out a concept, for example—they’re more likely to remember and develop a deeper understanding of the material, a large body of research shows. By Youki Terada, Stephen MerrillIt might seem like a scene from a wildlife documentary, but turning students loose to stride and hop around the classroom pretending to be lions, and then gazelles, is a powerful lesson on the differences between predators and prey.

Dec 6, 2024 | edutopia.org | Youki Terada |Stephen Merrill

It was a big year for tech. Cell phones had their moment in the sun, and then just as suddenly fell from grace and began disappearing from classrooms nationwide. In their stead, a revolutionary new tool powered by large-language models arose in the West—Silicon Valley, to be precise—and began to write in fluid, human-sounding paragraphs.

Nov 8, 2024 | edutopia.org | Youki Terada |Stephen Merrill

When Denise Pope was an English teacher, she’d spend hours jotting meticulous comments on student papers. More often than not it was a fruitless endeavor. “The first thing kids would do is go to the back of the paper, look at the grade, and never read my comments,” says Pope, now a senior lecturer at Stanford and co-founder of Challenge Success.

Aug 9, 2024 | edutopia.org | Stephen Merrill

There’s something deeply satisfying about mapping out a year’s lesson plans—bringing all of the sprawl into a tidy, clearly-sequenced plan of action to optimize learning. But well-organized content only accounts for half of the necessary transaction. If students don’t or won’t do their part, for whatever reason—a lack of discipline, an unwillingness to ask for help, or just a failure of academic confidence—then learning stalls, despite your best-laid plans.

Jul 19, 2024 | edutopia.org | Youki Terada |Stephen Merrill

Our understanding of what works in classrooms has shifted considerably in the last decade. Cognitive scientists have used powerful new technologies to peer into the learning brain, revealing the critical—and often underestimated—importance of downtime and brain breaks. Other researchers, meanwhile, have pored over hundreds of experimental studies to identify outstanding practices teachers can count on, and quantified the benefits when those practices are applied with fidelity.