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To welcome my remote students to my Earth science classes, I made this introductory video on PowerPoint. PowerPoint was great for me as someone with little video editing experience. I’ve gotten really frustrated with learning iMovie and other editing software in the past. But making a video slide show was much easier. I used freely […]

Imagine a middle school teacher who wants to teach about atoms. He’s a progressive guy. He thinks a lot about how to engage his students, and this lesson is no different. Instead of giving a lecture on protons, neutrons, and electrons, he’s planning to have students each choose an element from the periodic table. Then

I share this document with my high school students at the beginning of each semester just before we begin setting discussion norms. It has led to some rich conversations. Powerful discussions don’t just happen. They take trust and courage. They require us to question things we thought we knew. They make us realize how hard

“Does this mean that I never tell kids the answer?” I occasionally facilitate professional development workshops for teachers as part of the Next Gen Science Exemplar System (NGSX), and in them, teachers ask questions like this one a lot. A central aim of these workshops is to help shift science classrooms from places where students

It’s two months into the semester. The honeymoon is over. The problem on radiometric dating is confusing. Maybe he didn’t get enough sleep last night. Maybe he thinks he’s not smart enough to do math, and now all his friends are going to find out. Whatever the reason, he shakes his head and throws down

Ben’s Cognitive Science Annotated Book List for Teachers There’s a problem with books on learning science. On one side are book written for popular audiences that are full of dubious claims backed up with fluffy sources or no sources at all. Sometimes the evidence is good, but the authors make great, unsupported leaps to their

Last spring, I went on a field trip with my daughter’s fourth grade class to Naulakha, the house that Rudyard Kipling designed and lived in while writing the Just So Stories and maybe parts of the Jungle Book. Kipling was one of the most prolific authors of his day and, it turns out, had a

So far, I’ve suggest that if you want to learn better, you should 1.) think about how to make more connections between what you want to learn and what you already know and 2.) increase the amount of cognitive work you’re doing to understand it. If you’re doing that, then you’re learning. But … sorry

This post is part of a series about how to apply principles of cognitive science to teaching and learning. It’s grounded in a story about a student (here called Kyra) who inspired me to change my teaching. Read more about Kyra in My Three Biggest Teaching Mistakes. The other posts in this series can be

This post is part of a series about how to apply principles of cognitive science to teaching and learning. It’s grounded in a story about a student (here called Kyra) who inspired me to change my teaching. Read more about Kyra in My Three Biggest Teaching Mistakes. The other posts in this series can be