Denise Fawcett Facey

A recent study, published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, indicates that students learn better when allowed to make mistakes. (more…)

A new educational philosophy is gathering steam as it travels around the country: don’t give students zeros. Some school districts have adopted a “no zero” policy and instead, mandate that teachers replace a zero grade with a grade of 50. Districts enact such policies in the interest of making it easier for students to dig themselves out of a hole, even when students have done no work on an assignment. (more…)

Recently, the Education and Labor Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives held a hearing attended by teachers and teacher representatives. The central focus of the meeting was how to develop a more equitable distribution of effective teachers, so that low-income and minority schools are not always at a deficit in this area. As you might expect, although the consensus was that these schools definitely need more teachers who are effective, there was little agreement on how to achieve this or even on how to define “effective.” (more…)

Who would have thought that technology and jewelry would mate to produce a means for keeping up with schoolwork? That’s exactly what has happened with a new bracelet, which when plugged into the USB port of a computer, downloads information from a teacher’s Smart Board, which students can then upload to their home computers. (more…)