Edutopia: avoid rushing

 Many good suggestions in this article.  

Suppose a science lesson identifies 15 pages of reading and 10 related questions for students to complete within a 45-minute block. Many students will struggle to meet this expectation, so teachers are faced with two choices: spread the lesson over more than one class, or determine what portions of the text and which questions are most important for achieving that day’s learning goal. I recommend the latter because it will not only prevent the dreaded problem of falling behind but also help teachers learn more about how the curriculum supports important standards.

To avoid rushed grading, it helps to reflect on what feedback actually accomplishes. As Youki Terada and Stephen Merrill note, “The hours you commit to grading and commenting on every assignment and quiz are likely to be met with a shrug by your students.” Instead, they recommend focusing on a few high-impact areas for improvement. One of my favorite strategies for streamlining feedback is the holistic sort, which places formative data into two or three categories (such as “met,” “approaching,” or “not yet”). That way, we get a brief yet accurate picture of how students are doing.

For example, if students write a short constructed response (say, a paragraph) with the goal of identifying a main idea and some students have not done this correctly, the teacher is aware of who exactly is struggling. The next day, this teacher might allow students who met the standard to work independently for 20 minutes while pulling the “not yet” students aside for small group instruction on the skill. To try this out, pick one major assignment per week to receive detailed feedback and mark the rest with a quick holistic sort only. Research also indicates that students respond to feedback better when they see it without a grade—the latter is evaluative but is not considered feedback in and of itself.

Also a link to another article about the holistic sort

When teachers get bogged down in grading a large number of assignments, students do not receive feedback in time to make necessary adjustments to their understanding and are therefore more likely to give up. Providing feedback is not synonymous with giving a grade, and the value in letting students know where they stand informs their future success. Deciding which assignments deserve a grade and which exist solely to give the teacher data requires some discernment, but it’s well worth the effort. As for student pushback about not getting graded on everything, they will not be as vocally opposed to feedback for its own sake once they see the value of correcting their mistakes before their work is evaluated.

Suppose a sixth-grade science teacher wants to assess how accurately students identify mutually beneficial relationships within ecosystems by asking them to make a list of such interactions among organisms. Rather than grade the assignment or spend time making numerous comments, the teacher can divide student understanding into two categories labeled “Met” and “Not Yet.” Then, looking for overall patterns, the teacher makes notes about what mistakes students who are in the “Not Yet” category seem to encounter and uses that information to guide next steps.

This process is short and direct and provides the sort of visibility about student outcomes that makes instruction more relevant. In addition, students receive far more incisive feedback that helps them improve before a higher-stakes opportunity presents itself in terms of grades, and they are therefore less likely to get bogged down in a sense of failure.

Read in and out of comfort zone

 

from NYT learning network - 

read NYT - windows and mirrors

Before you read any further, try a quick experiment:

• Go to the NYTimes.com home page, or to any of the individual sections.

• Find an article, video, image, podcast or graphic that is immediately interesting to you because it is on a topic you know or care about, or are somehow connected to already.

• Now take a second look. Find an article, video, image, podcast or graphic that is outside your usual comfort zone, yet still seems potentially interesting.

• Read — or watch or listen to — them both. What happened?

This is exactly the challenge Kim Butterfield, an English teacher at Central High School in La Crosse, Wis., and a member of this year’s New York Times Teaching Project, gave her students.

What they discovered is that no matter how foreign a topic feels initially, you can nearly always find a way to connect to it and learn something valuable. And, as Ms. Butterfield explains below, when her students shared what they chose, “all of our worlds widened.”

We liked the idea so much we asked other Teaching Project members to try it. We ended up with students in schools from four U.S. regions — the South, the Midwest, the East Coast and the West Coast — all attempting the same exercise, and all discovering the same things Ms. Butterfield’s students did. Below, you can read excerpts from the reflections of a few students in each of these classrooms.

We have labeled the students’ choices “windows” and “mirrors,” because all of these teachers explained the assignment in terms of Dr. Rudine Sims Bishop’s often-cited metaphor of “windows and mirrors,” which she described this way in a 1990 essay:

Books are sometimes windows, offering views of worlds that may be real or imagined, familiar or strange. These windows are also sliding glass doors, and readers have only to walk through in imagination to become part of whatever world has been created and recreated by the author.

When lighting conditions are just right, however, a window can also be a mirror. Literature transforms human experience and reflects it back to us, and in that reflection we can see our own lives and experiences as part of the larger human experience. Reading, then, becomes a means of self-affirmation, and readers often seek their mirrors in books.

What mirrors and windows can your students find in The New York Times? If you’d like them to try the exercise described above, we have a related Student Opinion question, “How Often Do You Read, Watch or Listen to Things Outside of Your Comfort Zone?” that challenges them to take the same steps, then post their answers to our comments section.

If they enjoy that, they might also be interested in our annual Summer Reading Contest, which invites teenagers to tell us what got their attention in The Times each week and why. This year it begins on June 11 and runs through Aug. 19.

Choose 3 and tell me what you think

 From NYT learning network:  summer reading

Every summer for 16 years now, we’ve invited students to read (or watch or listen to) anything they like in The New York Times and tell us about the experience. We’ll be doing that again this year, and, as always, we’ll be offering students dozens of free pieces a week to choose from if they aren’t already Times subscribers.

But if you would like to help your students practice this kind of independent reading before turning them loose, our spring challenge can help.

All your students have to do is choose three articles (or videos, podcasts or photo essays) from three different Times sections; read, listen to or watch them; and then tell us what they thought — in writing or via a short video.

Clarify Priorities Constalty

Clarify Priorities Constantly from Leadership Freak

Fuzzy priorities waste energy. What is your priority today? This week? This month?

If you can’t list your priorities, you don’t have any.

If you have more than five priorities, you don’t have any. 

Is AI making us stupid?

 ​Just sharing:  You probably know Cal Newport ("Deep Work").  Here's a short excerpt of an interview where he's talking about AI and students (he teaches at Georgetown).  Seems wise.  I really like the "10,000 steps" metaphor.  

 Is Artificial Intelligence Eroding Our Ability to Think?

In this Chronicle of Higher Education interview with Evan Goldstein, Cal Newport (Georgetown University) talks about his worry that artificial intelligence is making us stupid. Some excerpts:

“When AI automates tasks that are repetitive or time-consuming,” says Newport, “or that you would be willing to hand off to a research assistant, I’m not so concerned. If a political scientist can use an AI coding agent to do a more comprehensive and faster data analysis to help them form an argument, that’s good.”

But he sees many students using AI to automate thought. “Think about having to write something and facing a blank screen. Blank-screen writing is hard. You might want to avoid that cognitive strain. You can get a good enough draft from AI and maybe edit it. You are spared cognitive strain. That worries me because cognitive strain is at the core of the entire post-Paleolithic human experience. It’s at the core of all big ideas. It’s at the core of empathy, morality, ethics, notions of justice and human rights, and religion and philosophy… Yes, automate drudgery. But automating hard thought is a dangerous direction to go.” 

The combination of distracting social media and artificial intelligence “is a powerful one-two punch,” says Newport. “This is a problem that’s 15 years in the making. The smartphone revolution and social media kicked this off. Now here comes AI at the worst time from the perspective of human thinking.”

“We need to think about cognitive fitness the way we think about physical fitness,” he continues. “There should be a simple rule for being a thinker in an age of AI: don’t let AI write anything for you. Writing is to cognitive health what steps are to physical health. Write that e-mail from scratch. Write that memo with the bullet points from scratch. Don’t flee the strain. You need it as much as you need those 10,000 steps a day.” 

How about the student experience? “We are going to look much more like classic Oxford than we do today,” says Newport. “More in-person testing, more blue books. Also, more Oxford-style tutorials where you sit with a proctor and walk through an argument and they assess how well you understand the material.” 

“Is AI Making Us Stupid? Cal Newport Is Worried” by Evan Goldstein in The Chronicle of Higher Education, March 27, 2026 (Vol. 72, #15, pp. 24-29)

NPR on the value of homework

 NPR on the value of homework:

This NPR discussion features two education writers who both support homework but from different angles, creating some interesting tensions:

The Core Agreement: Both Holly Korbey and Elizabeth Matthew support homework, particularly for older students. They compare it to practice in sports or music—you need repetition to build skills.

Key Tensions:

Why homework disappeared: Elizabeth blames higher education's "equity" approach—eliminating achievement to close achievement gaps. Holly focuses more on public perception that learning should always be "fun and creative," unlike how we view athletic practice.

What homework actually does: Elizabeth emphasizes executive function—having deliverables, meeting responsibilities to non-parents, building independence and routine. Holly stresses cognitive benefits—storing knowledge in long-term memory rather than relying on Google, practicing foundational skills like multiplication tables.

The class contradiction: Elizabeth points out that upper-middle-class parents complain most about homework burdens, yet lower-income families (who may actually struggle more with time) could benefit most since their kids have fewer structured activities and homework provides screen-free constructive time.

The research: Clear benefits for middle/high school students, but elementary school evidence is mixed. Both acknowledge there was too much bad homework in the mid-2000s, leading to overcorrection.

The alarm: Both worry about declining national reading and math scores over the past decade, suggesting the no-homework trend may be contributing to academic decline.

Students Reading Challenging Texts

 From Marshall Memo 1115

 Timothy Shanahan on Students Reading Challenging Texts

In this online article, Timothy Shanahan (University of Illinois/Chicago) responds to a teacher worried that students will be frustrated and discouraged if they’re required to read material above their current level. “I don’t want to undermine anybody’s motivation or love of reading,” says Shanahan, and he acknowledges that reading difficult texts can be frustrating and sometimes leads to off-task behavior and discipline problems, especially if students are trying to do so without support. But easy, boring texts can also lead students to act out, especially if they sense that their teacher has a negative mindset about “low readers.” 

“Let’s face it, motivation is complicated,” says Shanahan. “Difficulty can lead both to withdrawal and intensification of effort.” Students can feel incompetent struggling with a difficult text or get a sense of efficacy mastering it. They can feel inept or be driven by a desire to please a teacher, learn new information, and connect with peers. Simply adjusting the instructional level of a text to a child’s “just right” level doesn’t solve the problem of motivation – and risks the stigma of being assigned to a low reading group. Most important, leveling won’t accelerate students’ reading level and give them the feeling that they’re catching up.

“Instead of avoiding challenge,” says Shanahan, “I think it better to introduce it intentionally, placing students in books that they cannot already read well” – and then provide scaffolding and emotional support that encourage persistence and build skill, fluency, and background knowledge. Three important elements:

• Choose texts that connect with students’ interests and are worth reading.

• Give students a sense of the progress they’re making, emphasizing a growth mindset.

• Don’t overdo it; not every text has to be above level, especially independent reading.

“Won’t Challenging Texts Discourage Young Readers?” by Timothy Shanahan in Shanahan on Literacy, November 29, 2025; Shanahan can be reached at shanahan@uic.edu.