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…and wait…and wait…and wait…

Besides simply being an interesting alliteration, the title of this post is related to an article discussing a study to be released this Fall from a Virginia county school district.
A link to this article got passed around to several folks at my day job. It sparked a flurry of emails. Some of the comments were cautious at best. Given that this is a “teaser” article and no definitive evidence is presented - not even a good flavor for the study’s design or the method in which the laptops were implemented - I think it really is too early to tell what to think about this.

But, one of my colleagues wrote:

I’m tired of watching my kid’s teachers assign poster projects when they could be assigning student’s a collaborative project which involves students from another country with a web page as the product

I agree. Even when we have computers in the classroom, so many educators fail to see the power sitting on their desks. Not that the computer’s presence is a panacea. Rather, it permits you to reach kids where they live and opens up new tecahing methods and techniques impossible witout it. I am really looking forward to seeing this study when it comes out. I suspect that the details will expose that the pedagogy rather than the technology is what led to the gains experienced by students.

What do you predict?

“Are you okay?”

These three little words can make the difference between closing the door on a child and opening up a dialogue. When I train teachers how to help disengaged students, I train teachers (in both online and face-to-face environments) to begin each conversation with this simple query.

But such a small thing can have such a huge impact. I’ve recently begun an interview process with teachers I trained a year ago in this technique. These teachers were chosen because there is objective evidence that students in their classes have higher levels of engagement and academic activity than students in other teachers’ classes instructing the exact same course and content. I’ve only gotten through the first four interviews so far. However three of the four teachers indicated that they used this technique when talking to disengaged students and the effect was very positive.
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