Productive struggle occurs when the complexity and difficulty of the task or experience is challenging enough so that the learner must devote significant cognitive resources to make progress in that task or experience, but is provided the necessary supports and scaffolds to prevent frustration or discouragement.  

Once learning is acquired, encoded, and stored, the act of retrieval is the reactivation of that learning through active processing.

Better to flip the script and examine what’s getting in the way of learning, realizing that there are cognitive barriers to effective teaching.

One of the most fascinating aspects of research on how our students learn is that almost every study begins with the assumption of a motivated learner.  As teachers, we know this is not a safe assumption.  Right? 

We have been lamenting the phrase “learning loss” since we first heard it in June 2020. Has there been learning loss? Are the 6th graders now reading like 3^rd graders? Did students forget all that they knew? Unlikely.

There will be crises to attend to, although we hope not as severe as those of the past year. In addition, there will be opportunities to lead the rebound, as we like to think of it.

 The science of learning offers promising principles or practices that may work in our classrooms. 

Effective tutoring is much more complex than simply “telling” learners what they are missing and giving them empty praise about who they are as a learner. So, what does work best in tutoring?

We know good leaders work to develop collective teacher efficacy because it is a powerful way to increase student learning (effect size of 1.27). So, we wondered: what would happen if we applied what we know to developing collective student efficacy?

Student learning communities give all students access to deeper learning.