k12 Digest

JUNE 23, 2025

From a young age, I was captivated by a single question: “Can learning be more meaningful than memorization?” I grew up in Vietnam at a time when education was often delivered through rigid lectures and rote learning. In our school, we begin by asking equity-focused questions when planning any initiative: Who benefits?

Interdisciplinary

Ask a Tech Teacher

APRIL 28, 2025

This shift raises critical questions about the future of education: How will teachers adapt their roles? This shift raises questions about the efficacy and long-term viability of conventional education methods. As a result, your role involves creating a learning atmosphere that encourages questioning and exploration.

Hybrid Learning

Teachers Pay Teachers

JULY 16, 2025

You can also ask survey questions like “What should I know about you before the school year starts?” And if you can incorporate their phones and/or electronics into the lesson, you’ll get a lot more students paying attention! Then you can get to know them yourself!

High School

Teachers Pay Teachers

JUNE 16, 2025

For teachers who use this layout, it makes it easy to circulate the room and access each student for personalized attention. Pros: This classroom desk configuration is great for lecture-based teaching or if you do a lot of board work because it ensures that all students can easily see the teacher and the board at the front of the classroom.

Classroom Management

Edsurge

MAY 25, 2020

What’s the Use of Lectures? Yet that discomfort also raises opportunities to question prevailing assumptions about how teaching and learning occurs. Let’s start with one of education’s most hallowed traditions: the lecture. In his 1971 book “ What’s the Use of Lectures? Many things did not translate well online.

Lecturing

Edsurge

JANUARY 31, 2023

Teaching is about attention — getting students to pay attention to the material, and to engage with new ideas so they can develop new skills and abilities. But getting and holding the attention of students has become more difficult since the pandemic, according to many college instructors around the country.

Attention

eSchool News

MARCH 20, 2025

These 10 questions can help prospective students make an informed decision and choose a college where they will thrive academically, socially, and financially. Some students prefer the energy of large lecture halls, while others thrive in small, discussion-based classes. The key is knowing what to ask.

Questions

Faculty Focus

FEBRUARY 2, 2025

Despite debate and disagreement about how to define and measure attention spans, numerous studies have put student attention spans in approximately the 10-minute range (Bradbury, 2016). Attention is a so-called gateway between information and learning and is compared to a spotlight on a large stage (Keller et al.,

Lecturing

Catlin Tucker

JUNE 21, 2021

Over a series of three meetings, my architect asked me countless questions about what I wanted in a home and how I used the space. lecture, discussion, written responses), there are myriad barriers that may make it hard for students to access information and share their learning effectively. Identify and Remove Barriers.

Blended Learning

Faculty Focus

FEBRUARY 2, 2025

Despite debate and disagreement about how to define and measure attention spans, numerous studies have put student attention spans in approximately the 10-minute range (Bradbury, 2016). Attention is a so-called gateway between information and learning and is compared to a spotlight on a large stage (Keller et al.,

Lecturing

Catlin Tucker

DECEMBER 22, 2021

A teacher’s cognitive engagement is the degree of attention to and investment in their work (Klassen, Yerdelen & Durksen, 2013). Instead, teachers must strive to design student-centered learning experiences that challenge the students to think, discuss, problem-solve, collaborate, question, create, and reflect.

Blended Learning

Catlin Tucker

JUNE 18, 2023

However, I often hear the question, “Can I use the flipped classroom if I don’t assign homework?” ” Challenges with Traditional Live Instruction Traditionally, educators disseminate information in real-time, relying on lectures or mini-lessons. This encourages brainstorming and prediction.

Lecturing

Catlin Tucker

NOVEMBER 12, 2023

Instead of spending precious class time transferring information live for the whole group in the form of a lecture or mini-lesson, which presents myriad barriers (e.g., auditory processing, attention deficit, lack of background knowledge or vocabulary, absences), teachers record video instruction and assign those videos for homework.

Blended Learning

Faculty Focus

OCTOBER 17, 2023

Capturing students’ attention throughout the entire class is crucial for any teacher, but the challenge lies in the fact that, despite teachers’ expertise in their subject matter, it can be challenging to hold students’ attention for an extended period. A thought-provoking question is a great crowd-pleaser.

Attention

eSchool News

DECEMBER 5, 2023

But TikTok, and social media more broadly, continues to capture curiosity and attention, and it’s not all just dance videos–Indiana science teacher @ChemteacherPhil commands an audience of more than 3 million followers on the app. Is there a lesson in that? Or, if you’re Maynard Kereke (Hip Hop M.D.), Try, fail, learn, repeat.

Teaching Methods

eSchool News

JANUARY 9, 2024

Most educators will recognize the signs: students sleeping during class, students watching the clock, students daydreaming when they should be paying attention. The “Bored Board” can help give students options and eliminate the question, “ I’m done, now what?

Critical Thinking

eSchool News

DECEMBER 27, 2024

Most educators will recognize the signs: students sleeping during class, students watching the clock, students daydreaming when they should be paying attention. The Bored Board can help give students options and eliminate the question, I’m done, now what?

Students

Edsurge

JANUARY 14, 2021

As the pandemic has forced more teaching online, plenty of instructors have been trying to figure out the best way to keep students’ attention and interest with lecture videos or Zoom sessions. The face is a massive draw—it’s a magnet for attention,” Stull says. It’s almost like this symphony that the instructor is the heart of.”

Instructors

Faculty Focus

SEPTEMBER 21, 2023

It turns out that with each passing year, I’m finding it increasingly difficult to capture and hold a student’s attention and focus during my lessons. Our cognitive resources do, however, have a limit; therefore, we must always choose from the available resources that we can pay attention to.

Attention

eSchool News

OCTOBER 27, 2023

Once you see students engaged and learning through play, it clicks and the question goes from how to how do we add more?” At the same time, students say play makes them want to learn more (43 percent), helps them remember what they learn (42 percent), and helps them pay attention (40 percent). for LEGO Education.

Learning

Faculty Focus

OCTOBER 17, 2023

Capturing students’ attention throughout the entire class is crucial for any teacher, but the challenge lies in the fact that, despite teachers’ expertise in their subject matter, it can be challenging to hold students’ attention for an extended period. A thought-provoking question is a great crowd-pleaser.

Attention

Edsurge

OCTOBER 27, 2020

That question is the topic of a new book out this month by James Lang, called “ Distracted: Why Students Can’t Focus and What You Can Do About It. But Lang admits that holding students’ attention is now harder than it’s been in the past, and he offers some practical suggestions on how to respond. So what are educators to do?

Instructors

eSchool News

SEPTEMBER 15, 2023

If you’re unsure where to begin, ask the chatbot for help brainstorming lesson ideas and then ask follow-up questions until you get something you can use. Questions such as these can help guide the conversation: What do you need to learn about AI, and how can you gain that knowledge? Engage in the conversation.

Intelligence

Faculty Focus

SEPTEMBER 21, 2023

It turns out that with each passing year, I’m finding it increasingly difficult to capture and hold a student’s attention and focus during my lessons. Our cognitive resources do, however, have a limit; therefore, we must always choose from the available resources that we can pay attention to.

Attention

Edsurge

JANUARY 10, 2023

SAN MARCOS, Texas — Live lecture classes are back at most colleges after COVID-19 disruptions, but student engagement often hasn’t returned to normal. To see what teaching is like on campus these days, I visited Texas State University in October and sat in on three large lecture classes in different subjects.

Instructors

Edsurge

OCTOBER 17, 2023

In fact he had been pursuing research to improve physics teaching for years, as a parallel area of work that people hadn’t paid much attention to. And so I just tackled this as a science question, and I started reading the research on how people learn — how people learn physics. … You’ve famously compared lecturing to bloodletting.

Teaching

Edsurge

JANUARY 16, 2023

The pandemic brought even more attention to this issue. So, students can approach and ask classmates questions about homework or notes without addressing the entire class, or they can build social bonds that they would otherwise be able to do in real life. There's a lecture mode in UNIVERSE. Teachers love that feature.

Teaching

Edsurge

FEBRUARY 5, 2019

One of the latest people to tackle those questions is Josh Eyler, in a new book called “ How Humans Learn.” Eyler: That is the perennial question. It’s that in some cases attention gets really focused on a set of practices that are untested and can distract from the discussion that we have about teaching. Do I need this?

Art

Edsurge

APRIL 12, 2018

Lecture + Digital Formative Assessment I recently attended a local conference and the keynote was delivered by Aaron Polansky , superintendent from Old Colony Regional Vocational Technical High School in Rochester, Mass. Within his talk he exclaimed, “Lectures are only terrible if you are a terrible lecturer!”

Essay

Edsurge

AUGUST 17, 2018

The question of whether or not to allow students to use smartphones, laptops and other technology in the classroom has been long-debated , and at times, heated. The problem arises when the student starts dividing his attention between taking notes and other tasks, such as texting or watching a video.

Multiple Choice Questions

Edsurge

JUNE 6, 2024

It’s a game-changing shift,” says Marc Watkins, a lecturer of writing and rhetoric at the University of Mississippi and director of the university’s AI Summer Institute for Teachers of Writing. The software will automatically use your recording to make notes, flashcards and quiz questions,” she says in the promotional video.

Lecturing

Edsurge

JUNE 10, 2022

You can pose a question for a future column here. Though I usually use this space to offer answers to teaching advice questions from professors, I wanted to try something different. In an hour and fifteen minute class, you asked around 20 different questions. Ask questions. With abundant gratitude, Bonni.

Learning

Edsurge

OCTOBER 26, 2021

He’s even written a book about an approach called “ Flipped Learning ,” where professors ask students to watch lecture videos before they come to class so that class time can focus more on experiences and other forms of learning. Talbert had taken MOOCs back when they first started and was unimpressed. The answer is not definitive.

Teaching

eSchool News

DECEMBER 19, 2023

To fix the problem, I planned amazing lessons that would flop because the kids would either stare at me without paying attention or refuse to turn in assignments. If you’re like me, around the third or fourth hour of each day you might begin to question your decisions in the classroom and might even wonder if you have chosen the right career.

Teachers

Edsurge

APRIL 3, 2018

It’s a question as frustrating as a hangnail, asked virtually every time I give a public lecture on teen brain development. I end up misting the auditorium with questions, gentle as rolling fog, and just as obscuring. Questions about brain-effects have equal ambiguity. Worried about attention spans? Then I pause.

Mobile Devices

Edsurge

JANUARY 20, 2020

You can pose a question for a future column here. In hindsight, I created a safe environment, posed good questions, and gave them agency. In the book What the Best College Teachers Do , Ken Bain describes how sustaining students’ attention helps to facilitate learning. We have a core question to explore, or a goal to pursue.

Lecturing

eSchool News

JANUARY 3, 2023

To fix the problem, I planned amazing lessons that would flop because the kids would either stare at me without paying attention or refuse to turn in assignments. If you’re like me, around the third or fourth hour of each day you might begin to question your decisions in the classroom and might even wonder if you have chosen the right career.

Teachers