Instructional Strategies

Charles Leadbeater went looking for radical new forms of education -- and found them in the slums of Rio and Kibera, where some of the world's poorest kids are finding transformative new ways to learn. And this informal, disruptive new kind of school, he says, is what all schools need to become.

In this deceptively casual talk, Charles Leadbeater weaves a tight argument that innovation isn't just for professionals anymore. Passionate amateurs, using new tools, are creating products and paradigms that companies can't.

“Strategies for Effective Teaching are the instructional strategies that educators employ to significantly and quickly raise academic achievement in all subject areas. In combination with the careful examination of student work and frequent collaboration among teachers, widespread implementation of these Power Strategies can produce dramatic results.

These authors have examined decades of research to determine which teaching strategies have positive effects on student learning. To learn more about these strategies, click on Building Better Instruction by Kathy Brabec, Kim Fisher, and Howard Pitler. Another article, Focus on Instruction, by NREL, gives K - 12 examples of classroom activities. The following activities offer technology resources to give students the opportunity to increase their academic achievement.

In this talk from RSA Animate, Sir Ken Robinson lays out the link between 3 troubling trends: rising drop-out rates, schools' dwindling stake in the arts, and ADHD. An important, timely talk for parents and teachers.

In this TED Video,  Sir Ken Robinson makes an entertaining and profoundly moving case for creating an education system that nurtures (rather than undermines) creativity.  

Education scientist Sugata Mitra tackles one of the greatest problems of education -- the best teachers and schools don't exist where they're needed most. In a series of real-life experiments from New Delhi to South Africa to Italy, he gave kids self-supervised access to the web and saw results that could revolutionize how we think about teaching.