Kenie Richards

Introducing Jam Sessions, a new chat series from the team at Edutopia! Join the conversation anytime now through Saturday, November 8.

In our first Jam Session, teacher Kathy-Ann St. Hill-St. Lawrence (a.k.a. Ms. Saint) will break down how she supports learning across content areas through gamification!

Join us for tips, resources, and advice directly from Ms. Saint, other educators, and the Edutopia team: https://edut.to/3X434xV

School of Practice. Out now and ready to listen: The Extraordinary Impact of Drawing to Learn. Listen on Apple Podcasts.

Drawing can be a learning superpower, even for students who claim they’re not good at it! 🦸 ✏️

In our latest podcast episode, teacher Selim Tlili shares how to use this strategy to boost content recall and attention stamina—across grade levels and subjects!

Listen here: apple.co/4qvlV2D

'Astronomers' is an anagram for 'moon starers.'

Absolutely losing it that the special police unit investigating the Louvre heist is called the Paris Brigade for the Repression of Banditry 😭

Practical research insights delivered monthly. Illustration of paper airplane floating through clouds, with bar graphs and a pie chart on the wings.

Education research you can use! 🔬🌟

That’s what we deliver in our free, monthly email roundup—and our next edition lands this Sunday.

Subscribe now to get it in your inbox: edut.to/4qmZr3G

#EdResearch #EduSky

Call for submissions: What are you wrestling with right now—classroom misbehavior, grading stress, student engagement, discussion norms? We’re working on a live Ask & Answer for our podcast. Drop your toughest or most urgent classroom questions on this thread, and our team will take what we heard, find experts to help us make sense of…

What’s your biggest classroom challenge right now? 🤔

Drop your toughest or most urgent classroom questions on this thread.

Our team will take what we heard, find experts to help us make sense of it all, and produce a live podcast episode of answers. 🎧

New episode from School of Practice: How to Get Students to Ask for Help When They Need it. Listen on Apple Podcasts.

Do your students avoid asking for help—even when you know they need it? Our latest podcast episode is for you!

It's full of teacher-tested strategies that can make help-seeking not just accepted, but *expected* in your classroom. 🙋

Listen on Apple Podcasts: apple.co/4nTfvsr

Screenshot of NYT YouTube channel introducing a recipe with “chickpea anxiety is real.”

I’m gonna say something controversial: I actually don’t think chickpea anxiety is real

Small Kindnesses by Danusha Laméris I’ve been thinking about the way, when you walk down a crowded aisle, people pull in their legs to let you by. Or how strangers still say “bless you” when someone sneezes, a leftover from the Bubonic plague. “Don’t die,” we are saying. And sometimes, when you spill lemons from your grocery bag, someone else will help you pick them up. Mostly, we don’t want to harm each other. We want to be handed our cup of coffee hot, and to say thank you to the person handing it. To smile at them and for them to smile back. For the waitress to call us honey when she sets down the bowl of clam chowder, and for the driver in the red pick-up truck to let us pass. We have so little of each other, now. So far from tribe and fire. Only these brief moments of exchange. What if they are the true dwelling of the holy, these fleeting temples we make together when we say, “Here, have my seat,” “Go ahead—you first,” “I like your hat.”

This helped me today. Small Kindnesses, by Danusha Laméris

The cover of the School of Practice podcast from Edutopia Radio. It features a human pyramid of educators helping each other up.

Introducing School of Practice, our first podcast! 🎧

Join us for 15-minute episodes filled with smart, pedagogy-shifting advice—backed by the research, and test-driven by teachers just like you.

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/4psx6Zv

Subscribe on Spotify: https://bit.ly/47T3Wwg

I’m going skating for the first time since 1997 tonight. Wish me luck. (I’m 42 this could lead to a broken hip.)

Teaching strategies at your fingertips!

With Homeroom, you can build your own personalized educator feed that grows right alongside you. 🌼 Try it out today: edut.to/4n12xry

Remember, birding is there for you.

Bless.

I wish this was true because I’m struggling in my Auntie Supreme duties and this would help.

This is a printer that has printed a note that reads “share what works!”.

Hi there, #EduSky - I’m eager to connect with art teachers so putting out a call! We have a cool project in the works that would give you compensated opportunities to shape some of our visual content at @edutopia.org. Please help me spread the word. My DMs are open to anyone interested!

This is a rescue pup that looks a lot like Falkor from Neverendjng story.

So, there’s a rescue pup up for adoption in my town and do we think he is actually Falkor?

I'm a new teacher & started teaching middle school history the fifth week of school. Each class has a small, core number of students who are extremely difficult (see below). Thoughts on how to reset? Some additional context I started teaching two 7th Grade World History classes and two 8th Grade US History classes in the 5th week at an Oakland Charter School this last week. The students had demora...

This thread is a great example of exactly why we’ve built Ask & Answer on @edutopia.org. Please join us to get (and give!) support.

www.edutopia.org/ask-and-answ...

3 Ways to Boost Students’ Motivation to Learn New research suggests that motivation isn’t built on grades but on whether grades match students’ expectations, so showing them evidence of their learning is key.

Looking for research-backed tips for motivating students? @cathleenbeachbd.bsky.social has you covered: www.edutopia.org/article/boos....

Before leaving one day this past week, I sent home a few positive messages to families of students who had really shown out so far.

One responded with a loud thank you—and a note that “they had never heard anything positive before” about their kid from school.

Reminder: it‘s the little things.

Ask & Answer: Your space to get the support and strategies you're seeking.

Group work and reading and A.I., oh my! Join the conversation and share your tips on Edutopia’s Ask & Answer community forum.

Here are a few questions from the past week—add your ideas or get some new ones!👇

“We can think of school as a place that focuses on producing learning & learning outcomes, but I think that’s not true… It’s to grow thinkers, civic agents, ppl who understand themselves in a way that really positions them to think in evidence-based and systematic ways about complex problems…”

Projects, Purpose, and the Teenage Mind Neuroscientist Mary Helen Immordino-Yang on why adolescent students search for deeper meaning—and what that tells us about designing schools that engage teens.

When we think of “learning outcomes” as the purpose of education and stop there, we miss out on the ultimate aim of school—which is to use the learning to build the person.

Read the conversation between neuroscientist Mary Helen Immordino-Yang and @stephenmerrill.bsky.social for more.

#EduSky

"The whole notion of learning is a red herring. I don't talk about learning, throw it out. I'm sick of thinking about learning because learning in our society, the way we conceptualize it, is about semantic recall and procedural recall in a context. Learning is not the aim of school, learning is the means, the aim of school is human development. It's developing the dispositions, the capacities, to be able to engage in a complex systems-level of social and cultural institutionalization in the world, and to reify and create the kinds of structures and systems that we want and that we need given the changing circumstances. The thing is, learning is essential...but it is essential because you need fodder to be able to develop around, not because it is the end point, but we call learning the 'outcome', 'learning outcomes', and then we're done! That's what school's about: it's about producing learning outcomes. But it's not. The learning outcomes are just the midway to what you're really supposed to be working on, which is: how did learning these things, how did engaging with thinking about these things develop you as a thinker, as a person, as a citizen? Those are the outcomes we should be caring about but we think about them as on a separate track from the learning. There's the math, and then there's the other stuff...which is kind of ridiculous."

Some folks really need to be reminded that the purpose of school is not "learning" per se, it's human development. Experiences that contribute positively to the multiple & varied goals & needs of human development are never a distraction.

better than a push notification: learned about the Taylor Swift engagement because a woman outside of Madewell was yelling it into her phone

This is the show logo for Edutopia Radio, coming soon.

School of Practice is one of the podcast formats that Edutopia Radio will launch with. It will feature our host and a practitioner going deep on practical teaching strategies in every episode. Coming soon!

The rest we’ll shape together. Please join us and help spread the word.

PS - Podcast dropping next!

… “sharing what works” along the way, and doing whatever we can to make your Edutopia experience a little more useful every single time you visit. All this is to say, both Homeroom and Ask & Answer (www.edutopia.org/ask-and-answer) are just the beginning of @edutopia.org’s next chapter.

… get relevant event invites, and, soon, we’ll also open up ways to unlock fun perks as you engage. Who remembers those #EduAllStars T-shirts from Teacher Appreciation Week?

We are leaning hard into building this community with you, inviting you even more deeply into shaping our mission of…

This feature is now available to anyone with a (permanently free!) @edutopia.org account. We ask you a few questions to unlock it so we can serve you relevant resources, and then more you use it the smarter it gets. You’ll also see what other educators like you are reading and sharing…

This read is both inspiring and practical, and it’s full of helpful resources.

(PS - Thanks for the @edutopia.org shoutout, @mrneibauer.bsky.social!)