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" The future doesn't need us to memorize its answers; it needs us to master the art of asking better questions." The future won't wait for us to catch up; it will demand that we've already anticipated its needs, making future-proofing learning not a luxury but the very oxygen of survival. Recently, on my podcast Unpacking the Backpack , I discussed this topic in detail after revisiting a blog post I wrote in 2021.
Here is a Cold War Stations activity that I use with my AP World students when we cover the Cold War. One of my colleagues developed it years ago. It includes seven stations, each with cartoons, documents, or photographs for students to process. I printed it out for seven different stations, but students could also work on it online. Here's a google link to the handout that students complete.
Listen to the interview with Robert Barnett: Sponsored by Boclips Classroom and Zearn This page contains Bookshop.org links. When you make a purchase through these links, Cult of Pedagogy gets a small percentage of the sale at no extra cost to you. What’s the difference between Amazon and Bookshop.org? In the very first minute of my first day teaching at Eastern Senior High School in Washington, DC, I received a rude awakening.
Nearly a half century ago, a landmark study showed that teachers werent explicitly teaching reading comprehension. Once children learned how to read words, no one taught them how to make sense of the sentences and paragraphs. Some kids naturally got it. Some didnt. Since then, reading researchers have come up with many ideas to foster comprehension.
An anthropologist plunges into the world of Patagonian heavy metal music in Argentina to explore how the genre relates to language and cultural revitalization. I FIRST HEARD Patagonian heavy metal on a cold winter night in Esquel, Argentina. The song roared to life with guitar riffs and drumming resembling a U.S. or European thrash metal record. But around the 35-second mark, unfamiliar wind instruments grabbed my attention.
Several years ago, Oklahoma City Public Schools shuttered more than a dozen of its school buildings. It was part of a realignment process in the district to right-size student populations within schools some were overcrowded, others were underenrolled and to make the school experience better and more consistent for students across the city. But what to do with all of those empty buildings?
It’s a fact of life, when you assign work or projects in social studies class, you’ll have early finishers. What should you do with them? Let them hang out and talk? Ummm, no, that’s just asking for classroom management nightmares. When you fail to set procedures for students, they’ll create their own procedures 100% of the time, so make sure students know what assignments they must complete and what they are able to do once finished with their required work.
The laws of our country are the foundation of our democracy, safety, and prosperity. Without laws, there would be no protection for citizens rights and freedoms. There would also be no framework of laws to maintain order in the country. As such, citizens and their rights would be in grave danger and the nation could fall into a state of chaos. Thats why teaching the Legislative Branch and its importance to students is so crucial.
The laws of our country are the foundation of our democracy, safety, and prosperity. Without laws, there would be no protection for citizens rights and freedoms. There would also be no framework of laws to maintain order in the country. As such, citizens and their rights would be in grave danger and the nation could fall into a state of chaos. Thats why teaching the Legislative Branch and its importance to students is so crucial.
Here is a cool new online archive of 20th-century resources surrounding Winston Churchill. The archive includes primary sources such as images, cartoons, and documents. One of the most interesting parts of the archives is the investigations of significant issues designed for high school students. Find out what went wrong at Gallipoli or if Britain could have done more for the Jews during WWII.
By now, you may have seen the recent spate of articles bemoaning the plight of the novel, that outdated 18th-century technology that adults have long forsaken and that some schools are beginning to shrug off. The best case against novels goes something like this: Theyre long, students dont read them outside of class, and they should make way for other aspects of instruction.
On Monday, March 24, 2025 , historian Jeanne Theoharis and Rethinking Schools editorJesse Hagopian will discuss Theohariss book, King of the North: Martin Luther King Jr.s Life of Struggle Outside the South. Jeanne Theoharis is a distinguished professor at Brooklyn College. She is the author or co-author of numerous books and articles on the Civil Rights and Black Power movements and the politics of race and education.
The Trevor Project, a national suicide prevention nonprofit for LGBTQ+ youth, released a new report that gives a state-by-state look at the mental health of their target demographic. The data is based on a 2024 survey of more than 28,500 LGBTQ+ youth ages 13 to 24. Nationally, 39 percent of LGBTQ+ young people reported considering suicide during the past year, according to the survey results, and that figure was 46 percent among transgender and nonbinary youth.
For decades, the story of modern human origins seemed relatively straightforward: Homo sapiens emerged in Africa roughly 300,000 years ago, evolving as a single, continuous lineage before expanding across the globe. But new research suggests that this narrative is missing an entire chapter. Modern humans descended from not one, but at least two ancestral populations that drifted apart and later reconnected, long before modern humans spread across the globe.
This week was all about using EduProtocols to drive deeper thinking, engagement, and writing practice as we explored westward expansion and Manifest Destiny. Instead of just reading from the textbook and answering questions, students worked through activities that encouraged them to generate their own questions, analyze sources, and compare perspectives.
Emma Bittner considered getting a masters degree in public health at a nearby university, but the in-person program cost tens of thousands of dollars more than she had hoped to spend. So she checked out masters degrees she could pursue remotely, on her laptop, which she was sure would be much cheaper. The price for the same degree, online, was just as much.
I recently returned from an absolutely lovely trip to London and Windsor, where I presented at The Teaching and Learning Summit at Eton College, hosted by InnerDrive. I was provided 22 minutes to speak on a subject that is near and dear to my heart as a teacher. I chose to present about attention contagion in the classroom; what it is and how it can negatively impact learning.
Near the beginning of every semester, Sarah Z. Johnson has her students make her a promise: If they think about dropping the class, they will meet with her first. While many of the students roll their eyes, it may save at least one student a year, says Johnson, who is a writing instructor and head of the writing center at Madison Area Technical College in Wisconsin.
Few traits define humanity as clearly as language. Yet, despite its central role in human evolution, determining when and how language first emerged remains a challenge. Fossils do not speak, and ancient DNA does not carry recordings of conversations. Traditionally, scholars have debated linguistic origins based on indirect clues—symbolic artifacts, brain size, or the complexity of tool-making.
Over the past decade, revelations of the scale of historical infant and child mortality and unmarked, improper burial at Irelands Mother and Baby Homes (state-funded, religious-run institutions for unmarried mothers and children that operated from 1922 to 1998) have sparked public outcry, memorialization, and calls for forensic investigation. At this years commemoration at one such institutions graveyard, Bridget, a mother in her eighties, was too emotional to read aloud the poem she had selecte
Hancy Maxis spent 17 years incarcerated in New York prisons. He knew that he needed to have a plan for when he got out. “Once I am back in New York City, once I am back in the economy, how will I be marketable?” he said. “For me, math was that pathway.” In 2015, Maxis completed a bachelors degree in math through the Bard Prison Initiative, an accredited college-in-prison program.
Teaching government at Hilliard Darby High School in Ohio (a suburb of Columbus), Amy Messick helps students understand how our constitutional system works. She also encourages them to figure out their own political views and to actively engage in civic life. One former student who appreciates what he learned from Messick now serves on the school board for the district in which Messick teaches.
Nancy Muoz is on her second act this time, in a school and she feels shes finally where she belongs. After a long career working in health care, the pandemic led her to seek a new opportunity. She found it in the form of an operations coordinator role inside a middle school in Camden, New Jersey. In that position, Muoz sits at the front desk what she calls the face of the house answering phone calls, sending emails, receiving visitors.
A Child Buried in Ochre, A Legacy Written in Bone Buried deep within a Portuguese rock shelter some 28,000 years ago, a small child’s ochre-stained bones whisper a tale of interwoven ancestries, ritual significance, and a culture lost to time. When the "Lapedo Child" was unearthed in 1998 in the Lagar Velho Valley, it upended long-held assumptions about Neanderthal extinction and human evolution.
The American Anthropological Association seeks applications for a new Editor-in-Chief (or Coeditors-in-Chief) of the associations flagship journal, American Anthropologist ( AA ), for a four-year term beginning January 1, 2027, with an additional year shadowing the current Editor-in-Chief, beginning January 1, 2026. We are currently accepting letters of interest from potential candidates, due April 21, 2025.
The Education Reporting Collaborative, a coalition of eight newsrooms, is investigating the unintended consequences of AI-powered surveillance at schools. Members of the Collaborative are AL.com, The Associated Press, The Christian Science Monitor, The Dallas Morning News, The Hechinger Report, Idaho Education News, The Post and Courier in South Carolina, and The Seattle Times.
2024 Mary-Kay Gamel Outreach Prize kskordal Mon, 03/10/2025 - 08:52 Image Following the unanimous recommendation of the Outreach Prizes Committee, we wish to deliver the exciting news that Candida R. Moss has been awarded the 2024 Mary-Kay Gamel Outreach Prize by the SCS. Dr. Moss is the Edward Cadbury Professor of Theology at the University of Birmingham, but is also a public intellectual who has written as a columnist for The Daily Beast and is most recently the author of Gods Ghostwriters: En
San Francisco is seen as a global tech capital, yet even here, high school students are shockingly ill-equipped to survive in the modern digital age. The school where I teach science is nestled in the historic Mission District of San Francisco, mere miles from the sprawling campuses of X, Meta and Google. During the pandemic, our district embodied this tech-forward identity by providing Chromebooks and hotspots for all students to go fully remote for an entire academic year of virtual learning.
For decades, archaeologists have puzzled over one of humanity’s most crucial technological leaps—when and how early humans began making sharp stone tools. A new study proposes an unexpected answer: before hominins ever struck two rocks together, they may have been using naturally occurring sharp stones to butcher meat and process plants.
The quality of mercy is not strained, argues Portia in The Merchant of Venice , meaning there should be no limits to being kind and forgiving. But 21st-century culture wars are no Shakespeare play. These days, mercy is a finite resource, and the question is how strained the quality (and quantity) of yours is, for it might reveal your tribal affiliation: liberal or conservative.
This week was all about making westward expansion more engaging and interactive while reinforcing key historical concepts through EduProtocols. From annotated maps and Thick Slides to Map & Tell and Parafly , students used a variety of strategies to build knowledge, analyze sources, and develop writing skills. We started with a Great American Race to introduce westward territories, followed by a Map & Tell to break down the meaning of “5440′ or Fight.” Parafly helped st
Register We are delighted to host scholar Jason Stanley in conversation with Rethinking Schools editor Jesse Hagopian for an online class on Monday, May 12. Here is why: In Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future , Jason Stanley exposes the ways authoritarian regimes manipulate historical narratives to maintain power. Stanley demonstrates how attacks on education and historical memory support authoritarianism, undermining public understanding of past struggles for j
If youre a teacher, you are probably quite aware of the seeping of AI into the classroom and PD. I believe the last few monthly professional development offerings at my school have had a portion of time dedicated to different AI tools available to teachers to assist with writing lesson plans or developing questions from text or organizing and presenting content.
A Civilization Shaped by Water Long before the great empires of Babylon and Assyria rose to power, an ancient civilization in southern Mesopotamia was already mastering the art of water management. New research published in Antiquity 1 by geoarchaeologist Jaafar Jotheri and his team reveals a massive, intricate irrigation system in the Eridu region—one that predates the first millennium BCE.
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