A couple of years ago I came across a documentary-type video about a boy named Caine. The video, Caine’s Arcade, was simple enough, and the boy was engaging and adorable. The boy’s father had given him an opportunity that is sadly missing from many students’ lives.

The Opportunity Was Freedom
Caine’s dad allowed his son to learn freely, to create independently, and to foster his passion and curiosity. To summarize the video won’t do it justice, but here’s my attempt:  Nine-year-old Caine uses his creativity and initiative to create an arcade in his dad’s shop over one summer. The arcade was made primarily out of cardboard. Caine created all types of arcade games, along with prizes to be purchased with tickets won from the games. His goal was to create an actual arcade to which people would come and spend money.

So what does this child, who lived in the city and made a building out of cardboard in his dad’s shop, teach us about motivation and learning? A great deal, actually! 

It’s back-to-school time in the US, and classrooms are getting spruced up for business. As we brush out the cobwebs and get things in order, let’s not forget to spend some time dusting off our classroom website, too.

Here are 10 tips to help you refresh your online site for the upcoming school year.

Our Troubled World Requires a Skilled STEM Workforce
Elements of STEM are integral to our nation’s economy – from health care to infrastructure needs, energy, and the environment. That’s why one of the most important tasks we have as educators is to encourage our students to consider careers in STEM. To get them to that point, they need to develop the ability to question and plan ways through experimentation to find viable solutions.

You may remember this controversial line from the 2008 Presidential campaign: “You can put lipstick on a pig, but it is still a pig.” While the phrase ruffled some feathers during the campaign, it’s an idea that’s useful in classrooms today: Even if it’s displayed on a projector, a worksheet is still a worksheet.

Consider the typical tools of motivation: honor roll, certificates of achievement, and recognition at school assemblies. These are the traditional tools used by teachers and schools to recognize and motivate students to achieve more, and students tend to love these awards. But for those who embrace the growth mindset (the core belief that abilities are malleable and not fixed), these awards don’t always make sense. Some students achieve good grades easily and make the honor roll all the time, while others feel challenged every step of the way and have to learn a great deal just to achieve a C. For the latter, these tools of recognition and motivation are out of reach. 

The truth is that underachieving students aren’t motivated by things that seem unreachable. None of us really is. The honor roll may not even seem like an option to them. If I were to offer you one million dollars to make a hole in one, could you do it? If you didn’t make it, would it be an issue of motivation or a lack of skill and capacity? If I increase the motivation to 10 million dollars, would that change the result?

It’s still summer, and we hope you’re taking time to relax and recharge your batteries. But if there’s a little voice in your head reminding you that another school year lies ahead – and you’ve promised yourself that you’ll be more prepared this time around – we can help you get a handle on things with this helpful checklist. It covers the pertinent categories: students, parents, curriculum, technology, organization, classroom management, and self-care, plus miscellaneous. With the checklist in hand, you can silence that nagging little voice and get back to the important work of summer: relaxation, with a bit of time spent reading, learning, and growing as a professional! 

Let me begin by saying that summer should be summer – our students should have time to play and relax! Even though my wife and I are both educators, we believe that summer downtime is essential for all of our kids, regardless of their age. In our house, we “summer” hard. We stay up late, sleep in, often have no real plan for the day, and enjoy the freedom of summer.

That being said, once the summer rolls on for a little while, we usually find that our own kids start needing some engagement and some mental stimulation. We’ve found a number of ways to help maintain active brains over the long summer break. Here are eight ideas for your students and their parents.

America has always had a culture set on dreaming up possibilities and then taking action to make them happen. I believe that the amazing innovation we have seen in the United States (and, in some cases, don’t even know about yet) is due to the “maker” mentality. Because the art of making is inherent to the very fabric of our culture, it’s central to 21^st learning.

Childhood has long been a time when young minds are allowed – indeed, encouraged – to play and “make.” It’s important to understand that allowing students to be makers opens the doors to both personalized and authentic learning.

The current Maker Movement in education puts greater emphasis on allowing students to imagine, envision, create, innovate, play, formatively learn, experiment, collaborate, share, and – most of all – dream of possibilities. Creating a classroom makerspace seems to be a natural progression in today’s schools.

The school year is winding down and final grades are being entered. Field day is right around the corner, and students are starting to get more restless than usual. For teachers, this is a hard time of the year. Any teacher worth her salt wants to maximize learning for every minute of every day. At the same time, there is a limit to how much can actually be assessed accurately during these final few days.

To lend a helping hand, over the few weeks we’ll be featuring ideas and planning tips for making the end of the year fun, memorable, and engaging for students. Today let’s discuss problem-based learning (PBL), a student-centered pedagogy in which students learn about a subject through the experience of solving an open-ended problem. Via the PBL format, students absorb both thinking strategies and domain knowledge.

The Next Generation Science Standards were designed to be "rich in content and practice, arranged in a coherent manner across disciplines and grades to provide all students an internationally benchmarked science education." In practice, the NextGen Standards cover more than the science disciplines – the directives integrate all subject areas. The standards are so cross-curricular, you might sometimes think you’re reading a writing prompt for a language arts class or as a math story problem. Their nature makes them ideal for teaching in a project-based learning environment, where the goal is to synthesize curricular topics into one global learning experience. Nexgenscience.org provides a valuable resource on cross-curricular classroom sample tasks to get you started.

There are many ways to bring Science Standards into other disciplines and lessons. Think about presenting the science activities that are aligned to the Next Generation Science Standards as cross-curricular projects that will deepen student learning and engagement. For examples, consider the following 12 projects.