I’ve been teaching college English for more than 30 years. Four years ago, I stopped putting grades on written work, and it has transformed my teaching and my students’ learning. My only regret is that I didn’t do it sooner. Starting in elementary school, teachers rate student work – sometimes with stars and checkmarks, sometimes […] … learn more→

Students are facing significant psycho-social challenges as they return to their classrooms after two years of uneven pandemic schooling. Should schools be adding unnecessary tests to an overburdened educational system? Canada’s Council of Ministers of Education (CMEC) seems to think so: Between April 18 and May 27, CMEC will administer the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) to a sample […] … learn more→

Children in Ireland experienced one of the longest school closures among rich countries during the first wave of the pandemic. School children lost 141 days of face-to-face instruction during the 2019-2020 academic year. I and other researchers have been tracking the impact of the pandemic on the education and wellbeing of children in Ireland through the nationwide Children’s […] … learn more→

In the tradition of the Social Sciences, the research techniques that allow the development of empathy have been those of the ethnographic method, which have been exported to other disciplines: participant observation and in-depth interview. Active meaningful learning methodologies within the framework of research focused on teaching are thus articulated at the intersection between training […] … learn more→

In North American elementary and high-schools, Black and Indigenous students are disciplined through suspension and expulsion more often than their peers. These same groups of students are also more often exposed to adversity and trauma such as community violence, racism and inequity. As a social worker for many years in the Greater Toronto Area and Vancouver, in children’s mental health, child […] … learn more→

About 9 million Australians, 35% of the population, live in neighbourhoods classified as childcare deserts – populated areas where there are more than three children per childcare place. In the first research of its kind in Australia, the Mitchell Institute has examined access to childcare in more than 50,000 neighbourhoods across the country. We found about 1.1 million Australians […] … learn more→

The term audit trail is shorthand. i use it to describe “evidential” material that you provide for a reader. I am a bit suspicious of the overuse of the word evidence, and I prefer “audit” because it describes what actually happens. “Audit” signals the work that your additional material has to do. Because readers want […] … learn more→

Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) are integrated into any area of ​​society. They should also be part of the educational field. They are presented as instruments capable of transforming the conception of the classroom as a unique training space, and the blackboard and the textbook as teaching resources par excellence. Digital competence is one of the key […] … learn more→

Boys fish with their mother and grandmother. A young woman trains as a mixed martial artist. Relay riders race horses around a track, leaping from horse to horse. A twelve-year-old navigates the Oka Crisis. A mother joins an underground freedom movement in order to get her daughter back. A young girl learns she can change the story. Each sentence above links to a film made by […] … learn more→

The practice of philosophy with children has been developing all over the world for more than 50 years. The stakes are multiple and go far beyond the need to democratize the teaching of philosophy upstream of the Terminale class. It is a question of developing critical thinking from an early age, of cultivating complex thinking and the […] … learn more→