Author: TeachThought Staff

contributed by Barbara R. Blackburn Differentiation is a popular concept in today’s schools. After all, it makes sense. We’d all love to provide instruction tailored to every student’s needs. However, intentionally or accidentally, many teachers simply lower the rigor for struggling students. When we do that regularly, students always stay behind. In some cases, they are never even allowed to work at a higher level, which isn’t fair to those students. From my perspective, rigor is not just ‘harder work.’ In Rigor is Not a Four-Letter Word, I define rigor as creating an environment in which each student is expected to…

Richard Feynman On Knowing Versus Understanding by TeachThought Staff Who is Richard Feynman? Richard Feynman, born in 1918, was a theoretical physicist whose work in quantum mechanics earned him the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965. According to nobelprize.org, Feynman obtained his B.Sc. in 1939 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and studied “at Princeton University, where he obtained his Ph.D. in 1942. “He was Research Assistant at Princeton (1940-1941), Professor of Theoretical Physics at Cornell University (1945-1950), Visiting Professor and thereafter appointed Professor of Theoretical Physics at the California Institute of Technology (1950-1959).” Feynman’s legendary intelligence–often mentioned alongside Isaac…

contributed by Michael Mirra Abstract Diversity has been at the forefront of educational discussions over the last few years. When we think about having a diverse classroom we think of ethnicity, race, gender, nationality, religion, and sexual orientation. It is easy for us to forget about socioeconomic status. This paper explores the impact socioeconomic status has on student learning in order for teachers to have a better understanding of their diverse classroom. Keywords: socioeconomic status, informer choice, late-emerging reading development, standardized testings, student attainment, service-learning How Socioeconomic Status Influences Learning At the beginning of the school year, teachers are made…