Author: Terrell Heick

by Terry Heick While I often talk about ‘scale’ as one of the primary challenges in education–and have also wondered about curriculum, too–a more subversive concept constantly at play throughout education is tone. As an ‘English’ teacher, I always explained tone to students as a kind of  ‘attitude’ that can be expressed in a variety of implicit and explicit ways–from words (said and unsaid) and body language to voice tone, timing, irony, and any other modality used to communicate ideas. How Students See Themselves Matters Tone affects how students see themselves and their role in the learning process. In fact, a…

by Terry Heick Grading problems are one of the most urgent bugaboos of good teaching. Grading can take an extraordinary amount of time. It can also demoralize students, get them in trouble at home, or keep them from getting into a certain college. It can demoralize teachers, too. If half the class is failing, any teacher worth their salt will take a long, hard look at themselves and their craft. So over the years as a teacher, I cobbled together a kind of system that was, most crucially, student-centered. It was student-centered in the sense that it was designed for…

Bertrand Russell’s 10 Essential Rules Of Critical Thinking by Terry Heick For a field of study that explores the nature of knowledge, Philosophy has had a surprisingly small impact on education. Most formal academic ‘platforms’ like public schools and universities tend to parse knowledge into content areas–what is being learned–rather than how and why it is being learned. This, to a degree, reduces the function of pure philosophy. Psychology, Neurology, and even Anthropology all have had a louder voice in ‘education,’ which may explain why critical thinking seems to be so often missing from most school and curriculum design. There…

Critical thinking is the ongoing application of unbiased analysis in pursuit of objective truth. Although its name implies criticism, critical thinking is actually closer to ‘truth judgment‘ based on withholding judgments while evaluating existing and emerging data to form more accurate conclusions. Critical thinking is an ongoing process emphasizing the fluid and continued interpretation of information rather than the formation of static beliefs and opinions. Research about cognitively demanding skills provides formal academic content that we can extend to less formal settings, including K-12 classrooms. This study, for example, explores the pivotal role of critical thinking in enhancing decision-making across…

by Terrell Heick It isn’t clear what the original goal of social media was. No single person, organization, or platform could have possibly decided this. Once the framework of publishing content–in any constantly changing but not always evolving forms–was established, new standards for engagement emerged. At its best, the primary goals of most kinds of print publishing in the past were sharing ideas (new, unique, credible, propaganda, etc.) and creating revenue. Social media has made anything simple to publish, which has changed things. For example, ‘social engagement’ and ‘traction’ have become their currency. There are new scales for knowledge-sharing–one billion…

by Terry Heick Education is a series of learning experiences informed by policy, and actuated by teachers. Policy, by its very nature, is sweeping and ambitious. It is designed to work on various scales, is well-intentioned, and often difficult to fault on paper. The teachers aren’t really much different. They are ambitious, designed to work on various scales, and are commissioned (quite literally) to enact the policies that govern the institutions (schools) they work in. The wrinkles arise however as teachers strive to realize a vision for education that is, as things are, entirely impossible: For every student to master every academic…

by Terry Heick My wife is a schoolteacher, and recently I’ve been listening to her online meetings. And there have been a lot of them. It’s July 2024 and a week or three from the beginning of the 2024-2025 school year in the United States depending on your local school district’s schedule. Yesterday, I was at a cafe sitting next to what seemed to be a group of teachers and they had a lot of ideas. And a lot of enthusiasm. Over the low but constant noise of most cafes, some words and phrases were audible: Data. Goal. Standards. Vision.…

by Terry Heick It’s possible that there is no time in the history of education that our systems of educating have been so out of touch with the communities. Growing populations, shifting communities, and increasingly inwardly-focused schools all play a role. In light of the access of modern technology, social media, and new learning models that reconfigure the time and place learning happens, it doesn’t have to be that way. Schools can evolve while simultaneously growing closer to the people they serve. First, for the purpose of this post let’s think of technology and social media as distinct. Technology has…

by Terrell Heick Will robots replace teachers? I was asked this in an interview a years ago for Futurism and tried to offer up some abstract nonsense whose lack of clarity represented my own thinking: “Will artificial intelligence replace teachers? Will the students themselves replace teachers through self-directed learning, social/digital communities, and adaptive technology?” These might be the wrong questions, a product of our sentimentality as a culture and human insecurity in general. For example, if we say that robots can replace teachers, it is seen as a slight at teachers because we suggest that even simple, mindless machines can…

by Terry Heick Phonemic awareness is knowing that certain letters make certain sounds. Phonemic awareness is knowing that sounds can blend together in predictable and unpredictable ways. Phonemic awareness is about loving the sounds that letters can make, then noticing common patterns across symbols, media, and languages. Phonemic awareness makes decoding possible. Decoding is being able to blend sounds together to ‘make’ words you recognize. Decoding is collecting as many words as possible into your ‘sight word bank’ to increase your reading speed and comprehension. Decoding is recognizing common word parts used in many words and using knowledge of those…