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Dr. John Spencer is the author of The AI Roadmap, Vintage Innovation, Empower, and Launch. He creates blog posts, articles, and free resources about creativity, project-based learning, deeper learning, and tech integration. Join his free newsletter to get exclusive free access to the ideas, tools, and resources that can help you empower your students.
For years, I held a very teacher-centered view of assessment. I would grade student work and use that to modify lessons and pull small groups. Students would receive a grade, which would then motivate them to work harder. Later, I started realizing that my feedback could help students determine what they knew, what they didn’t know, and what they needed to do next. Here, assessment shifted from a teacher task to a conversation between the teacher and the student. However, it remained...
If you’ve read my blog before, you know that I love to share sharing practical ways that we can empower our students to own the learning from day one. This is the core idea that AJ Juliani and I wrote about in our book Empower. It’s a journey I began in my second year of teaching middle school and continued for a decade. Each year, I experimented with new strategies, new ideas, and new protocols. For the last eleven years, I’ve continued this journey as a professor with my students and...
For years, the conversation around educational technology centered on one question: How can we get more technology into classrooms? Today, we’re facing a different challenge related to excessive screen time. But in my latest article, I argue that it’s time to move beyond debates about screen time and start thinking more intentionally about when technology leads to deeper learning and when it simply leads to greater screen dependence. I’m a Reluctant Techie I was never supposed to be a techie....