Evidence Based Teaching

A knowledgeable librarian is a crow 's nester, high up on the mast, looking for the important trends and best practices to share with fellow educators. I do an extensive amount of reading about education, and, in turn, choose articles from my readings to distribute to staff and members of the greater school community. Staff usually receive between two and four posts weekly. I draw this information from many sources such as scholarly articles, email, newsletters, journals, and magazines. I have been told that these mailings are highly valued by the staff and it is not unusual to walk into a room where the teacher is using the materials I emailed to them in lessons. By choosing and supplying high quality teaching materials, I directly impact

Carol Dweck, Professor of Psychology at Stanford University, that compared student learning when taught either as 1. a unit on enhanced study skills, or 2. a unit on how the brain learns (with no mention of study skills). The students in the later group were the only group that advanced as reported by their teachers who were in the blind. Since first sharing the research with staff, I was encouraged to develop lessons to present to our students. On the strength of this research, I honed a PowerPoint based on her work. I developed lessons on the malleability of the brain, on grit and it 's relationship to malleable intelligence and the differences between fixed and growth mindsets, emphasizing homework as the key to building and maintaining dendrite

Thus, using research-based strategies, we have changed both what we do as educators and how we help our parents be more effective supports for their children. During the lessons, we talk about the differences between growth and fixed mind sets. Using the lesson in malleable intelligence each year, we have been able to track a noticeable change in personal attitudes of students when they take self surveys during the lesson. Over the course of the entire 7th grade year, after being exposed to the lesson, the self survey scores have shifted toward growth mind sets when the same surveys are taken during 8th grade. The ensuing parallel reduction in risk adversity has helped student resilience and grit, resulting in work products that demonstrate such. We share this work with the greater community through a weekly newsletter. One of the teachers, in whose class I taught, told me that in 22 years of teaching, she had never had such a constant stream of student requests for homework. She said the lesson had improved the atmosphere for teaching in her