Tag: Our Best

The Two Minds Of An Educator

by Terry Heick

In his essay Two Minds, Wendell Berry, unsurprisingly enough, offers up two tones of thought produced by two kinds of ‘mind’—Rational, and Sympathetic.

One is driven by logic, deduction, data, and measurement, the other by affection and other wasteful abstractions—instinct, reverence, joy, and faith. These minds struggle for to manifest in our collective behavior. That is, they both seek to control our actions–what we say and do.

Berry explains their distinctions:

“The Rational Mind of is motivated by the fear of being misled, of being wrong. Its purpose is to exclude everything that cannot empirically or experimentally be proven by fact.

The Sympathetic Mind is motivated by fear of error of a very different kind: the error of carelessness, of being unloving. Its purpose is to be considerate of whatever is present, to leave nothing out.”

It’s no surprise that these two minds exist in education as well. These are instincts you’ve likely had as an educator—a teacher, administrator, developer, or designer. Probably as a parent too if you have children. The need to be rational and deductive and strategic colliding with the enormous complexity and scale of the circumstances you face.

You’re told to be data-based—that is, to design learning experience with ‘strategies’ that are suggested by some measurement you’ve taken.

You might plan lessons and units by asking yourself, why this instructional strategy? Why this assessment form? Why group at this point in the lesson rather than that point? Why this standard with this novel?

This is your Rational Mind.

But your Rational Mind is servant to another kind of thinking—in fact, is roused and spurred by a kind of insecurity that realizes that unmistakable importance and coinciding impossibility of what you’ve made it your life’s work to do: Teach dozens and dozens of other human beings what they need to know to about (insert your content area here).

The Rational Mind (the same mind that drives policies and standards) wants to parse that task–to respond with logic. Preemptively, strategically, and analytically.

So rather than worry that this student can’t read and this student is a brilliant artist ready for a professional mentor to foster his gift and this student needs both a hug and self-knowledge more than content knowledge, you respond analytically. Your Rational Mind takes over.

You stare at standards and bar graphs and skim books by Marzano and Hattie that list the instructional strategies that their Rational Minds say will work. You listen to your colleagues, your instructional coach, and anyone else willing to offer advice. Then you teach, assess, reteach, re-assess, remediate, extend, and move on.

You’re keenly aware, though, of the tearing that has taken place by acting with logic. You’ve separated a learner from their very human circumstances—their interests, past experience, insecurities, and affections.

Academic content from their native schema.

Proficiency from curiosity.

Scientific concepts from the application of science.

Reading level from the love of reading.

The Rational Mind necessarily excludes curiosity, love, affection, and joy because they are inherently irrational. We live in an age of information that itself proceeds an Age of Enlightenment. By design, data and rationality can’t tolerate abstraction and humanity or they’d shake themselves apart in confusion.

But this requires an adjustment on our part. We have to stop being obstinate to what we increasingly see in our students. Apathy. Distraction. Superficiality.

As an industry, we are currently not just driven but dangerously preoccupied with research and science and that which is measurable and observable, having ridden our profession of superstitions like ‘patience,’ ‘self-knowledge,’ and ‘community.’

We leave it up to teachers to buffer the collision between students from policies, or sterile academic standards with communities that need more than proficiency from students. But if we are “considerate of whatever is present” and want to “to leave nothing out,” we can now see that pure Rationality isn’t fully a ‘mind,’ but an instinctive reaction to the scale of our task.

A challenge for you and I then may be to elevate teaching beyond singularities through a kind of marriage–joining our Rational and Sympathetic mind into something inclusive and awake and whole.

Always insisting, no matter what, that we don’t resort to Rationality or even Sympathy, but rather act as ‘whole teachers’ in every single one of our interactions with and analyses of students, and in doing so model for them the significant practice of being human.

Image attribution flickr user NASA Goddard Space Flight Center; Becoming A “Whole Teacher”

Terry Heick

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October 26, 2025
Teaching Students To See Quality

by Terry Heick

Quality—you know what it is, yet you don’t know what it is. But that’s self-contradictory. But some things are better than others, that is, they have more quality. But when you try to say what the quality is, apart from the things that have it, it all goes poof! There’s nothing to talk about. But if you can’t say what Quality is, how do you know what it is, or how do you know that it even exists? If no one knows what it is, then for all practical purposes it doesn’t exist at all. But for all practical purposes, it really does exist.

In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, author Robert Pirsig talks about the evasive idea of quality. This concept—and the tangent “Church of Reason”–heckles him throughout the book, notably as a teacher when he’s trying to explain to his students what quality writing looks like.

After some struggling– internally and with students–he throws out letter grades altogether in hopes that students will stop looking for the reward, and start looking for ‘quality.’ This, of course, doesn’t turn out the way he hoped it’d might; the students revolt, which only takes him further from his goal.

So what does quality have to do with learning? Quite a bit, it turns out.

A Shared Sense Of What’s Possible

Quality is an abstraction–it has something to do with the tension between a thing and an ideal thing. A carrot and an ideal carrot. A speech and an ideal speech. The way you want the lesson to go, and the way it actually goes. We have a lot of synonyms for this idea, ‘good’ being one of the more common.

For quality to exist–for something to be ‘good’–there has to be some shared sense of what’s possible, and some tendency for variation–inconsistency. For example, if we think there’s no hope for something to be better, it’s useless to call it bad or good. It is what it is. We rarely call walking good or bad. We just walk. Singing, on the other hand, can definitely be good or bad–that is have or lack quality. We know this because we’ve heard good singing before, and we know what’s possible.

Further, it’s difficult for there to be a quality sunrise or a quality drop of water because most sunrises and most drops of water are very similar. On the other hand, a ‘quality’ cheeseburger or performance of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony makes more sense because we A) have had a good cheeseburger before and know what’s possible, and B) can experience a vast difference between one cheeseburger and another.

Back to learning–if students could see quality—identify it, analyze it, understand its characteristics, and so on—imagine what that requires. They have to see all the way around a thing, compare it to what’s possible, and make an evaluation. Much of the friction between teachers and learners comes from a kind of scraping between students and the teachers trying to guide them towards quality.

The teachers, of course, are only trying to help students understand what quality is. We describe it, create rubrics for it, point it out, model it, and sing its praises, but more often than not, they don’t see it and we push it closer and closer to their noses and wait for the light to come on.

And when it doesn’t, we assume they either don’t care, or aren’t trying hard enough.

The Best

And so it goes with relative superlatives—good, better, and best. Students use these words without knowing their starting point–quality. It’s hard to know what quality is until they can think their way around a thing to begin with. And then further, to really internalize things, they have to see their quality. Quality for them based on what they see as possible.

To qualify something as good—or ‘best’—requires first that we can agree what that ‘thing’ is supposed to do, and then can discuss that thing in its native context. Consider something simple, like a lawnmower. It’s easy to determine the quality of a lawnmower because it’s clear what it’s supposed to do. It’s a tool that has some degrees of performance, but it’s mostly like an on/off switch. It either works or it doesn’t.

Other things, like government, art, technology, etc., are more complex. It’s not clear what quality looks like in legislation, abstract painting, or economic leadership. There is both nuance and subjectivity in these things that make evaluating quality far more complex. In these cases, students have to think ‘macro enough’ to see the ideal functions of a thing, and then decide if they’re working, which of course is impossible because no one can agree with which functions are ‘ideal’ and we’re right back at zero again. Like a circle.

Quality In Student Thinking

And so it goes with teaching and learning. There isn’t a clear and socially agreed-upon cause-effect relationship between teaching and the world. Quality teaching will yield quality learning that does this. It’s the same with the students themselves–in writing, in reading, and in thought, what does quality look like?

What causes it?

What are its characteristics?

And most importantly, what can we do to not only help students see it but develop eyes for it that refuse to close.

To be able to see the circles in everything, from their own sense of ethics to the way they structure paragraphs, design a project, study for exams, or solve problems in their own lives–and do so without using adultisms and external labels like ‘good job,’ and ‘excellent,’ and ‘A+’ and ‘you’re so smart!’

What can we do to nurture students that are willing to sit and dwell with the tension between possibility and reality, bending it all to their will moment by moment with affection and understanding?

Terry Heick

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October 13, 2025
6 Domains Of Cognition: The TeachThought Learning Taxonomy
by Terry Heick

How can you tell if a student really understands something?

They learn early on to play the game—tell the teacher and/or the test what they ‘want to know,’ and even the best assessment leaves something on the table. (In truth, a big portion of the time students simply don’t know what they don’t know.)

The idea of understanding is, of course, at the heart of all learning, and solving it as a puzzle is one of the three pillars of formal learning environments and education.

1. What do they need to understand (standards)?

2. What (and how) do they currently understand (assessment)?

3. How can they best come to understand what they currently do not (planning learning experiences and instruction)?

But how do we know if they know it? And what is ‘it’?

Understanding As ‘It’

On the surface, there is trouble with the word ‘it.’ Sounds vague. Troublesome. Uncertain. But everyone somehow knows what it is.

‘It’ is essentially what is to be learned, and it can be a scary thing to both teachers and students. ‘It’ is everything, described with intimidating terms like objective, target, proficiency, test, exam, grade, fail, and succeed.

And in terms of content, ‘it’ could be almost anything: a fact, a discovery, a habit, skill, or general concept, from mathematical theory to a scientific process, the importance of a historical figure to an author’s purpose in a text.

So if a student gets it, beyond pure academic performance what might they be able to do? There are many existing taxonomies and characteristics, from Bloom’s to Understanding by Design’s 6 Facets of Understanding.

The following actions are set up as a linear taxonomy, from most basic to the most complex. The best part about it is its simplicity: Most of these actions can be performed simply in the classroom in minutes, and don’t require complex planning or an extended exam period.

By using a quick diagram, concept map, t-chart, conversation, picture, or short response in a journal, quick face-to-face collaboration, on an exit slip, or via digital/social media, understanding can be evaluated in minutes, helping to replace testing and consternation with a climate of assessment. It can be even be displayed on a class website or hung in the classroom to help guide self-directed learning, with students checking themselves for understanding.

How This Understanding Taxonomy Works

I’ll write more about this soon and put this into a more graphic form soon; both of these are critical in using it. (Update: I’m also creating a course for teachers to help the, use it.) For now, I’ll say that it can be used to guide planning, assessment, curriculum design, and self-directed learning. Or to develop critical thinking questions for any content area.

The ‘Heick’ learning taxonomy is meant to be simple, arranged as (mostly) isolated tasks that range in complexity from less to more. That said, students needn’t demonstrate the ‘highest’ levels of understanding–that misses the point. Any ability to complete these tasks is a demonstration of understanding. The greater number of tasks the student can complete the better, but all ‘boxes checked’ are evidence that the student ‘gets it.’

36 Thinking Strategies To Help Students Wrestle With Complexity

The Heick Learning Taxonomy

Domain 1: The Parts
1. Explain or describe it simply
2. Label its major and minor parts
3. Evaluate its most and least important characteristics
4. Deconstruct or ‘unbuild’ it efficiently
5. Give examples and non-examples
6. Separate it into categories, or as an item in broader categories
Example Topic

The Revolutionary War

Sample Prompts

Explain the Revolutionary War in simple terms (e.g., an inevitable rebellion that created a new nation).

Identify the major and minor ‘parts’ of the Revolutionary War (e.g., economics and propaganda, soldiers and tariffs).

Evaluate the Revolutionary War and identify its least and most important characteristics (e.g., caused and effects vs city names and minor skirmishes)

See also 20 Types Of Questions For Teaching Critical Thinking

Domain 2: The Whole
1. Explain it in micro-detail and macro-context
2. Create a diagram that embeds it in a self-selected context
3. Explain how it is and is not useful both practically and intellectually
4. Play with it casually
5. Leverage it both in parts and in whole
6. Revise it expertly, and explain the impact of any revisions
Domain 3: The Interdependence
1. Explain how it relates to similar and non-similar ideas
2. Direct others in using it
3. Explain it differently–and precisely–to both a novice and an expert
4. Explain exactly how and where others might misunderstand it
5. Compare it to other similar and non-similar ideas
6. Identify analogous but distinct ideas, concepts, or situations
Domain 4: The Function
1. Apply it in unfamiliar situations
2. Create accurate analogies to convey its function or meaning
3. Analyze the sweet spot of its utility
4. Repurpose it with creativity
5. Know when to use it
6. Plausibly theorize its origins
Domain 5: The Abstraction
1. Insightfully or artfully demonstrate its nuance
2. Criticize it in terms of what it might ‘miss’ or where it’s ‘dishonest’ or incomplete
3. Debate its ‘truths’ as a supporter or devil’s advocate
4. Explain its elegance or crudeness
5. Analyze its objectivity and subjectivity, and how the two relate
6. Design a sequel, extension, follow-up, or evolution of it
Domain 6: The Self
1. Self-direct future learning about the topic
2. Ask specific, insightful questions about it
3. Recall or narrate their own learning sequence or chronology (metacognition) in coming to know it
4. Is comfortable using it across diverse contexts and circumstances
5. Identify what they still don’t understand about it
6. Analyze changes in self-knowledge as a result of understanding
Advanced Understanding

Understanding by Design’s 6 facets of Understanding, Bloom’s Taxonomy, and Marzano’s New Taxonomy were also referenced in the creation of this taxonomy; a learning taxonomy for understanding
Terry Heick

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October 8, 2025
Why Some Students Think They Dislike Reading | TeachThought

by Terry Heick

We tend to teach reading in a very industrial way.

We focus on giving kids ‘tools’ and ‘strategies’ to ‘make’ sense of a text. To ‘take the text apart’. To look for the ‘author’s purpose’—to bounce back and forth between a main idea, and the details that ‘support’ the main idea, as if the reading is some kind of thing that students happen upon by chance while on some purely academic journey.

And we push the illusion of the ‘otherness’ of a text by promoting the lie that they simply need to decode this, recognize that, and analyze that and that and that, and they’ll be able to ‘read.’

While this can work well to emphasize the work that real literacy requires, there’s little wonder why students are increasingly seeking briefer, more visual, social, and dynamic media. Because not only are these media forms effortlessly entertaining, they rarely require meaningful investment of themselves.

And it is this kind of connection that makes reading–or any other media consumption for that matter–feel alive and vibrant and whole. When readers are younger, there is a natural ‘give’ between the reader and the text, their imaginations still raw and green and alive.

But as readers grow older, there is less give–and more need for texts to be contextualized differently.

See Also: 25 Self-Guided Reading Responses for Fiction and Non-Fiction

The Spirituality Of Literacy

There is a spirituality involved in reading (really) that is challenging to promote only in the classroom. (That is, not at home, at social or recreational events, but only at school, where it will always be a kind of naked.)

Cognitively, a student ‘makes sense’ of a text through a perfectly personal schema—that is, through the symbols and patterns and enthusiasm and suffering and meaning in their own lives. Students can’t simply be encouraged to ‘bring themselves’ and their own experiences to a text; they have to realize that any grasp of the text decays almost immediately if they don’t.

Without that inward, reflective pattern where students acknowledge the sheer craziness of reading–where they are asked to merge two realities (the text, and themselves)—then that process will always be industrial. Mechanical.

A matter of literacy and ‘career readiness.’

Other.

It’s interesting that we give students mechanical tools that, even used well, can break the text beyond recognition, then wonder why they don’t appreciate Shakespeare or Berry or Faulkner or Dickinson.

We try to divorce the reader from the reading.

The nuance and complexity of literature is its magic. But students dislike reading raised in data-loud, image-based, form-full, socialized and self-important circumstances aren’t accustomed to that kind of selfless—and terrifying–interaction.

The self-reflection true literacy requires is horrifying! To closely examine who we are and what we think we know by studying another parallel examination from another human being who put their thinking in the form of a novel, short story, poem, or essay! You’re not just ‘reading’ another person’s thoughts, but you’re pouring yourself into their marrow.

No wonder they skim.

Most readers are already working from a disadvantaged position, where they view themselves as not only distinct from the text (false), but somehow further along in time and priority, as if they are being brought to some text to see if it’s worth their time.

And so they sit with it only long enough to see if it entertains them, neglecting the most fundamental tenet of literacy: Interdependence.

The Irony Of Reading

In reading, you’re simply uncovering something you’ve always been a part of. Instincts you’ve always had. Circumstances you’ve long been afraid of. Events and ideas and insights you’ve struggled to put into words but have just found right there on the page.

Your brain can’t understand it any other way.

Compared to media experiences most modern students gravitate easily towards–Instagram, facebook, Epic Fail YouTube channels, video games—reading also lacks the immediate spectacle that can catalyze the experience. Something that lights them up inside at a basic knee-jerk level, and will keep them from having to go any further.

Reading isn’t a show. (Not at first anyhow.) It doesn’t exist to make them LOL. (Though it might.) But they often turn the page hoping to be passively entertained. Ironically then, reading isn’t ‘built’ for what we use it for in education. Reading is hugely personal but in education, we often focus on the mechanics instead of the people and the strategies instead of the living and breathing happening all around us.

Reading involves process and tools and strategies, but it isn’t any of those things.

The Ecology Of Reading

It’d be easy to blame the ecology of it all. To suggest that Huckleberry Finn was only interesting because Minecraft wasn’t around to compare it to. Or to blame social media for distracting everyone.

And this is all part of it. Their habits and access to complex texts and personal affinities matter. There is an ecology that schools and students and texts and literacy operate within–an interdependence–that is there whether we choose to honor it or not. A lot of this is much bigger than you and I as teachers.

But that doesn’t excuse us from our own failures in how we teach reading in schools. We give students processes for writing and tools for reading without stopping to humanize the whole effort. Mechanized literacy has all sorts of troubling implications.

You and I–we teach students to overvalue their own opinions when they’re still often baseless and uninformed, which is like teaching them to read without helping them to truly understand why they should read.

We fail to help them navigate the blessed, intimidating, awkward otherness of reading that makes it rise.

And so we lose the reader—the real person–in the process.

Terry Heick

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October 6, 2025
Teaching Students To See Quality

by Terry Heick

Quality—you know what it is, yet you don’t know what it is. But that’s self-contradictory. But some things are better than others, that is, they have more quality. But when you try to say what the quality is, apart from the things that have it, it all goes poof! There’s nothing to talk about. But if you can’t say what Quality is, how do you know what it is, or how do you know that it even exists? If no one knows what it is, then for all practical purposes it doesn’t exist at all. But for all practical purposes, it really does exist.

In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, author Robert Pirsig talks about the evasive idea of quality. This concept—and the tangent “Church of Reason”–heckles him throughout the book, notably as a teacher when he’s trying to explain to his students what quality writing looks like.

After some struggling– internally and with students–he throws out letter grades altogether in hopes that students will stop looking for the reward, and start looking for ‘quality.’ This, of course, doesn’t turn out the way he hoped it’d might; the students revolt, which only takes him further from his goal.

So what does quality have to do with learning? Quite a bit, it turns out.

A Shared Sense Of What’s Possible

Quality is an abstraction–it has something to do with the tension between a thing and an ideal thing. A carrot and an ideal carrot. A speech and an ideal speech. The way you want the lesson to go, and the way it actually goes. We have a lot of synonyms for this idea, ‘good’ being one of the more common.

For quality to exist–for something to be ‘good’–there has to be some shared sense of what’s possible, and some tendency for variation–inconsistency. For example, if we think there’s no hope for something to be better, it’s useless to call it bad or good. It is what it is. We rarely call walking good or bad. We just walk. Singing, on the other hand, can definitely be good or bad–that is have or lack quality. We know this because we’ve heard good singing before, and we know what’s possible.

Further, it’s difficult for there to be a quality sunrise or a quality drop of water because most sunrises and most drops of water are very similar. On the other hand, a ‘quality’ cheeseburger or performance of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony makes more sense because we A) have had a good cheeseburger before and know what’s possible, and B) can experience a vast difference between one cheeseburger and another.

Back to learning–if students could see quality—identify it, analyze it, understand its characteristics, and so on—imagine what that requires. They have to see all the way around a thing, compare it to what’s possible, and make an evaluation. Much of the friction between teachers and learners comes from a kind of scraping between students and the teachers trying to guide them towards quality.

The teachers, of course, are only trying to help students understand what quality is. We describe it, create rubrics for it, point it out, model it, and sing its praises, but more often than not, they don’t see it and we push it closer and closer to their noses and wait for the light to come on.

And when it doesn’t, we assume they either don’t care, or aren’t trying hard enough.

The Best

And so it goes with relative superlatives—good, better, and best. Students use these words without knowing their starting point–quality. It’s hard to know what quality is until they can think their way around a thing to begin with. And then further, to really internalize things, they have to see their quality. Quality for them based on what they see as possible.

To qualify something as good—or ‘best’—requires first that we can agree what that ‘thing’ is supposed to do, and then can discuss that thing in its native context. Consider something simple, like a lawnmower. It’s easy to determine the quality of a lawnmower because it’s clear what it’s supposed to do. It’s a tool that has some degrees of performance, but it’s mostly like an on/off switch. It either works or it doesn’t.

Other things, like government, art, technology, etc., are more complex. It’s not clear what quality looks like in legislation, abstract painting, or economic leadership. There is both nuance and subjectivity in these things that make evaluating quality far more complex. In these cases, students have to think ‘macro enough’ to see the ideal functions of a thing, and then decide if they’re working, which of course is impossible because no one can agree with which functions are ‘ideal’ and we’re right back at zero again. Like a circle.

Quality In Student Thinking

And so it goes with teaching and learning. There isn’t a clear and socially agreed-upon cause-effect relationship between teaching and the world. Quality teaching will yield quality learning that does this. It’s the same with the students themselves–in writing, in reading, and in thought, what does quality look like?

What causes it?

What are its characteristics?

And most importantly, what can we do to not only help students see it but develop eyes for it that refuse to close.

To be able to see the circles in everything, from their own sense of ethics to the way they structure paragraphs, design a project, study for exams, or solve problems in their own lives–and do so without using adultisms and external labels like ‘good job,’ and ‘excellent,’ and ‘A+’ and ‘you’re so smart!’

What can we do to nurture students that are willing to sit and dwell with the tension between possibility and reality, bending it all to their will moment by moment with affection and understanding?

Terrell Heick

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June 25, 2024
An Innovative Learning Model: How To Sync Your Classroom

by TeachThought Staff

In just the last decade, the image of technology in the classroom has shifted from rows of desktops in a dedicated computer lab (all facing the same direction) to one where a variety of different devices coexist, often uneasily, in and out of the lab.

The role of the teacher, on the other hand, remains dynamic as ever: morphing hour to hour, if not minute to minute, between lecturer, coach, guide, mentor, referee, and on-call problem solver. Has the unleashing of technology out of the lab, away from bulky desktops, provided the classroom with better tools to support the teacher in all her roles, and the students in all their activities?

Terry Heick’s article on ‘second screen learning’ (What Is The Sync Teaching Method?) addresses this question head-on. He provides a framework for understanding how a 1:1 (or 1:few) environment can best be leveraged. How can today’s potentially ubiquitous technology support the variety of interactions between students and content in a classroom? What should we think about when we think about the sorts of interaction between the teacher’s device and the students’ that may best support and extend a classroom’s effectiveness?

The difference between 1:1 and second screen learning ‘is a matter of syncing.’ Synced learning requires two potentially opposing technologies: one, the ability to engage the same core material, and two, the ability to engage the material independently. “In second screen learning classrooms, the teachers and students are ‘sync’d’ content-wise with one another, while still having the tools, strategies, freedom, and space to clarify, extend, create, or connect the learning.”

This notion of a class that moves fluidly from a focus on a single theme to individual or small group activities, and back again, is not new. The teacher guides the class as a ‘conductor’ while unleashing each student to delve into topics on their own as well, harnessing each individual’s curiosity and aptitude. And this occurs routinely with or without digital media.

This post is a brief introduction to the technologies that can support a synced classroom using second screens—focusing on the use of web-based resources. As web-based resources play an ever-larger role in K-12 education, the ability to better wrangle and adapt them to the natural rhythms of classroom instruction rises in importance.

The hope is for this discussion to be useful to educators thinking about what technologies to adopt in amplifying the ‘syncing’ that they already practice.

5 Steps To The Sync’d Classroom

Step 1: Sync’d Resources: Common Access To A Predetermined Set Of Educational Resources

An anchor for sync’d learning is the ability to have students engage with a common set of educational resources curated by the teacher. From email and browser bookmarks to more elaborate social bookmarking and curating services, the options are many.

To enable deeper engagement, bookmarking can be supplemented by two additional features: the ability to add commentary, and the ability to freely add to one’s own collection of resources.

The ability to comment on resources enables teachers to put resources in their proper context and sequence. Students in turn can engage with the resources with questions, reactions, answers, and thoughts.

The initial set of resources provided by the ‘conductor’ becomes a core around which the students can start to create their personal collections, be it videos, scientific articles, or URLs of apps that provide a ‘gamified’ introduction to programming.

Even with just these elements, a classroom may be ‘sync’d.’ Whether loosely around a collection of resources and comments or more tightly on a page that the teacher is discussing live, the teacher can vary the interaction to create a synced experience. The following steps, however, would significantly ease the burden on both the teacher and the student–and support interactions not possible before.

Step 2: Sync’d Navigation–The Same Thing At The Same Time

Though ‘synchronous navigation’ may bring to mind a lecture, armed with second screens, it can be more. Because most digital resources are at least partially interactive, landing on the same page or using the same app does not require everyone to engage with the content in exactly the same way.

However, screen sharing apps usually work only in one direction—very much like a ‘first screen’ (the teacher’s) on a projector. Instead, teachers should be able to take all students to a page and, perhaps after a context-setting introduction, set them free to explore on their own. Synchronous navigation differs from screen sharing because it provides a common path around which exploration is encouraged.

To use both definitions of the word, the teacher is a ‘conductor,’ guiding where necessary, corralling everyone in the same direction when called for, and asking everyone to disembark and go off on their own when appropriate. Coupled with the ability to view the teacher’s comments and the ability to contribute one’s own thoughts, synchronous navigation supports a blend of guidance and freedom, of focus and creativity.

Students should be allowed to lead these sessions as well—to present their finished work, engage their peers and their teacher in the research phase of a project, and lead each other in smaller groups as a part of everyday learning.

Step 3: Different things at Different Times—Switching Between Sync’d & Unsync’d

A blend of synchronous and independent activity may be determined on the fly. This blend is often the magic of live teaching, where instruction is leavened by questions, pauses, changes in direction, as well as time for independent work. So the ability to shift fluidly between the two is critical. Even if planned, the easier the mechanics of the transition, the more transitions there can be.

Necessary elements include the ability of the teacher or a student to pause navigation to allow for discussions. They also include allowing students to ‘catch up’ and re-engage after having gone off on tangents of their own.

It should also support the full use of the shared resources in Step 1—to guide a session, to add new resources during a session, and the ability to comment on everything. Figure 1 shows a simple example of the type of progression possible with ‘on the fly’ switching.

Step 4: Sharing Ideas—Communication & Collaboration

Although teachers can incorporate existing messaging and note-taking apps to support Steps 1-3, the ideal would be to have commenting, messaging, and chatting be integrated into a common platform.

For example, synchronous navigation would include a messaging function. Even when all participants are in the same physical space, writing comments, questions, and answers through an integrated messaging function will provide a more focused channel for engagement, to augment verbal exchange as well as substitute for it.

To encourage dialog and collaboration, discoveries and comments should trigger a ‘new message’-like notification. And once notified, participants should be able to have both synchronous and asynchronous discussions. Much like how synchronized navigation should be switchable on the fly, commenting and messaging should also support the seamless transition between synced, real-time discussions (similar to chatting or instant messaging) and conversations adapted to each student’s own pace (more like email).

Step 5: The Glue—From The Individual To The Group

This brings us to the synced classroom’s structure. Whether the entire class is synced on the same page at the same time or smaller groups are synced loosely, the teacher must determine both the degree of syncing and the scale of it for different occasions. And the two decisions may be tightly related. Technology can help by making it easy to create different groupings for different purposes—from the single student all the way to a combination of multiple classes.

Different grouping should also exist simultaneously, for collaboration, messaging, and synchronous navigation. These need to act as the glue that creates the context for synced learning at different scales. One can imagine the cross-cutting groupings in Figure 2 all going through their own seesawing between synchronous and independent activities on their screens over the course of a day, with the teacher orchestrating as much as needed or desired.

A Successfully Synced Classroom

As Terry Heick reminds us, “Interaction is possible with teachers and textbooks as well as it is with apps and tablets, but not on the same scale, with the same degree of personalization, or the same engaging form factors.” Sync teaching using technology is valuable because the analogous method of sync teaching without technology is effective. The appropriate enabling technology, especially when combined with the “abundance of engaging and flexible learning resources on the internet,” becomes a way to amplify a tried and true method.

To be even remotely useful, the technology outlined above needs to be convenient. For it to be relied upon by teachers looking to support an adaptive and responsive learning environment, it too has to provide an adaptive and responsive service. So the challenge is to combine the above functions in a way that is intuitive and easy to use, if not also a little fun.

TeachThought Staff

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June 25, 2024
The Inside-Out School: A 21st Century Learning Model
by Terry Heick

This post has been updated from a 2012 version

As a follow-up to our 9 Characteristics of 21st Century Learning we developed in 2009, we have developed an updated framework, The Inside-Out Learning Model.

The goal of the model is simple enough–not pure academic proficiency, but instead authentic self-knowledge, diverse local and global interdependence, adaptive critical thinking, and adaptive media literacy.

By design this model emphasizes the role of play, diverse digital and physical media, and a designed interdependence between communities and schools.

The attempted personalization of learning occurs through new actuators and new notions of local and global citizenship. An Inside-Out School returns the learners, learning, and ‘accountability’ away from academia and back to communities. No longer do schools teach. Rather, they act as curators of resources and learning tools and promote the shift of the ‘burden’ of learning back to a more balanced perspective of stakeholders and participants.

Here, families, business leaders, humanities-based organizations, neighbors, mentors, and higher-education institutions all converging to witness, revere, respond to and support the learning of its own community members.

The micro-effect here is increased intellectual intimacy, while the macro-effect is healthier communities and citizenship that extends beyond mere participation, to ideas of thinking, scale, legacy, and growth.

The 9 Domains Of the Inside-Out Learning Model

1. Five Learning Actuators
- Project-Based Learning
- Directed and Non-Directed Play
- Video Games and Learning Simulations
- Connected Mentoring
- Academic Practice
2. Changing Habits
- Well-being (for teachers and students) as a matter deserving of innovation & design
- Acknowledge limits and scale
- Reflect on interdependence
- Honor uncertainty
- Curate legacy
- Support systems-level and divergent thinking
- Reward increment
- Require versatility in the face of change
3. Transparency
- Between communities, learners, and schools
- Learning standards, outcomes, project rubrics, performance critera persistently visible, accessible, and communally constructed
- Gamification and publishing replace ‘grades’
4. Self-Initiated Transfer
- Applying old thinking in constantly changing and unfamiliar circumstances as a constant matter of practice
- Constant practice of prioritized big ideas in increasing complexity within learner’s Zone of Proximal Development
- Project-based learning, blended learning, and Place-Based Education available to facilitate highly constructivist approach
5. Mentoring & Community
- ‘Accountability’ via the performance of project-based ideas in authentic local and global environments
- Local action –> global citizenship
- Active mentoring via physical and digital networking, apprenticeships, job shadows and study tours
- Communal Constructivism, meta-cognition, Cognitive Coaching, and Cognitive Apprenticeship among available tools
6. Changing Roles
- Learners as knowledge makers
- Teachers as the expert of assessment and resources
- Classrooms as think-tanks
- Communities not just audience, but vested participants
- Families as designers, curators, and content resources
7. Climate of Assessment
- Constant minor assessments replace exams
- Data streams inform progress and suggest pathways
- Academic standards prioritized and anchoring
- Products, simulation performance, self-knowledge delegate academia to a new role of refinement of thought
8. Thought & Abstraction
- In this model, struggle and abstraction are expected outcomes of increasing complexity & real-world uncertainty
- This uncertainty is honored, and complexity and cognitive patience are constantly modeled and revered
- Abstraction honors not just art, philosophy, and other humanities, but the uncertain, incomplete, and subjective nature of knowledge
9. Expanding Literacies
- Analyzes, evaluates, and synthesizes credible information
- Critical survey of the interdependence of media and thought
- Consumption of constantly evolving media forms
- Media design for authentic purposes
- Self-monitored sources of digital & non-digital data
- Artistic and useful content curation patterns
The Inside-Out Learning Model Central Learning Theories & Artifacts: Situational Learning Theory (Lave), Discovery Learning (Bruner), Communal Constructivism (Holmes), Zone of Proximal Development & More Knowledgeable Other (Vygotsky), Learning Cycle (Kolb), Transfer (Thorndike, Perkins, Wiggins), Habits of Mind (Costa and Kallick), Paulo Freire, and the complete body of work by Wendell Berry
Terrell Heick

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October 20, 2023