In This Issue:

1. Zaretta Hammond on building student ownership for learning

2. Deliberate practice – the key to better performance

3. Thoughts on how teachers can deal with GenAI

4. Crafting assessments that prevent AI cheating

5. Using AI to give students immediate feedback on performance tasks

6. A one-page chart for student accommodations

7. Tips for winning grants from DonorsChoose

8. Bad and good interview questions

 

Quotes of the Week

“We can teach our hearts out, but in the end, only the learner learns.” 

            Zaretta Hammond (see item #1)

 

“The number one brain rule is that all new learning must be coupled with existing learning,” 

            Zaretta Hammond (ibid.)

 

“Millions of boys are struggling because they carry in their pockets constant access to products that are addictive by design. I am worried about boys, but my focus and my worries are aimed primarily at the predatory business models that profit from their vulnerability.” 

            Zach Rausch (NYU Tech and Society Lab), quoted in “How Video Games Are Shaping 

a Generation of Boys and Young Men, for Better or Worse” by Claire Cain Miller and 

Amy Fan, New York Times, October 14, 2025

 

“Civics education is not about boosting national pride or fueling shame. It’s about preparing citizens for the task of cultivating democracy. It doesn’t require memorization. It should ask students to stop, think, and argue – and appreciate how others might differ.” 

            Jeffrey Edward Green (University of Pennsylvania) in “American Civics Education 

Should Confuse, Not Comfort” in The Boston Globe, October 29, 2025

 

“Decoding is a transferable skill; that’s why we can ‘read’ nonsense words like gox, yake, or churbite and agree on their pronunciation. But comprehension is not a skill at all. It depends on deep cognitive processes fueled by vocabulary and background knowledge built across years of content-rich, text-centered instruction. Many state reading initiatives, understandably focused on early decoding, stop short of the second, steeper challenge.”

            Kristen McQuillan and Robert Pondiscio in “From Laws to Literacy: The Science of 

Reading Needs More Than Statutes to Succeed” in Education Gadfly, Nov. 7, 2025

 

“Deliberate instruction is a cost-effective, cognitively aligned way to steady literacy against drift – fastening form to meaning in a noisy open sea where fog blurs, waves toss, and cross-currents of distraction pull learners off course… Literacy is navigation. Our students are at sea. The channel is crowded with bright objects that do not guide. Give them beacons to see. Give them anchors to hold. When we do, the drift subsides – and literacy reaches solid ground.”

            Haiyan Fan in “Students Need Anchors When They Read. How to Make Them Stick”

            in Education Week, November 6, 2025

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1. Zaretta Hammond on Building Student Ownership for Learning

            In this Cult of Pedagogy article, Zaretta Hammond says it’s not enough to implement good classroom practices like project-based learning, UDL, and makerspaces. “We still have to give students explicit tools, techniques, and moves to take full advantage of them,” she says. “We can teach our hearts out, but in the end, only the learner learns.” To get students carrying more of the cognitive load, build their sense of agency, and make learning “sticky,” she suggests five learn-to-learn moves that she believes will close the opportunity gap and move us toward more-equitable academic outcomes.

            But first, Hammond wants us to distinguish moves from skills. In basketball, a crossover dribble is a move, ball handling is a skill that includes knowing various dribbling moves, including the crossover. “Skills are what allow you to choose the right moves at the right time and execute them well,” she says. “You can know a move without having the skill to use it effectively, and you can have great skills while still learning new moves. The relationship is top-down and bottom-up. Skills are built from practicing moves, but also from developing the judgment and adaptability that transcend any single technique.” 

These five student moves are a skillset for processing new content so it’s meaningful and deepens understanding:

            • Move #1: Size it up and break it down. Sizing up is task analysis – making sense of the cognitive activity involved in new learning. Breaking it down is crafting a plan of attack – which tools and strategies I’ll need to complete the task. Key questions: Does this task seem hard? What type of press or stamina will I need? How do I feel about that? How do I need to organize for this task? Have I done this before? Do I already have strategies and tools that I can use?

            • Move #2: Scan the hard drive. “The number one brain rule is that all new learning must be coupled with existing learning,” says Hammond. The student goes on a mental scavenger hunt, scouring memory and background knowledge for an experience, definition, or concept related to the new learning, no matter how tangential. Questions: Where have I heard or seen this before? This is new, but what is a similar concept or skill I’m familiar with? What might be the opposite of this?

            • Move #3: Chew and remix. The student integrates the new content with previous knowledge, engaging in meaning-making. “This is the active part of learning,” says Hammond, “that requires productive struggle in the learner’s zone of proximal development (ZPD) to make sense of complex, conflicting, or competing information.” Questions: How is this new content connected to what I already know? Does this make sense? What is confusing? How do I figure this out? Which cognitive routine will work best right now to help me mix this new content with what I already know? 

            • Move #4: Engage in skillful practice. Here students deepen understanding and build proficiency and automaticity of a math formula or a historical event, engaging in repetition and continuous refinement. Questions: What small changes do I need to make to execute this particular part of the task or skill more effectively? How can I stretch myself to the edge of my current ability? Do I need to level up my emotional stamina? Do I need to use my self-critique tools to monitor my progress and adjust as needed?

            • Move #5: Make it stick. Within 12 hours (usually after school hours), the student consolidates the new information or skill by retrieving it and applying it in a new setting. This can be by using the skill or knowledge, describing it to someone, or just mentally rehearsing it. The student might systematically space out the new learning or interleave it with other material. 

            The hallmark of a cognitively independent learner, says Hammond, is getting to the point where students can make these moves without prompting from the teacher. “For students to own their learning, we have to get them to understand this big idea,” she says: “You have to be the one working the move. Just like in sports, the coach can demonstrate the move, but you have to pay attention to your own execution and how to correct poor performance.” For this to happen, teachers need to orchestrate three steps:

            • Initiate students into a cognitive apprenticeship. “Just like carpenters, chefs, and artists become apprentices as part of their learning journey,” says Hammond, “we have to treat learners in a similar way.” That involves these capacities of a good information processor:

-   Map out the stepping-stones toward mastery.

-   Study mistakes as a way to improve.

-   Bond with classmates as a community of learners who can be a resource to one another.

• Invite students to revise their learner identity. Students often need to rethink perceptions and beliefs about their abilities, motivations, and place in the academic world – for example, pushing back on the idea that “I’m not a math person.”

• Integrate regular opportunities for reflection. “Building learning power requires reflection and feedback,” says Hammond, “just like developing any other skillset. Several times a week, students need to engage in structured instructional conversations that get them to reflect on how they are managing their learning process through mistakes, confusions, and the moves they use to correct them.” That means developing a vocabulary about learning stages and identifying and solving predictable “choke points” – notably the limits of working memory – and pitfalls such as multi-tasking, using ineffective study strategies, and self-sabotage.

“Creating these conditions and inviting students to take up learn-how-to-learn skills is what it means to teach for instructional equity,” Hammond concludes. “These are more than individual strategies to make our lessons more engaging. They are the hidden equity curriculum every student needs to become a truly independent learner. Every student deserves to learn and master the craftsmanship of learning.” 

 

“Rebuilding Students’ Learning Power with Learn-to-Learn Skills” by Zaretta Hammond in Cult of Pedagogy, November 9, 2025; Hammond’s new book is Rebuilding Students’ Learning Power (Corwin, 2025). 

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2. Deliberate Practice – the Key to Better Performance

            “Everything important that you have ever learned, you learned by engaging with a feedback loop,” says Robert Talbert in Grading for Growth. Students may have had this insight in music and sports, but when it comes to the classroom, there’s a disconnect. Talbert spells out the key stages of the most powerful feedback loop, deliberate practice:

-   Students have a clear idea of what specific elements of their work need improvement.

-   They target those elements through exercises or other focused tasks.

-   Those exercises are easy to repeat, are repeated, and there’s immediate feedback.

-   Accumulating, incremental steps lead toward improvement on the main task.

-   It’s hard work, sometimes exhausting, and often not fun.

This is the blueprint for success among almost all top performers in music, sports, cooking, gaming – and the academic world. These people “are usually the best at what they do because they are the best at practicing what they do,” says Talbert. True, some people have more innate talent, but “top performers aren’t the ones who are built differently; they are the ones who practice differently – who practice deliberately.” 

            If we want to get students on a steeper learning curve, he believes, we have to school them in the details of deliberate practice: “It has to become part of the ‘material’ that we teach and part of the everyday vocabulary we use in dialogue with students.” Some precepts:

-   Top performance is impossible without the right kind of practice.

-   Don’t beat yourself up about mistakes; engage in strategic problem solving.

-   Engage with peers in this kind of problem-solving, processing mistakes in real time.

-   With practice, it’s quality, not quantity, done in manageable interleaved chunks.

-   Frequently talk with other learners about how you are practicing. 

 

“Alternative Grading and Deliberate Practice” by Robert Talbert in Grading for Growth, August 4, 2025; for more on deliberate practice, see Memo 971 for a summary of Anders Ericsson’s book, Peak. 

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3. Thoughts on How Teachers Can Deal with GenAI

            In this opinion forum in The Chronicle of Higher Education, 15 academics weigh in on the impact of artificial intelligence. Some excerpts:

 

While proud parents display that A paper on the fridge, that’s only the end product; learning actually happens through the work. We grade the output simply because we can’t easily grade the process – the student working in private. Assignments they return function as proof of work, a reasonable proxy for the quality of their effort. Well, no more. This cycle has been disrupted by… ChatGPT and its ilk: AI bots that can write…

            Think about marathon training. Beginning athletes run shorter distances, gradually building up endurance and speed till they can conquer the full 26.2 miles. The grading of assignments is similar to ticking off the time as students complete the 1K, 5K, 10K, and longer distances. But now AI gives all trainees magic rollerblade shoes that undetectably retract the wheels as they cross the finish line… But they’re not building muscles to run that marathon.

            If AI genuinely and fully replaced human skills, there might be a stronger case for its straightforward use in education. But generative AI is a powerful but strange beast; an LLM doing the writing is not like using calculators for arithmetic. Crucially, the reasoning and thinking skills developed through writing don’t just lead to polished outputs, which AI can indeed produce, but also empower students with much sharper, better cognitive powers. 

To genuinely persuade our students of their benefits, we should remember these abilities are neither natural nor easily acquired. Academics’ relationship to literate culture can be like an enthusiastic marathoner who relishes arduous training but gets flustered by those understandably reaching for the rollerblade. It won’t be easy to reconfigure it all – grading, exams, credentials – but the first step to saving writing is to make a case for its deep, empowering, and enduring value.

            Zeynep Tufekci, Princeton University 

 

            Even in a world in which AI becomes ever more powerful and widespread, basic skills like clear thinking and strong writing will remain extremely important. The ease with which AI can help students evade ever having to do the hard work required to pick up these skills is a genuine threat to their intellectual growth…

The students best able to make a contribution in the future are those who have both been forced to write plenty of traditional essays without the use of digital tools and who are skilled in using AI to push the boundaries of human knowledge… 

The most skilled pilots are capable of flying both a simple Cessna that contains little technology and of handling the myriad gadgets of a Boeing 787. Similarly, the best-prepared workers, scholars, and citizens of the future will be capable of thinking for themselves without the help of ChatGPT and expertly calling upon the help of such magician’s apprentices when appropriate. Our task as their teachers is to help them accomplish both.” 

Yascha Mounk, Johns Hopkins University

 

It has been observed that AI excels at making connections within existing patterns of data, but is bad at extrapolation – guessing at values beyond a known range. This is one of the reasons why experience is our greatest human advantage. When learners step away from the infinite online machine and into the professional space or public square, they learn about the world, about other people, and about themselves. They practice contextual agility, critical thinking, empathy, and social skills. They test, transfer, and extrapolate knowledge from one domain to another. In other words, they strengthen their agency.

            Joseph Aoun, Northeastern University

 

            I decided to redesign my class to focus as much on the quality of attention my students would be asked to pay as on the content of the texts themselves. They can acquire all the information they want at the push of a button. The question, though, is whether they can feel, understand, and master their own attentional instrumentation and deeply know the difference between themselves and the machines. I shrank my reading list but determined not to use excerpts.

            Danielle Allen, Harvard University

 

            I prefer the sea metaphor. Large language models are vast, boundless, and often unfathomable. You have to navigate them. There are currents that pull you along. You can get lost exploring them. There are always new seas to explore. You dive deep and plumb the depths. You can drown. You can go aground. They are sometimes unexpectedly shallow. It is always a voyage. You fish things out. There are strange things there as well. The seas are vast. So is the yet to be discovered. 

            Hollis Robbins, University of Utah

 

“How AI Is Changing Higher Education” in The Chronicle of Higher Education, November 14, 2025 (Vol. 72, #6, pp. 13-27)

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4. Crafting Assessments That Prevent AI Cheating

(Originally titled “Designing Plagiarism-Resistant Assessments”)

            In this Educational Leadership article, Torrey Trust and Robert Maloy (University of Massachusetts/Amherst) empathize with teachers trying to decide whether to confront students who have submitted work that looks like it had an AI assist. Rather than playing cat and mouse with academic cheating, Trust and Maloy suggest using the TRUST model to create assignments and assessments that reduce the likelihood of students taking AI shortcuts. 

            • Transparency in rationale, task, and criteria – “When students understand the purpose behind an assignment,” say the authors, “they’re more likely to value the process and less likely to rely on AI tools to shortcut their learning.” The Transparency in Learning and Teaching website www.tilthighered.com/resources has a number of exemplars. Teachers should also clarify the rules for use and misuse of GenAI tools.

            • Real-world application of knowledge – Students have lots of experience with “disposable” assessments, say Trust and Maloy – a paper that’s written, graded, and thrown away. But if a project has relevance to their lives and the world around them, students are more likely to engage intellectually and keep it after it’s been graded. In Maloy’s methods class for history teachers, students contribute to a Wikipedia page https://bit.ly/resourcesforhistoryteachers. 

            • Universal design for learning – Students often blame themselves when they do poorly on an assessment – when it’s actually the design of the assessment that was at fault. UDL encourages teachers to assign work that allows all students to showcase their knowledge and skills. The CAST website has suggestions: https://udlguidelines.cast.org. 

            • Social knowledge construction – All learning has the potential to be social, say Trust and Maloy, “whether it involves reading, listening, watching, talking, writing, or reflecting on what others have said and done.” The key is designing learning experiences that incorporate a group dynamic – for example, groups of students working on a blog post, newsletter, or podcast series and sharing it with the local community. 

            • Trial and error – “Learning is a process of making mistakes and using them to improve,” say Trust and Maloy, but students too often conclude they are “bad” at something and avoid the productive struggle needed to improve. Teachers can help shift this mindset by assigning a series of low-stakes tasks, normalizing errors, giving lots of encouraging feedback, and reframing failures as steps toward mastery. 

 

“Designing Plagiarism-Resistant Assessments” by Torrey Trust and Robert Maloy in Educational Leadership, November 2025 (Vol. 83, #3, pp. 16-21); the authors can be reached at [email protected] and [email protected]. 

 

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5. Using AI to Give Students Immediate Feedback on Performance Tasks

(Originally titled “Are We Assessing What Really Counts?”)

            In this article in Educational Leadership, Jay McTighe and Jay Meadows say there are two reasons teachers often use multiple-choice items for classroom math assessments:

-   They believe students need practice for high-stakes tests.

-   Open-response questions take too much time to grade.

But getting a steady diet of multiple-choice questions gives students an unfortunate message: there’s a “right” answer to every question, and teachers’ mindset may be that math instruction is ongoing test prep with students plugging in memorized answers. Needless to say, this dynamic fails to convey the complexity of mathematical thinking and problem solving. 

            A better approach, say McTighe and Meadows, is a “photo album” of authentic performance tasks over time, conveying an accurate sense of students’ progress toward mastery. Good performance tasks have the following characteristics:

-   A realistic context with a genuine problem, target audience, and constraints;

-   Open-ended with multiple steps, allowing for a variety of strategies;

-   Reasoning and explanation required, not simply computing the right answer;

-   A rubric for judging performance;

-   Aligned with key math standards;

-   Might also include content and skills from other subject areas;

-   Might include the use of technology.

A 3^rd-grade example: A class of 30 students is going to a movie theater. If there is an equal number of students in each row, what are all the possible seating arrangements? Good performance tasks answer the questions often heard from students, especially in middle and high schools: Why do we need to learn this? Whoever uses this stuff?

But what about the teacher time involved in evaluating and grading performance tasks? With the 3^rd-grade movie theater example, the teacher might need to spend four hours giving meaningful feedback on students’ diagrams and explanations. 

            This is where AI is a “game changer,” say McTighe and Meadows. “Recent advances in AI may finally resolve the long-standing tension between depth and practicality.” They fed one student’s response to the movie theater task into TRISTAN with a detailed prompt and it produced the following feedback in seconds:

-   Good job on this task! You really showed your understanding of how multiplication and division can help solve real-world problems. I especially liked how you used arrays to visualize the different seating arrangements and how you organized your findings in a table. You clearly explained your thinking by showing the multiplication equations that match each arrangement. Here are a few ideas to help you grow as a mathematician:

-   Try to explain the connection between the multiplication facts and the seating arrangements. “Since 3 x 10 = 30, we can have 3 rows of 10 seats.” 

-   Level up your math language by using words like “factors” and “product” when you talk about the numbers in the problem.

-   Think about how you could use what you know about factors to break down the number 30 in different ways. Can you find any prime numbers that are factors of 30?

“We can now authentically assess learners’ abilities to tackle problem-solving tasks and explain and justify their mathematical reasoning,” say McTighe and Meadows. “The AI technology needed to greatly expand the use of performance assessments will only become more powerful.”

 

“Are We Assessing What Really Counts?” by Jay McTighe and Jay Meadows in Educational Leadership, November 2025 (Vol. 83, #3, pp. 34-40); McTighe can be reached at [email protected]. 

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6. A One-Page Chart for Student Accommodations

            In this Edutopia article, high-school co-teachers Cathleen Beachboard and Carolyn Shaw describe what happened when they were both out for a few days at the same time. “In many classrooms,” they say, “that’s a recipe for chaos: students test boundaries, routines slip, and learning stalls.” But the subs got a spreadsheet summarizing the accommodations for their 80 students, and it provided a road map for connections, engagement, and support. Things went smoothly, and when Beachboard and Shaw returned, one student said, “They knew what worked for us.” 

            To create this accommodations chart, the two teachers dove into students’ IEPs, 504 plans, WIDA Can Do Descriptors, and what they’d learned about kids and sorted it into six categories (click the article link below for a filled-in chart for 24 students):

-   Environment and behavior supports – for example, a student who does best in a quiet corner, or a student who calms down when given a movement break;

-   Instruction and participation supports – visual cues, scaffolds, perhaps a student who benefits from the opportunity to explain something out loud first;

-   Assessment/testing accommodations – extended time, small-group settings, read-alouds;

-   Transitions and routines – for students with autism, anxiety, or trauma, changes in the routine can trigger stress; a student might need extra time to pack up;

-   Tools and communication – for example, assistive technology, speech-to-text, written directions on the board, a hand signal for “I need a break”;

-   Strengths and motivators – for example, a student who lights up when asked to draw, another who works harder when math problems include sports statistics.

Beachboard and Shaw color-coded the chart so supports are visible at a glance. It’s not just for substitutes; it’s helpful every day, they say: “When the pace of teaching is fast, we don’t lose track of what matters most. The last column, Strengths and Motivators, is often the most powerful.” They list the benefits of having one clear, visual reference for teachers:

-   It eliminates guesswork, relying on memory, or flipping through stacks of paperwork. 

-   It builds consistency and ensures the supports are applied regularly.

-   It makes strategic student grouping quick – for example, clicking the top of the Google sheet can quickly sort students who benefit from graphic organizers.

-   It normalizes support. “By including every student, not just those with official paperwork, we signal that accommodations aren’t exceptions,” say Beachboard and Shaw. “They’re part of good teaching. This shows that learning differently is normal – and valuable.”

The most striking outcome of visually organizing learning differences, they conclude, “is what we don’t see anymore: constant misunderstandings and behavior flare-ups. When students’ needs are met, behavior issues shrink dramatically.” 

            Every quarter, Beachboard and Shaw sit down with students and discuss mutual insights on what’s working and what needs to be tweaked. They might comment that a student stayed focused when he got written directions, that another did her best work when given a choice, that another student was more confident in a group with a clearly defined role. In these conferences, the teachers ask students if anything was missed – if a new insight needs to be added. “Over time,” they say, “students recognize which supports make the biggest difference for them, and they carry those strategies into other classes.” 

            Is creating a chart like this too time-consuming? “It’s a little more work up front,” say Beachboard and Shaw, “but it saves enormous amounts of time later – during testing, when writing sub plans, and when grouping for big assignments. More important, it helps us stay regulated and organized instead of scrambling through multiple documents during lessons. It also protects us. We can be confident that accommodations are consistently applied, even when we’re absent. For students with IEPs or 504 plans, that consistency isn’t just good practice – it’s a legal requirement. The chart gives peace of mind that whether it’s a substitute, a co-teacher, or a new staff member, every student’s needs are met without oversharing sensitive information.”

 

“A One-Page Chart to Support Every Student Every Day” by Cathleen Beachboard and Carolyn Shaw in Edutopia, October 3, 2025

 

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7. Tips for Winning Grants from DonorsChoose

            In this article in Teaching Exceptional Children, Florence Bason (a Florida teacher and PhD student at University of Florida/Gainesville) says she has had 21 classroom projects funded by DonorsChoose with a total value of $12,329. There’s no limit to the proposals an individual teacher can submit. When a proposal is accepted and funded, DonorsChoose ships the materials to the teacher. Here are Bason’s suggestions for a successful proposal:

            • Scope – DonorsChoose has funded books, technology, flexible seating, art supplies, STEM kits, field trips, classroom basics, and supplies students don’t have.

            • Connection and empathy – “Projects that tell a personal story and help donors connect emotionally are often most successful,” says Bason. “When writing your proposal, describe your students and classroom context. Provide a vivid picture. What does your room look like? What are your students like? Avoid showing student faces but help potential donors see their impact and feel emotionally connected to your classroom.” 

            • Joy and engagement – Connect to what donors might have enjoyed when they were in school – hands-on science experiences, adaptive tools to get all students engaged. “Focus on what your students will do, not just what you are buying,” says Bason.

            • Reading – Nurturing a love of reading resonates with many donors. Bason has received funding for books chosen from the Notable Children’s Literature list, explaining why each one was meaningful for her students. 

            • A fresh start – “Consider key moments in the school year,” suggests Bason, “such as a new semester, Literacy Month, Giving February, or back-to-school season.”

• Equity – Donors have been especially receptive to projects that further the goals of equity and inclusion, says Bason, in schools where more than half of the enrollment is low-income or students of color.

            • Matching other contributions – DonorsChoose can match a donation from another source – for example, doubling the value of a $25 gift from a friend. Donors have sometimes surprised educators by supporting every project in a school, district, or even state.

 

“Classroom Funding Made Simple: Getting Started with DonorsChoose” by Florence Bason in Teaching Exceptional Children, September/October 2025 (Vol. 58, #1, pp. 64-66); Bason can be reached at [email protected]. 

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8. Bad and Good Interview Questions

            In Leadership Freak, Dan Rockwell lists what he considers dreary and ineffective interview questions:

-   What’s your biggest weakness?

-   Where do you see yourself in five years?

-   Why should we hire you?

-   Why do you want to work here?

-   If you were an animal, what would you be?

Rockwell believes these two questions are better at revealing an applicant’s key qualities:

-   What have you learned from failure? followed by, How are you using those lessons?

-   What kind of challenges energize you? followed by, What’s energizing about that?

 

“Job Interviews: 5 Stupid Questions” by Dan Rockwell in Leadership Freak, November 12, 2025; Rockwell can be reached at [email protected]. 

 

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