Day: August 7, 2023

One of the great debates in education spans more than two millennia.
Around 370 B.C., Plato wrote that his teacher Socrates fretted that writing things down would cause humans to become ignorant because they wouldn’t have to memorize anything. (Ironically, the only reason we know this is because it was written down in Plato’s “Phaedrus,” still available today.)
Albert Einstein argued the opposite in 1921. “It is not so very important for a person to learn facts,” the Nobel laureate said, according to his biographer Philipp Frank. “The value of an education in a liberal arts college is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think something that cannot be learned from textbooks.”
But neither of these great thinkers could anticipate how the debate would play out in the Age of Google. Not long after the search engine company was founded in 1998, psychologists began to wonder how the ability to have so much information instantly available was changing our brains. ..

Educators, particularly English Language Arts teachers and librarians, play a critical role in cultivating students’ love for reading. Studies have shown that teachers who are passionate readers bring valuable literacy practices into the classroom. However, in their efforts to improve students’ reading abilities, it is important not to overlook the reading habits and needs of educators themselves. Even though most teachers understand the importance of reading for fun, a study looking at teachers’ reading practices found that nearly half of teachers do not read for pleasure regularly.
“You have to do things after work to pour into your spirit, and reading may not be at the top of that list,” said literacy educator Lois Marshall Barker, who has over 14 years of experience as a classroom teacher, instructional coach and professional development and curriculum specialist. Despite a recent RAND survey indicating that teachers’ stress levels have returned to pre-pandemic levels, 23% of tea..