Over the course of this academic year, three guest speakers have addressed Loomis Chaffee faculty on issues related to the brain. In this post, we hope to draw a throughline between these talks, summarize takeaways, and provide food for thought as we wrap up this school year and make plans for the next one. The most basic summary goes something like this: a rudimentary understanding of how our brains function is critical and should play a role in lesson and unit design and classroom management. This understanding must also inform our interactions with students exhibiting dysregulation. When we are transparent about the science that informs our pedagogical decisions, we help students develop more effective ways to learn and to self-regulate.

In August, Andrew Watson focused on how information moves from short-term to long-term memory and how working memory limits can impede this transfer. Watson provided the helpful mnemonic SHREK – select, hold, reorganize, kombine (combine) – which distills the processes students must undergo in order to access, utilize, and retrieve information from long-term memory. He emphasized that teachers must respect working memory limits and help students monitor for understanding. This is metacognition! Watson reminded us that the process of storing and retrieving information in long-term memory is part of a system that depends on working memory and impacted by many outside factors, including attention, emotion, and motivation.

In January, Joe Brummer, whose talk Sam Lagasse previewed in this post, discussed the neurobiology of psychological safety. Referencing the work of Bruce Perry, MD, Brummer presented a spectrum of mental states (from calm to terror) and explained that students’ cognitive and emotional states dictate what region of the brain is available for learning. The closer that students are to red on the spectrum, the harder it is for them to learn because their emotional state impacts cognitive load.

Brummer highlighted the importance of building trusting relationships with students in order to support them in developing self-regulation. Teachers can aid in this process by engaging in co-regulation with students as a preliminary step and to prepare them to self-regulate eventually.

At our March Faculty Day, Jud Brewer, MD discussed the habit-forming potential of anxiety. He explained that our brains get stuck in loops (trigger, behavior, reward), but that once we are aware of our brains’ patterns, we can work to undo them and form more healthy responses to triggers. Brewer asked that we notice habits (our own and students’) and use curiosity to break the cycle. This noticing is a form of mindfulness – taking note of WHAT is happening without examining WHY.

Following Brewer’s talk, many audience members had questions about Brewer’s advice to avoid prompting students to reflect on “the why” of their anxiety. Though unpacking the root causes of one’s anxiety with a trained therapist may be an important part of the healing journey for many, we teachers are not trained mental health professionals. In addition, encouraging students to engage in analysis of their anxiety may just cause more rumination. Instead, Brewer recommends prompting students to approach their symptoms from a mindfulness stance, which he believes will lead to better outcomes in the classroom. It is nevertheless important that students have a trusted adult outside of the classroom context with whom they can unpack their feelings and guide them to next steps (which may include clinical support).

Conclusion- TL;DR (too long; didn’t read) for faculty and staff

• If you have a basic understanding of how memory functions, you can be more intentional with your lesson and unit design. (Watson)

• It is difficult to learn if you are experiencing cognitive overload and/or dysregulation. (Brummer)

• When you recognize negative thought patterns, you can move from reactivity to agency. (Brewer)

• The more we as educators do to help students understand the above, the better prepared they will be to learn and function at an optimal level. (Watson, Brummer, and Brewer)

Another TL;DR:

Watson: As teachers, we prepare our lessons and units.

Brummer: We’re prepared for the unexpected.

Brewer: We notice what is going on with our students.

(p.s., it’s also good to know about our own brains)

One pathway toward this hopeful future lies in curing what moderator Flora Lichtman termed humans’ “intimacy problem” with nature. In response to Lichtman’s question about this issue, the panelists shared thoughts about a particular natural place to which they felt a deep connection. Kolbert described the awe she experienced when spending time in the Great Barrier Reef in Australia (and which she explored in her book The Sixth Extinction). Regan discussed the importance of his small, family farm in North Carolina, land that his family has cultivated for generations. McKibben waxed poetic about the beauty of New England winters and spoke of the need for every person to fall in love with a specific place in the natural world.

How might our efforts to cultivate a sense of place at Loomis Chaffee encourage care for the planet on a broader scale? Research on the impact of place attachment in development and wellbeing suggests that these attachments are foundational and long-lasting. Furthermore, connection to place is strongly associated with the development of pro-environmental behaviors. If we imagine our students’ time and experiences on the Island as a stone dropped into a pool of water, we might interpret the first ripple that emerges to be the actions they take and the relationships they build with the natural and social world as they navigate their high school years. Our hope is that the second ripple will constitute a transcendence of space and time - that students will carry forth their sense of place into their futures, helping them to engage deeply in actions that will support the longevity of the human species and our planet.

Studies linking health and happiness to time spent in nature continue to emerge. Yet more and more of our academic, social, and personal time is spent in front of screens. And so, we leave you with this question: How will schools of the future balance technological advances with time and space for natural experiences?

What strikes me as both daunting and exciting about our current moment is that the advent of generative AI has compelled us to reconsider what purpose writing serves in our classrooms and how we might reinvigorate students’ relationship to written expression. I do not think that this means abandoning the long-form essay altogether, but it does invite us to ask whether conventional analytical writing is the best vehicle for inspiring and assessing critical thinking. If students can outsource the production of polished prose to a machine, our urgent concern ought to be determining what kinds of writing assignments make the work of thinking irreplaceable — assignments that return students to the experience of craft as inquiry and that make clear to them what is lost when the labor of cognition is handed off to someone or something else.

“Machines Can Craft Essays. How Should Writing Be Taught Now?” – Inside Higher Ed

I am fortunate to have had the opportunity to teach the senior elective “Literature & the Environment” over the course of this past year, and I have used the autonomy afforded to me to experiment with the design of my assessments. Instead of closing the term with a final paper as I might have in the past, my students’ culminating project is a hybrid work of research, personal reflection, poetic expression, and photography. While exploring a topic of their choosing, students must emulate the techniques of the avant-garde documentary poets we read throughout the term. These poets are thinking in novel ways about craft as they try to imagine what writing can be and do in a time of environmental crisis, when conventional forms no longer seem adequate for realizing cultural change. By creating collages of excerpts from their personal reflections, original poetry, and sources that they have researched, students experiment with parataxis and polyphony as methods of meaning-making. By creating a chorus of voices on the page, students are challenged to generate and observe moments of resonance and dissonance, and to present their own perspective not in service of a larger totalizing narrative, but rather to practice seeing the value of their voice in ongoing, meaningful dialogues. By seeking out new modes of listening and understanding, students can begin to see how craft can work in service of cultivating the kind of empathy our world so often seems to lack.

My hope is that, in the age of AI, students will see the value of preserving their voices and the voices of others and of honoring writing as an act of crafting and creation. I also hope that students will learn that their concern with mastery should not come at the expense of exploration, discovery, and connection. LLMs might help them refine their prose, but they cannot help them imagine what a better world might feel and look like were we to use writing to be more human, which is to say, more curious, empathetic, and authentic. In other words, the goal of this project is to inspire students to see discourse not just as craft, but as an opportunity to use writing as thoughtful, exploratory creation in service of developing their skills to think critically.

I do not share these reflections as a teacher who has arrived at any satisfying answers. Rather, I share them as someone who has found, in the discomfort of questioning what I once took for granted, a renewed sense of what teaching writing might mean in this particular historical moment. The students I have watched wrestle with documentary poetics this year have not simply produced inspiring work; they have modeled something I think we all need to practice more: a willingness to sit with complexity, to resist the temptation of easy resolution, and to treat the act of writing not as a performance of mastery but as an invitation to remain genuinely open to the world.

I would like to conclude by sharing some of the questions that I have been working through:

1. How might we think of craft as something other than mastery without seemingly sacrificing intellectual rigor and challenge?

2. How might our school start to invent new writing assignments rather than merely adapt older forms of assessment so that students find originality empowering, enriching, and more human than the production of “perfect” (or AI-generated) writing?

3. What might assessment-worthy writing look like in the future if the out-of-class essay might no longer be our go-to tool for measuring student learning and fostering student engagement?

MLK Day always brings the same inconveniently important question—how do you pause the normal school routine to honor Dr. King without turning it into a performance, a poster, or a quick “feel good” detour that everyone forgets by the next day. That was the challenge the Center for Inclusive Excellence & Belonging tried to meet this year, and we tried to meet it honestly.

We anchored our week of programming to this year’s school-wide theme, “What does it mean to be human?” Not as a slogan, but as a pressure test. Because Dr. King’s work wasn’t about perfect speeches or polished assemblies. It was about insisting on the full humanity of Black people in a world that kept trying to bargain it down. When we keep MLK Day “safe,” we quietly teach students that dignity is negotiable, that justice is optional, and that the most important parts of history are best discussed at arm’s length.

If I’m being honest, this felt like a particularly hard year to honor the legacy of Dr. King. There is no shortage of fear, exhaustion, cynicism, and “please don’t make me talk about this” in the air. Students are absorbing headlines they don’t know how to metabolize. Adults are, too. And schools feel the pressure because empowering Black students in meaningful ways can feel “risky,” which is a sentence that should bother us more than it does. The fear of pushback, misunderstanding, or “getting it wrong” can seduce schools into neutrality. But neutrality is rarely neutral. Most of the time it’s just comfort dressed up as principle.

That’s exactly why MLK Day still matters. Not as a reenactment of the past, but as a living framework for the questions our students are already dealing with: Who counts here? Who is protected? Who gets believed? Who gets to mess up and still belong? Who is celebrated for brilliance, and who is merely tolerated? Those are not abstract questions. They are daily school-life questions.

This year, our student leaders named something essential—the Beloved Community isn’t a place without disagreement. It’s a place where disagreement doesn’t slide into unkindness, cruelty, or the casual status games that schools can normalize if adults aren’t paying attention. In any school, conflict is guaranteed. The question is whether our norms and adult modeling turn conflict into learning, or into small, everyday harms—sarcasm that becomes social currency, exclusion that becomes entertainment, and “I’m staying neutral” that becomes an excuse to avoid responsibility.

That’s why the most honest framing for this work is values. Schools don’t do “justice work” as a side project. We do values work, all day, whether we admit it or not. Through curriculum, policies, hiring, discipline, traditions, advising, and the thousand tiny interactions that teach students what we actually stand for. When we are clear and steady about shared values like dignity, fairness, integrity, courage, kindness, resilience, and belonging, this stops feeling like a niche topic for a few students and becomes the work of a whole community.

Our MLK Day keynote speaker, Columbia University professor Dr. Bettina Love, helped make that values framing real while also refusing the myth that change is made by lone heroes. She honored Dr. King, but she widened the story, naming figures who are too often pushed to the margins, like Coretta Scott King, Bayard Rustin, Pauli Murray, and Mahalia Jackson. The message underneath was simple and bracing—change is never a solo act. It is relational. It is collective. It requires people who are willing to be brave together.

One moment landed especially hard. The story of Mahalia Jackson, recognizing that Dr. King’s speech lacked the power she felt the moment required, calling out “tell them about your dream, Martin!” Dr. King listened to his trusted friend, and recalling a collection of previously assembled notes for a speech he might one day give, he extemporaneously transformed that moment into what we now know as the I have A Dream speech. That is leadership, humility, and community in motion. He didn’t protect his ego. He stayed grounded enough to be shaped by someone else, in real time. That is a model students can actually use. Ordinary people doing extraordinary things by staying rooted in values and letting others make them better.

We also made a deliberate choice not to cram everything into one marathon day. Spreading meaningful programming across the week created multiple entry points: workshops, films, discussions, music, history, wellness, religion, and arts. That matters, because not every student walks into this work through the same door. A school doesn’t need spectacle to do this well. Consistency and care beat pageantry. A thoughtful advisory discussion. A workshop block. A film with a guided debrief. A student panel. A short performance paired with a real reflection. Done well, those “smaller” things can be the most formative, because they meet students where they actually are.

And speaking of performances—our week reinforced something schools still undervalue. Art isn’t the “fun part” after the serious work. Art is part of the serious work. It’s how people learn, feel, remember, and connect. Celebration doesn’t have to mean “happy.” It can mean proud, grieving, unsettled, joyful, honest, and moved, sometimes all at once. When we treat the arts as cultural work rather than entertainment, we teach students how to take in the world with depth.

All of that leads directly into February and the 100th year of Black History Month, which raises its own uncomfortable question—what does it mean to “commemorate” Black history without reducing it to struggle-only narratives, trauma-only narratives, or a timeline of oppression punctuated by a few exceptional names? A centennial is not just a milestone. It’s a mirror. It asks what we’ve learned, what we’ve avoided, and what we’re still refusing to do.

If we’re serious about Black History Month, especially in its 100th year, then Black Excellence cannot be treated as a dessert course after we’ve spent weeks on suffering. Black Excellence is not a rare miracle. It is the expected outcome when Black students are given what students should always get—high expectations, real support, intellectual challenge, belonging without condition, and adults who advocate for them and love them with clarity and courage. Excellence doesn’t flourish in environments where students have to spend half their energy managing stereotypes, shrinking themselves, translating their experiences, or proving they deserve to be here.

So here’s the real connective tissue between MLK Day, the centennial of Black History Month, and Black Excellence: we can’t celebrate Black brilliance while quietly maintaining systems that make Black students fight for basic ease. We can’t praise Black leadership while disciplining Black students for the very confidence and voice we claim to value. We can’t post quotes about dreams while avoiding the practical work of power—who gets access, who gets mentored, whose talents get nurtured, whose mistakes get forgiven, and whose stories get taught as central rather than “additional.”

As educators and school communities, we should not shy away from empowering our Black students in meaningful ways because we are afraid of controversy or discomfort. That fear is not neutral. It has consequences. The better path is steadier, calling us to do our values work in public. Name excellence in the present tense. Build structures that develop Black leadership. Teach Black history as American history, not as a special unit. Invest in joy and culture as forms of strength, not distractions from rigor. Protect the conditions where Black students can be fully human, seen, challenged, supported, celebrated, and safe enough to grow.

Students don’t “receive” an education like a package. They earn it, test it, and then decide what it’s for. At its best, MLK Day and Black History Month help students ask, concretely: Where does this legacy show up in my life, my choices, my silence, my courage? What is one “small and mighty” act, rooted in values, that makes my community more human and more just?

That’s the work. That’s the point. And in a world that keeps asking people to shrink their humanity, it’s work worth doing out loud.

• What’s one way schools sanitize Dr. King’s legacy, and what gets lost when that happens?

• Where do schools do “values work” well, and where do they slip into performance?

• What would it mean to treat Black Excellence as an “expected outcome” instead of a special celebration?

This winter, the Center for Teaching & Learning at Episcopal Academy and the Kravis Center for Excellence in Teaching at Loomis Chaffee both held Open Classroom Weeks during the same stretch of January. When we realized the coincidence, we sat down for a conversation—the kind that Open Classroom Week itself is designed to spark. What follows is an edited transcript of that exchange between Justin Cerenzia (EA), Buckley Executive Director, CTL at Episcopal Academy, Dr. Allison Schultz (EA), Associate Director, CTL at Episcopal Academy, Dr. Rachel Nisselson (LC), Director of the Kravis Center for Excellence in Teaching at Loomis Chaffee, and Matt Johnson (LC), Director of Educational and Administrative AI Initiatives, Associate Director of the Kravis Center.

Two Schools, One Week

Rachel Nisselson (LC): I just read your most recent Substack post and saw that you also just had Open Classroom Week, which we just finished. So that seems like a starting point. What were your big takeaways? Or how did your Open Classroom week go overall?

Allison Schultz (EA): The fact that we both just had an open classroom week, perhaps even in the exact same week, that’s obviously, a natural extension. I don’t think it’s totally a metaphor, but this conversation is opening the classroom even further by thinking about sort of how we can learn from other schools.

The Nuts and Bolts

Rachel Nisselson (LC): At Loomis, this is a tradition that dates back at least seven years. We publish an editable spreadsheet where folks can post their classes, room and either a topic that they’re going to be teaching or something they’d like feedback on or both. And then there’s a column for folks to sign up to visit, though you can still visit if you don’t sign up. And our goals are similar to yours in that it’s meant to be a non-evaluative opportunity to see colleagues in action, also to see your students in different spaces and to get some feedback from colleagues.

Allison Schultz (EA): We also have a spreadsheet where people can sign up. Time, Classroom, all that. We don’t have the feedback piece [teachers asking for feedback], but I like that idea. This is only our second year doing Open Classroom Week and so we have skewed towards making it very positive and gamifying it and just trying to encourage people to partake, which I think has worked really well.

The way we count our observations is we have an appreciation form. So we have this Google form that has four little sentence starters. “I really appreciated the way you...” and “I really love the way you motivated students to...” And our attempt is to make it super easy for people to give positive feedback to the colleagues whose classrooms they visited and that they can access that. We send out that link multiple times throughout the week. And then it’s also on a QR code on our door signs. We put door signs on every single classroom. One side is green and says, “please come in.” And the other side is red and says “please come back later.” So even if people didn’t get a chance to sign up on the sheet, they can just signal that way.

Celebratory and Curious

Justin Cerenzia (EA): Those are our two words. It’s meant to be purely celebratory and curious. And again, we are a Pre-K through 12 school. So learn from your third grade teacher if you’re having issues with classroom management. Just go ahead and learn. We always catch people doing it wrong. Let’s just catch them doing it right or doing it well. So how do we start to cultivate a culture of feedback amongst our faculty?

Openness as Precondition

Matt Johnson (LC): I’m curious. A question I asked one of my colleagues in the meeting about Open Classroom Week was: in order to have that culture of feedback, do you think that a culture of openness is a necessary precondition? One of the things that I am always curious about is how we can continue with this ethos of Open Classroom Week beyond just this week. And how does that happen? I worked at a charter school for a few years, and they had the advantage of…it [being] a brand new school. But one of their sort of pedagogical and structural components of how the classrooms functioned was, you needed to be comfortable with anybody walking into your classroom at any given time. And at first, I found it so jarring. I was trying to adjust to this place. And I quickly realized that it was one of the best aspects of the school— the culture of it was we’re in there because we’re trying to help each other out. The feedback I was getting was so well intended. And it stuck with me. And I wondered ever since, is that a culture that can happen in a school like ours? I would hope so.

Trust First

Allison Schultz (EA): I think the crux of your story is, oh, they’re just here because they want me to help me to get better. Right. The observations can happen. It’s the conversations that happen after the observations where you’re building that trust. And trust is, I think, more the foundational layer of feedback than openness is, in my opinion. You know, if I trust that you have my back, that you are going to give me grace, that you believe that I am working to get better, that you believe my intentions are good, then I’m going to take your feedback and know that it’s given, you know, almost from a place of love, from a place of caring, from a place of desire to help.

This conversation has us thinking: How do you create a culture of trust and openness among colleagues in schools?

If you’ve participated in an Open Classroom Week at your school, we’d love to hear from you. What’s working? What’s hard? What are you learning?

Drop a comment below, or find us at The Beacon and The Loop.

To keep my classroom visits focused and practical, I am using a modified version of Taylor Institute’s “What, So What, Now What” Teaching Square reflection prompts as a simple lens for note-taking and reflection.

These reflection prompts keep the focus productive: examples of good teaching and learning I saw, what I learned from observing, and things I might try next. I also love the bigger questions as a lens for my note taking: what surprised me, what assumptions were challenged, and what is one thing I will apply in my own classes. That framing matches how I naturally approach observations. Sometimes, I visit teachers who are masters of a strategy I am working on. Other times, I sit in on a class that simply sounds interesting. And sometimes, I choose visits that could fuel interdisciplinary work aligned with our strategic plan. When peers visit my class, I am also hoping for insight that helps me see my own teaching more clearly, without turning it into evaluation. Using the same “What, So What, Now What” structure, I will invite visitors to share what they noticed, why it stood out, and what possibilities it suggests for my next steps. Then, I can do the most important part: reflect, choose one small change, and try it.

Taylor Institute for Teaching and Learning - The Teaching Squares Guide: Observe and Reflection Teaching and Learning - This guide leads readers through the process of organizing and implementing a Teaching Square and includes numerous tools and templates that can be used to support and enhance observation and critical reflection skills.

Note: Teaching Squares is a faculty development tool created by Anne Wessely from St. Louis Community College and adopted widely by colleges and universities.

I often return to Dave Stuart Jr.’s notion of teaching as work oriented toward the “long-term flourishing” of children. In doing so, I find myself reflecting on how I am preparing my students not only to thrive in their present lives but also to navigate a future that will be marked by profound change and instability.

Recently, I have begun to associate this work with small acts of intervention: deliberate ways of disrupting tendencies that, if allowed to accumulate and gather force, can crystallize into patterns of alienation or trauma. Reframing my work in this way has required me to slow down and take stock of how such tendencies are shaped not only by obvious factors—bullying, for example—but also by institutional structures that deprive students of access to meaningful and equitable forms of relational accountability.

This ethos aligns closely with what many would call a mode of restorative practice: a way of educating that attends not merely to deterring harm but to cultivating the capacities students need in order to understand harm, rebuild connection, and re-establish relationships of trust. Underlying the application of restorative practice to the field of education is the recognition that such capacities become especially important in U.S. social contexts where accountability can quickly become reduced to retributive or punitive dynamics that inhibit students’ agency.

We often assume that these retributive or punitive dynamics are effective simply because they are familiar and, as a result, we overlook their cumulative influence on community life. Yet shouldn’t we examine what happens in schools when we choose to identify accountability with such dynamics?

Dr. Carla Shalaby tells us that our students come to discern in these mechanics of behavior management a series of lessons—a hidden curriculum in which what they learn is not merely the wrongfulness of their actions but also that certain goals can only be met through the exertions of a social power that excludes, humiliates, and coerces.[1] Without practices of intervention that unpack this curriculum and work to change it, we risk modeling a kind of accountability that engenders and manipulates cycles of emotional dysregulation. In turn, we teach our students not how to repair harm, but how to weaponize authority within social and psychical relations that are inherently unequal.

To intervene in these dynamics, I approach restorative practice as a toolkit that empowers me to model alternative arrangements of power. In these arrangements, authority gives structure to practices of care by resisting coercion and sustaining conditions of recognition, agency, and belonging.

I do not consider these conditions to be luxuries or the unearned spoils of an era in which our idea of school discipline has suddenly “gone soft.” Rather, I think of them as foundational to the healthy development and future success of all young people.

Follow-Up Questions:

1. When we talk about authority that resists coercion and sustains agency and belonging, what does that look like in your role? When have you seen it enacted well?

2. What barriers—structural, cultural, or emotional—get in the way of restorative approaches in your context? What would need to shift to make restorative practice more sustainable or authentic?

3. What is one belief you hold about discipline or accountability that this post challenges or complicates? How does that belief show up in your daily work?

4. If students were asked how their community responds to harm, what stories or examples would they likely share? What would you want to be the focus or lesson of those stories?

[1] Carla Shalaby, “Imagining ‘Classroom Management’ as an Abolitionist Project,” in Lessons in Liberation: An Abolitionist Toolkit for Educators, ed. Bettina L. Love et al. (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2021).

My instinctive answer was: research. Many of our schoolwide practices are rooted in research—retrieval practice, motivation theory, belonging, effective feedback, and more. As a scientist, I have long trusted research to guide practice. There is a science of learning informed by research, which I use.

So I was surprised when Dr. Daniel discussed a study comparing whether students learn more when they read before a lecture or after it. In the published findings from a university psychology lab, students who read after class scored dramatically higher on quizzes. The bars representing these results on a graph that he presented were striking—large enough that one might conclude most professors had been “doing it wrong” by assigning reading beforehand, as I suspect most of us here do, too.

But Dr. Daniel asked a question too often left out of conversations about research: Would the same effect emerge in a real classroom with real students—not undergraduates participating for course credit in a controlled lab? Dubious, Dr. Daniel replicated the study using his own students in his own class. And the result flipped - completely. In this real-world setting, reading before class substantially outperformed reading after, almost mirroring the magnitude of the original effect in the opposite direction.

What does this mean for us? For one, this makes me doubly sure about the value of research. I know – it might seem like the opposite, since two studies got opposite results. Two well-designed studies can contradict each other, and our work as reflective educators is to approach that ambiguity with curiosity rather than certainty. Research provides a way of thinking, not a prescription for what to do. Though there is a science of learning, there isn’t a science of teaching. Teaching remains an art, and we are artists!

The first study offered a useful framework for examining a question. Dr. Daniel’s replication revealed a key variable the first lacked: context. I believe many of the major ideas shaping education today—targeted feedback, classroom belonging, routine, cognitive load, spacing—are fundamentally sound. But how they function depends heavily on the setting in which we apply them. Independent schools, boarding environments, and diverse student populations present contexts that differ greatly from university labs.

This reminded me of something Andrew Watson emphasized at a presentation during our opening days in August: “Not ‘Do this’ but ‘Think this way’. In other words, successful educators don’t simply enact a strategy—they have a mindset that allows them to figure out when a strategy will and won’t work. They adopt a mindset of inquiry. When we encounter new research, the more useful question may not be “Does this work?” but “How might this work here, with these students, in this moment?” This need to take context into account might call us to be researchers in our own classrooms. This need not be daunting. Evidence does not have to mean randomized trials or complex statistics; it can be:

• a short exit ticket after trying something new,

• noticing changes in student engagement,

• tracking homework completion,

• comparing two weeks of discussion involvement.

Most of us already gather evidence informally. I’d love to hear from anyone experimenting with formal classroom inquiry this year—Loomis’s Eval C participants, Penn Fellows (past and present), and any colleagues or external readers who explore teaching through a reflective, evidence-seeking lens.

Questions to Reflect On This Week:

• What is one strategy you’ve adopted because of research—and how might your specific context be shaping its success?

• How do you know when a strategy is “working” for your students? What forms of evidence do you tend to rely on? What additional evidence could you gather?

• What small, research-informed shift might you try this month? How could you collect meaningful data to gauge its impact?

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“The obligation of anyone who thinks of himself as responsible is to examine society and try to change it and to fight it — at no matter what risk. This is the only hope society has. This is the only way societies change.” - James Baldwin

Dr. Love also shared the following quotation from hooks that I found equally timely and thought-provoking:

Here, hooks wisely counsels schools to create spaces where teachers can test out ideas, express concerns and fears about working to dismantle educational inequity, and engage in training opportunities to learn how to redesign their curriculum and classroom pedagogies to center justice and joy. Over the years, Loomis faculty and staff have enjoyed a number of opportunities to participate in such spaces through the SEED program, last year’s Penn Experience, and numerous BLTS and PLCs, among other programs.

However, I wonder if these spaces have truly felt safe for all faculty to express concerns, validate one another’s fears, and offer constructive feedback on how to retool and revision classroom strategies and curricula. How could we transform existing spaces to become places where teachers felt free to express what they are actually feeling when doing this work as well as provide tips and tools to equip them to continue - often in the face of pushback, questioning, and adversity?

I close by posing the following questions as thought exercises (and I’m hoping some readers will share their thoughts in the comments section). And I also acknowledge that we all carry multiple identities and differing privileges so that “going for broke” is much more dangerous for some of us than for others. For some, practicing self-care in these times may be paramount while others of us may need to more readily engage in serving as active co-conspirators.

• What would “going for broke” look like for you in your classroom? On campus? In the outside world?

• What would need to shift in our institution to make “going for broke” possible? Are there specific supports, mechanisms, people, policies, etc. that would need to be in place in order to boldly commit ourselves to the courageous and necessary task of dismantling injustice and inequity in our classrooms and campuses?

• How can we create spaces here at Loomis that allow our faculty and staff to safely share their fears and trepidations while enacting educational justice?

Feedback is central to our jobs as teachers, coaches, and leaders. But Scott argues that we often default to two unhelpful extremes. The first, “Ruinous Empathy,” occurs when we do not give honest feedback because we want to be kind. This leaves people unaware that change is even needed. The other, “Obnoxious Aggression,” happens when we give blunt, honest feedback in a way that feels mean, shuts the other person down, and makes them defensive rather than open to change.

To help visualize this, Scott maps feedback into four quadrants defined by two axes: caring personally (kindness) and challenging directly (clear, direct feedback).

Scott argues that for change to happen, we must instead approach conversations in the “Radical Candor” quadrant. When I think back to the mentors who shaped me the most, they were the ones who told me the truth, even when I didn’t want to hear it. I might not have liked it in the moment, but I never doubted they were on my side, and their honesty helped me to stop, take stock of what I was doing, and make change for the better, instead of unknowingly continuing along a “wrong” path. That’s exactly what Scott is talking about - being willing to say the hard thing in a way that still makes it clear that you have the person’s best interests at heart.

If you are interested in learning more, I recommend listening to Kim Scott’s Ted Talk: How to Lead with Radical Candor

Scott’s Radical Candor framework can apply to our work with students and with colleagues. Consider the following reflection questions:

• Where on the quadrant do you tend to fall with tough conversations? Does it make a difference whether feedback is intended for a student or a colleague?

• Think of a time you didn’t give honest feedback because you wanted to be kind. What happened as a result? How might you approach that conversation differently now?

• Think of a mentor/coach/teacher who told gave you feedback with “radical candor.” What made their honesty feel caring instead of harsh?

Towards the end of the summer, I started seeing a lot of discussion about Cognitive Load Theory popping up on various feeds I follow and realized I hadn’t done much digging into it since grad school. So, I picked up a copy of “Cognitive Load Theory: A Little Guide for Teachers”. I had passing familiarity with the concepts that undergird the theory but was taken by this one passage early in the book, where Greg Ashman, the author, wonders about our ability to teach critical thinking. He remarks that when learning activities lack clear objectives or goals, we often lean on an argument that they’re building critical thinking or problem-solving skills. But according to his views of cognitive load theory, that doesn’t add up.

The problem is that broad problem-solving skills like means-end analysis (figuring out what means are necessary to reach desired ends) are innate, and while domain-specific problem-solving skills can be taught, they are “specific to a small class of problems”.

I find Ashman’s conclusion to be striking: “If this is true, schools cannot improve students’ problem-solving skills in a general sense and should focus on developing skills specific to certain classes of problem…So, if we want to enhance critical thinking, building knowledge in long-term memory may be our best bet.”

This felt deflating to me; I like to imagine each discipline working together harmoniously towards larger goals across the curriculum. As with many things in education, I often seek out what Daniel Willingham has to say on the matter. In an article he wrote aptly titled “How Can Educators Teach Critical Thinking?”, he offers a helpful definition of critical thinking:

You are thinking critically if (1) your thinking is novel—that is, you aren’t simply drawing a conclusion from a memory of a previous situation; (2) your thinking is self-directed—that is, you are not merely executing instructions given by someone else; and (3) your thinking is effective….what constitutes effective thinking varies from domain to domain

According to Willingham, the problem with teaching critical thinking ultimately comes down to transfer:

…not just that different domains have different norms for critical thinking. The problem is that previous critical thinking successes seem encapsulated in memory. We know that a student has understood an idea like the law of large numbers. But understanding it offers no guarantee that the student will recognize new situations in which that idea will be useful.

Which leads me to two questions I’m sitting with this week: First, when you see critical thinking in your classroom, can you trace it back to knowledge and skills built in your class, or is something else at play? And second, if transfer is as hard as Willingham suggests, what does that mean for how we talk about building ‘transferable skills’ or other broader goals of our curriculum?

Today’s post focused on activating prior knowledge is a timely topic, given that we are in our third full week of the school year and just a few weeks out from our Faculty Day session on working memory with Andrew Watson. Activating prior knowledge can reduce demands on students’ working memory by priming students to make connections between old and new material. As we engage with new students in our classes at the beginning of the year, determining what students know and don’t know will allow us to tailor our teaching to their needs.

Natalie Wexler – the author of Beyond the Science of Reading – argues that “knowledge is like velcro.” She goes on to explain, “Kids who start out with more knowledge and vocabulary are in a better position to then absorb and retain even more knowledge and vocabulary because they have a context.” But Universal Design for Learning (UDL) reminds us that even students who have prior knowledge may need help activating it or seeing its relevance to current material.

The interactive nature of Substack was one of the primary reasons behind our adoption of this platform; leave a comment and let us know how you’re uncovering prior knowledge in your classes! We also welcome comments or emails with thoughts on our new format and platform.

Pioneering actor, singer, and athlete Paul Robeson notably proclaimed, “Artists are the gatekeepers of truth. We are civilization’s radical voice” while W.E.B. DuBois “believed that artistic achievement would lead to racial pride, positive self-image, confidence, in how Black people saw themselves.” Fittingly, the focus of this year’s Black History Month is African-Americans and the Arts. In celebration, the Smithsonian Museum has curated an online collection of wonderfully wide-ranging resources centering Black art and creativity that also encompass much joy including:

• Extraordinary culinary chefs

• Under-celebrated artists such as Harlem Renaissance sculptor Augusta Savage

• Artists who use their work as a platform for social justice

• Native, African, and African American artists in conversation about prevailing stereotypes

• Amazing visual resources from pioneering rap and hip hop artists including Run DMC, Grandmaster Flash, Queen Latifah, KRS-1, Nas, Big Daddy Kane, Fab Five Freddy, and Salt-N-Pepa, to name a few from my teen years.

Similarly, Facing History and Ourselves recently published “ Celebrating the Significance and Abundance of Black Art,” offering a multitude of lessons and resources exploring Black artistic expression including “Afrofuturism and Black Joy ” - a movement that brings together science fiction and fantasy to reimagine the past, present, and future in order to reach for a reality that moves beyond legacies of pain and trauma. As scholar Kalkidan Assefa contends, “By painting a picture of a future populated with people of color who have technologically enhanced bodies and superhuman strength, who drive opulent spacecrafts and live in worlds where power is not a struggle, Afrofuturism artists imagine a future that has left a problematic world of Eurocentrism, oppression and injustice in the past.” Calling all Black Panther fans as Wakanda is a prime example of Black resistance and joy!

As we consider incorporating aspects of Black life in our curriculums, it is imperative that we contextualize, historicize, and humanize when teaching about Blackness. Not only do the texts and topics we choose to teach matter, but equally important is how we approach them with our students. In the Kravis Center, we often discuss the necessity of equipping our students with the capacity to grapple deeply with complex issues such as how to contend with both joy and pain as we teach Black history and lived experiences; to center both the resistance and resilience alongside the violence and atrocities committed against Black bodies. As Brittany L. Jones contends in her Education Week article “You Should be Teaching Black Historical Contention,” presenting a more nuanced approach to exploring Black history is a worthy and fruitful endeavor that allows students to gain a broader perspective on the complexity of Black life and forge links to other social and political ideologies and structures and steer students away from limiting, monolithic understandings of Black history and experiences as one only steeped in violence and degradation. In doing so, however, one must be mindful that “teaching Black historical contention can humanize Black histories, but that starts with humanizing Black people” (Jones). I humbly suggest that a focus on Black art and joy can be an avenue through which to begin (or continue) this important work.

What is integration, anyway?

Let’s be clear: responsible approaches to technology in a classroom don’t inherently mean using more technology in the classroom. We often conflate ‘integration’ with ‘addition’. In some ways, it would be easy if the solution here is simply more technology, more AI (or its inverse — no AI at all, ever!). But if our end-goal is student learning, then what we really want is effective use of AI. It means using it when it’s an appropriate tool to solve a problem. There can be huge upsides to effectively using these tools in the right ways at the right time: we’ve seen many examples demonstrated in faculty meetings and detailed in these musings. But integration also needs to mean incorporating an awareness of AI into teaching: acknowledging that the broader world has changed in big ways, and that, in turn, teaching might need to as well. Integration from this perspective is closer to its root, “to make whole”, creating a holistic educational experience that neither ignores AI’s presence nor surrenders to using it uncritically.

Start from intention

Integrating AI means using it thoughtfully and intentionally. In my own classes, I frame my selection criteria around research-backed theories of learning. When evaluating whether AI is an appropriate tool for the task I think about three main buckets, asking:

1) Does this use case provide meaningful feedback more quickly or effectively than I can alone?

2) Does this use case give students access to information or documentation in a reliable, accessible way?

3) Does this use case add or remove necessary friction in the learning process? (desirable difficulties)

These questions roughly align with challenges I have in my own teaching: the timing of feedback, managing students’ cognitive load, and creating desirable difficulties for students — importantly, this means there’s an opportunity for AI to help solve my problems. Let’s zoom in on the question of friction, as its tendency to eliminate productive struggle in the learning process is often the most valid criticism of AI in the learning process. I’d like to see if I can flip that on its head.

Extending this thinking into the concrete

So, what would it look like to use AI to create desirable difficulties? I used Flint to create some activities that aim to increase the desirable difficulties for my students.

1) Hidden study guide: Rather than supplying students with a study guide, give one to Flint. Students then need to ask the right questions of Flint to review -- it becomes more active, and the chatbot's tendency to want to explain becomes an asset! In this instance, I found a random study guide online on cellular respiration and made an activity around getting students to more actively create their own review.

2) Argue with the AI: Flint creates a lousy (but seemingly polished!) essay on the same text the students are reading. They must give feedback to Flint about the argument and where it falls short. Flint pushes back and asks for even more reasoning.

3) Reading/HW quizzes: I know, I know this doesn't sound innovative! But I've been doing more, low-stakes formative assessments (on paper, not open book or notes) as a hedge against AI summaries (which smooth away friction). They typically highlight small details that are relevant to the lesson that day.

What about you?

This is just my approach — what questions am I missing? How might these activities fall short of their intentions?