Learning-Friendly Classroom Design!

It's no secret that the spaces and places in which we live and learn can have an enormous impact on our mood, our attention span, our ability to focus, and our social interactions. So it's incredibly important for educators to think about the way their classrooms encourage students to be engaged in the learning process. This is particularly true as educators integrate education technology into classroom spaces in ever more organic and thoroughgoing ways.

If you're interested in challenging yourself to create a learning space that's more "brain-friendly," then join the Classroom Cribs Challenge! There are four easy steps that will help you rethink and redesign your learning space to enhance the learning experience, and then share your new ideas with others.

Take a look at this video by interior designer-turned-teacher Erin Klein, where she talks about what it means to design a classroom space that really helps students engage with learning.

BRAND NEW! Check out these AMAZING Math courses that just hit PEPPER!

Two fantastic new middle school mathematics professional development courses are available in Pepper now. Take a look at the courses and their descriptions and get excited about the opportunities to be prepared and ready to work with your students as the new school year kicks into gear! Click on the course titles to learn even more about what you'll discover if you sign up!

Getting Started With Expressions and Equations (6-8)

Take a deep dive into the Expressions and Equations domain and the clusters of standards it includes at each grade level. Study the clusters of standards for each grade, work on math tasks related to each cluster, and learn more about the mathematics education research behind the CCSS.

Implementing Expressions and Equations (6-8).

Continue your journey into Expressions and Equations by understanding how to implement the domain effectively in your classroom. This course is designed to follow Getting Started with Expressions and Equations course.

Happiness and Learning--Exploring the Connections

It's easy for educators, parents, and even students today to think of education solely in terms of metrics, data, measurable results, assessments, and content standards. And it's true that these things do matter in a world where career- and college-readiness are important, and where being well-prepared gives students a competitive job market advantage in the world outside the classroom.

Yet education is also about so much more than that. As philosopher and ethicist Nel Nodings states in her 2003 book Happiness and Education, "Happiness and education are, properly, intimately connected. Happiness should be an aim of education, and a good education should contribute significantly to personal and collective happiness."

How can educators help their students better understand and experience the real joy and happiness that can come with exploring new ideas, venturing out into new areas of learning, using knowledge to help others, and making sense of the world in which they live?

Here's a great place to begin: "Exploring the Idea of Happiness as Part of Schoolwork," by journalist Katrina Schwartz. She takes a closer look at New Tech Network's "Global Happiness Project," which aims to help teachers and students explore the many ways that happiness impacts their daily lives and their communities, both in and out of the classroom.

Interested in a more in-depth look? Then check out the article "Happiness and Education: Theory, Practice, and Possibility" by researcher Mark K. Smith, writing for pedagogy website infed.org. He explores what happiness means, and argues that education cannot give students what they really need without a connection to happiness.