Blog

Have you ever noticed that you can gauge a person’s wisdom by how quickly they respond to questions? Sometimes you ask someone a question and without even a second of thought they’re blurting out an answer. On the other hand, there are those individuals who calmly take their time to consider a question carefully before composing a response. In most...

In a classroom environment where students' grades often depend on obedience and towing the line... it's easy for students to develop a strong aversion to risk. But that could be detrimental to their future careers. As the saying goes, nothing ventured, nothing gained. Studies show that individuals who are willing to take risks are much more likely to get promoted,...

I can remember reading class in elementary school like it was yesterday. Ms. Hopson would ask us to open our textbooks to a given page. We would each take turns reading aloud until she told us to stop. At the end, we would write down our answers to the questions at the end of the story. Inspiring? Not quite. Effective?...

Even the most straightforward of math problems can be approached in different ways. For example, say you want students to find the product of 14 x 3. They could write out the problem and cross multiply. They could also mentally multiply 10 by 3 and 4 by 3 and add them together. If they’ve memorized their times tables and know...

One of the most challenging aspects of teaching is getting all students to participate. On the best days hands shoot up in response to a question but on the worst days, it can feel like pulling teeth. And in my years of teaching, there were plenty of these teeth pulling moments. There are lots of reasons kids don’t participate. Sometimes...

Why do you wake up early every morning to teach? It's more than just a job to pay the bills, isn't it? You teach because you want to have a positive impact on students and society. You want to open eyes to new ideas and open doors to new possibilities for the world's youth. At Teaching.com, our mission is to...

Imagine trying to teach someone to ride a bike if you had never ridden one yourself. You could research riding a bike and watch every video Youtube has to offer, but your instruction likely wouldn’t be very effective. It’s hard to give relevant tips and explain the sensation of doing something if you’ve never actually experienced it. This same philosophy...

Learning a new language can be both frustrating and exciting. One minute you think you've got things down, and the next you've forgotten how to introduce yourself. So what helps people stick with the process? It’s the little signs of progress. Like the first time you understand something you hear on the radio, or the first time you successfully order...

Why do people strive to obtain power? Traditionally, most people have thought that a quest for power comes from a desire to control other people, to be in charge. A recent study from Columbia University, though, turns this idea on its head. According to the study, people who seek power do so not because they want to control others, but...

Anyone who’s spent any amount of time working in education has likely heard of the achievement gap. The achievement gap describes the fact that in our country, students from minority backgrounds and low-income households tend to perform worse in school than their peers from wealthier homes. Countless researchers, non-profit organizations, and policymakers have dubbed this the civil rights movement of...