I am a strong believer in having kids on task throughout the class session. Lessons rarely finished “early” and if they did, I always had something for the kids to do until the class ended. I usually didn’t give students “free time” to start homework or to read a book or magazine. That’s because that seemed to be a signal to have a chat fest. If I started the class by quickly checking homework or doing some clerical things, I had a bell ringer (is this term still used?) or activity for the...

C. M. Rubin’s Monthly Global Education Report

Innovation guru Clay Christensen has his eyes on Parenting. In a revealing interview with CMRubinWorld this month...

So search engine giant Google had this neat idea a few years ago to allow its engineers to spend 20% of their time working on things that really interested them – the goal being to inspire creativity and indirectly increase productivity. Some significant innovations came out of Google’s 20% time. Well-publicized “20% products”...

Recently, I had the opportunity to learn about the British educational system from a visiting professor from Cambridge University. When the issue of standardized testing came up, she used a memorable analogy. She said schools spend too much time “weighing the pig, expecting it to grow.” The expression, which apparently originated from a story by a farmer to his son in the early 1900s, teaches that the activity of weighing or measuring does not produce results or improve performance—it simply...