SEL in Schools Series, for all educators and schools to use

  My students know I am really into the inclusion of helping humanity into our physics classes, and also promoting the skills we ALL need and use every day of our lives, Social-Emotional Learning skills (SEL). It is to the point where ETHS, and most districts around the country, are promoting and including SEL into their district plans and goals. This is good news for everyone, and now the challenge is to all learn what SEL is (and is NOT), why we need it for our students, evidence that it works (otherwise it would be a waste of time and resources), and finally how it can be embedded within content courses. 

If interested, I have created a SEL in Schools series of slide decks and accompanying videos, as well as hundreds of examples of lesson ideas in all subject areas/departments for middle schools and high schools, in order to train teachers and staff, as well as build up 'buy in' among teachers when they see how possible and valuable it is to include SEL in lessons on a fairly regular and consistent basis. 

Note that STEM courses are often viewed as the most challenging to include SEL within, so there's a video just on the use of SEL in STEM classes. 

If you happen to view it and find it useful, please share with other teachers, administrators, schools, etc. All of it is free, and with the slides you can make a copy and then use it or modify to your needs, as you please!

For ALL of us to do- in general, it's OK to be nice to others!

 You can't be best friends with everyone, but you CAN: 

- notice everyone

- be friendly to everyone

- make room for everyone

- cheer for everyone

- listen to everyone

- have a smile for everyone

- say hello to everyone

- empathize with everyone

Oh, and you can be nice to yourself, too! 

Doing science: 'Discovering' what the period of pendulums depends on

 This shows how students can go after determining what affects the period of a pendulum. 

Doing science: 'Discovering' Ohm's law

For schools that have electricity and equipment that can be used to set up simple circuits, this outlines an experiment where students can create an empirical formula for Ohm's law (and actually 'discover' Ohm's law). It shows how experimental science is done.  

Thoughts on Stopping the Science Brain Drain from Africa

 This is a relevant concern for many African nations. 

TED Talk: New Mindset for how we think about students, inspired by Quantum science!

  I wanted to share my TED Talk, just out, about the Quantum Revolution in Education. In order to break educators everywhere from the traditional mindset that all students will more or less get the same experience and learning from any given lesson teachers provide, we need a more realistic mindset that drives home the fact students are unique, with their own emotional and intellectual states! 

They DO NOT get the same experience from any lesson we do! We must then ACT and INTERACT with students in different ways if we really mean what we say with "No Child Left Behind." 

This mindset is inspired by quantum mechanics, of all things, so check it out. 

If you have Internet: Use Netlogo to learn programming and do computational science

 Northwestern University researchers created a programming platform called Netlogo some years ago, and it's likely a million students, graduate students and even professors have used this to learn how to program, run its hundreds of prewritten simulations in just about every STEM field for assignments, or used it for actual, high-level research that is agent-based. 

If you have any Internet access, you can use any type of computer to access Netlogo. 

By agents, we mean individual objects or even organisms. Netlogo is designed to, as easily as can be done, develop programs and simulations where individual entities interact with each other by some set of rules or mathematical law. You can do orbits, for example, since this is just individual objects interacting through Newton's law of gravity. You can do growth of bacteria, since those are individual organisms that follow some statistical rule for reproduction. You can simulate forest fires since each tree is an individual organism (an agent), and the spread of fire follows a relatively simple rule (if a neighboring tree catches fire, those trees next to it will catch on fire). 

It is worthwhile to check this out. You can download it, or run it on the Web, so even ChromeBooks can use Netlogo. There is a library with hundreds of examples, and you are free to modify the code for any of them to learn the language and create your own versions of the original simulation!