"The Work"

Once upon a time classrooms were small, and teachers had the time and ability to encourage students to share and react to each other's ideas about what they were learning. This aspect of the learning experience was critical as it allowed students experience thinking critically and creatively, as well as experience with both receptive communication (i.e., listening effectively to others) and expressive communication (i.e., voicing their own perspectives in efficient ways). These are what educators now call core cognitive skills, and unlike the learning of information, students can only develop skills through repeated structured practice. These sorts of Socratic-like exchanges used to provide that practice.

In a world in which information is everywhere, and not all of it is accurate, the ability to critically think about and discuss the information we are exposed to has never been more important. Thus if there was ever a time to prioritize the teaching of core cognitive skills, it is now. Unfortunately, as class sizes increase without commensurate growth in budgets the traditional method for teaching core cognitive skills has become logistically impossible. The result is that our current education systems are unbalanced, putting most of their emphasis on the teaching of content, and very little on the structured development of core cognitive skills.

It is our mission to rebalance this system by imagining, creating, testing and advocating for new and innovative methods that once again give teachers the time and ability to provide their students with structured practice engaging the core cognitive skills that underly success in the modern world. This website provides documents, media, and more specific presentations of the tools and ideas that form the cornerstone of our efforts. Thank you for experiencing this site, and if we share our vision please reach out. Together we can do things that are impossible alone.

For more details about our efforts please click below to read either a brief or more complete description of the things we have been doing and will continue to do.

We are researchers first. Our innovations are all based on practices that have a research-proven efficacy. We then submit the innovations themselves to research in our Advanced Learning Technologies Lab to ensure maximum impact and usability. This has resulted in many international publications and presentations - sometimes keynote presentations - at many international conferences. Here are three examples of our work.