Walk into a room where children are hitting buckets with sticks and the natural assumption is that learning has stopped for a while and will resume shortly. That assumption is wrong, and the evidence against it has been accumulating for well over a decade. Neuroscientists and education researchers have built a substantial body of work linking rhythmic training to cognitive development in children. The findings run across mathematics, reading fluency, executive function, atten

Isn't it distracting? Not when applied properly. Here's how... Ask a room of teachers whether music helps students concentrate and you will get a fight. Half will tell you it is a distraction and the other half will tell you their students cannot work without it. Both camps are arguing the wrong question. Music is not one thing. The question is never whether to have music on. It is which music, at what volume, during which kind of work. Get those three right and the room se

There is a gap opening between what a student can produce and what that student actually takes away from producing it. Daniela Kon Lieberberg, CEO of SIMA Academy, named this precisely in her essay "Chasing Algorithms: Why the Future of Education Depends on the Stories Machines Can't Tell," and it has stayed with me since I read it. The gap is not new. Most schooling has run on produce-and-move-on for a century. What is new is that the production side has become effortless, a