Elizabeth Helfant's Recent LinkedIn Posts

What matters most to me is helping the people around me, especially department chairs and classroom teachers, stay curious, ask better questions, and take responsible risks on behalf of students. That's the whole job, really. Always looking for ways to make the student experience better and doing it with curiosity a…

Before you read another post from me, you should know I asked my friend Claude to grade our work. Last week I wrote about pedagogical debt and our obligation to help students stay aware of the consequences on their thinking when they outsource it. (You might need to skim this previous post: https://bit.ly/4pRc2fH) O…

Who is doing the thinking? That is the question I cannot get out of my head lately. I have spent the last while reading and re-reading a few people who think clearly about learning. Jay McTighe on covering versus uncovering. Karin Hess on what rigor actually is. Dr Philippa Hardman Hardman on how AI is quietly rei…

Sometimes the clearest thinking about screens shows up in a movie about toys. We keep asking whether kids should be on screens. The better question is hiding in a Pixar movie. I adore Toy Story. My love for it started when I had three young sons and a daughter. The first film sealed it. I was delighted to see the t…

For decades, we treated polished prose as proof of thinking. It never quite was. Kelly Webb-Davies at the University of Oxford puts it simply: academic English is no one’s first language. Every one of us has to translate our thinking into it. Some students do that easily. Others reason with real force and then fre…

I'm still toying with my Both Chairs Substack. What I like about it is that it gives me room to think longer and go deeper. LinkedIn is where I start, but I keep hitting the edges of what the format wants to hold. I just put out my second post. I spent this weekend sitting with the coming PISA data and the argume…