About this episode

This episode discusses the cognitive changes in students and teachers since the pandemic, featuring insights from Nancy Weinstein.

If you've noticed that students seem different since the pandemic and you're not sure what to do about it, this episode gives you real answers. Nancy Weinstein, Chief Innovation Officer at Otus and co-founder of MindPrint, shares findings from a longitudinal study of 35,000 students aged 8 to 21, tracking cognitive skills from 2015 through and beyond the pandemic. The data reveals something most school leaders haven't yet seen: the biggest change in students isn't attention, which is what teachers almost universally report, it's verbal memory, with the average student now retaining roughly half of what they would have five years ago.   You'll learn why flexible thinking has dropped significantly and what that means for how students respond to feedback in the classroom, why AI may be compounding these challenges, and where to find evidence-based strategies that already exist and work. Nancy also shares a surprising finding: teachers showed similar cognitive shifts to their students, particularly in flexible thinking, which helps explain some of the staffing and morale challenges school leaders have been navigating. If you want to move from "kids are different" to actually…

People in this episode

Host: Shane Leaning

Guest: Nancy Weinstein

Topics covered

• impact of pandemic on students
• cognitive skills
• verbal memory
• flexible thinking
• teacher challenges
• evidence-based strategies

Keywords

• pandemic impact
• student cognition
• memory retention
• flexible thinking
• education strategies
• teacher morale

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Otus, MindPrint

Books & works: The Empowered Student

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