Tom Schimmer is an author and a speaker with expertise in assessment, grading, leadership, and behavioral support. He is a former district-level leader, school administrator, and teacher.
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From the cabin in the woods to educational airwaves, Canadian education expert and author Tom Schimmer sits down with us to discuss how The Tom Schimmer Podcast began and grew. Learn how Tom developed the idea for his podcast in 2020, and follow his journey as he discusses how he solidified his format, the importance of his special guests, and the ways he promotes his platform. Read more
[VIDEO] Based on Growing Tomorrow’s Citizens in Today’s Classrooms
Being able to recall the states and capitals, solve routine problems, identify causes of various wars, or name and describe characters in a novel used to be enough—learning content and developing basic reading, writing, and mathematics skills used to be the end goal. Collaboration, critical thinking, communication, self-regulation, and other critical competencies, or 21st century skills, were often the means by which students learned content deemed necessary. Students would collaborate to analyze a character in a novel, talk about the evidence in the text to support their thinking, and then be assessed on identifying and describing characters from the discussion; this is no longer sufficient. Read more
The short answer to this question is no. For several decades now, research has been quite emphatic that grades and scores can interfere with a student’s willingness to keep learning. Read more
I recently read the following quote and thought it a great reminder as a new school year begins:
“…development and learning are primarily social processes, and learning cannot be separated from its social context.” (Laboratory for Comparative Human Cognition, 2010 cited in Ruiz-Primo, 2010)
Tom Schimmer
