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Let's start with a simple truth: Great teachers have a deep understanding of both their kids and their content areas. Drawing from extensive experience, they can accurately predict the kinds of misconceptions that students are likely to have about key ideas in their curriculum before lessons even begin; diagnose the reasons individual students are struggling during the course of a lesson; and change directions on a dime, designing new lessons to help kids move forward regardless of the circumstance.
And for the best teachers, these actions happen reflexively.
Like top-flite quarterbacks on the best NFL teams, these teachers spend their class periods constantly working through progressions and monitoring multiple signals all at the same time. They ask questions, look for student reactions, parse the meaning behind body language and facial expressions, attend to common patterns that they expect to see and tune in to the unexpected during the course of every lesson.
Making sense of all of these disparate information streams and then taking the RIGHT action at the RIGHT time requires individuals who can accurately process on the fly.
Which is right - but how do educators stay on top of the information overload?