I co-authored this article with Daniel Yiorgios Rigney, which is just published. Below is the abstract and you can read the entire article here.
Outcomes in education are complex and numerous. Seemingly simple instructional choices can have far reaching implications for a student’s interest in a subject, their social network, and even their psychological well-being. These types of outcomes are rarely studied however. Interest in short-term instructional outcomes is far more prevalent, as made evident by the popularity of yearly high-stakes testing. Combatting this trend will require educators and policy makers …

My latest book Learners without Borders: New Learning Pathways for All Students is published by Corwin in July 2021. Below is Chapter One.

It may surprise you to learn that teenagers in Nepal are using Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) to learn English and Egyptian, study dinosaurs, and take high-level STEM courses. On Episode 33 of Silver Linings for Learning, a weekly show about educational innovations during COVID-19, we had five Nepalese students and two teachers as guests. They told an unexpected story of learning beyond their schools. Nepal, a very small country largely …

My article Build back better: Avoid the learning loss trap published in Prospects on March 4 2021. Below is the abstract and you can read here.
Abstract

A dangerous trap exists for educators and education policy makers: the learning loss. This trap comes with a large amount of data and with sophisticated projection methods. It presents a stunningly grim picture for education and it invites educators and policy makers to make wrong decisions and invest in wrong things. The article identifies a number of undesirable outcomes that their concerns could lead to. It also …

Just published in Journal of Educational Change: The changes we need: Education post COVID-19
Yong Zhao and Jim Watterston
Accepted: 28 January 2021
Read here or Download the PDF here
Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic has caused both unprecedented disruptions and massive changes to education. However, as schools return, these changes may disappear. Moreover, not all of the changes are necessarily the changes we want in education. In this paper, we argue that the pandemic has created a unique opportunity for educational changes that have been proposed before COVID-19 but were never fully realized. We identify three …