Teachers have this nasty habit of not being able to stop thinking about their work. Even during the holidays you might see a teacher at a Thanksgiving dinner steering the conversation to what they are currently doing in class to ask for input from those around the table. You might even see that same teacher […]
Read more "Why you should leave your work at school at least twice a week."Short answer. Yes. Long answer. It’s complicated. There are pros and cons to eating in your schools faculty lunch room. Lets look at them Pros: You get to debrief with colleagues about your day and be surrounded by people who have roughly the same intellect and thirst for conversation that is NOT about One Direction. […]
Read more "Should you have lunch in the faculty lounge?"Core Value statements need to change. Every time I visit a school, I make a point to look up what their ‘Core Values’ are. For those of you that might not know what core values are they are usually three to five words, or phrases, that encompass the ideals, aspirations and culture that a school […]
Read more "Core Value statements need to change."Get faster at building content: Nuts and Bolts edition My last post was all about the basic of creating your first bit of content in Google Earth. Today I’m going to show you a few hacks to make the process a little easier. If you remember from my last post, the three forms of content […]
Read more "Nuts and Bolts of building content in Google Earth"The case for Pass/Fail in Secondary Schools When my wife told me that most medical schools in the US are pass/fail, I was dumbstruck. “What do you mean?”, I asked incredulously. How could the smartest people in the country take their classes pass/fail? Wouldn’t they just start skipping class since there was no more competition? […]
Read more "What’s wrong with the A-F grading policy."It is so hard to get out of our classrooms these days. With the amount of grading, planning, meeting, and TEACHING that teachers accomplish on a daily basis it is no wonder that once you enter your classroom at 6:30am, you might only leave it to go to the bathroom around noon. These expectations seem […]
Read more "Why you need to visit another classroom"There is so much talk about giving students a voice in the classroom these days but very little tangible evidence of what it looks like. What are specific examples of student voice in class? How is it accomplished and made to be part of the routine of a high functioning classroom? It takes a teacher […]
Read more "Student Voice in class. What does that look like?"If you are new to teaching, you’ve probably had dozens of veteran teachers tell you that having your daily agenda posted in a highly visible place is essential to having regular success in your class. They’re right, you know. An agenda board is not just for your students to have a reference point for the […]
Read more "Agendas in the classroom. Use them."Most teachers have encountered a class that starts off a bit rambunctious and needs some extra convincing to get down to business. I have seen a whole host of different techniques over the years that have all worked to varying degrees of success. Usually it depends on the teacher in question but often the tactic employed has just […]
Read more "How to get a classrooms’ attention."I’m a big proponent of standards based learning. Having benchmarks for students to reach for is something that instills intrinsic motivation and helps them set goals that are often higher than the ones teachers or parents set. What gets lost in all of this is that each student learns in a slightly different way but teachers are […]
Read more "Why grading should be about effort."
peter spiegel 