Why you should leave your work at school at least twice a week.

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 […]

Have at least one meeting a week with NO notes

Have at least one meeting with no notes per week…just a conversation of ideas. Education has entered the world of big data and data driven education. Overall this is a very good thing for getting quantitative information about the performance of students (and in some cases teachers) in a wide variety of situation. The idea […]

Agendas in the classroom. Use them.

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 […]

How to get a classrooms’ attention.

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 […]

What does curiosity look like in the classroom?

I ask myself that question constantly. The look of engaged students chomping at the bit to ask more and more questions. Kids getting into arguments about hypotheses and debating all sorts of ideas. This is student led learning at its best. But how do we as educators actually create that in the classroom? What protocols […]

Facilitate the classroom: Part Deux

My last post was a about a simple hack to get kids who are normally on the more quiet end of the conversation spectrum to participate more in class. I discovered that it was not that they didn’t have anything to say, it was that they didn’t feel comfortable expressing opinions out loud. By creating […]

Connected

As an educator I see lots of ideas come and go. There always seems to be the ‘next-big-thing’ that will revolutionize the way education is done. What the reality is more like is there are solutions to specific types of problems that only work if there is enough buy in from the faculty within the […]