Dear colleague, This’ll be my last article of 2024; thank you for reading and teaching right beside me this year. (This is the halfway mark of the eighteenth year of my teaching career. Just when I think I’ve got this job figured out, providence brings along a set of challenges that make it feel brand […]
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Let’s Make Teaching Better.
Dave Stuart Jr. is a husband, father, and high school teacher who writes about education. He reads extensively across the disciplines so that he can create uniquely satisfying professional development experiences for his colleagues around the world. His mission is to encourage and equip educators on the journey to long-term flourishing and professional excellence.
Professional development. (The good kind.)
If we’re going to make teaching better, we’ve got to improve professional development. I’m not the guru, but I have spent thousands of hours practicing and researching the art and science of educator-centered, high-impact PD. My hope with all of these is that they help.
And oh yeah: I’m still a teacher. I’ve never left the classroom. With 120 students on my roster each year, it’s impossible for me to detach theory from practice.
Online PD
My schedule-friendly, all-online professional development courses are designed with busy educators in mind. Whole staff or district applications are available — email support@davestuartjr.com with your needs.
In-Person PD
I speak and lead education workshops for a limited number of schools and organizations around the world each year.
Books + Blog
My best-selling book, These 6 Things, has been read and cherished by secondary teachers around the world. My blog is read by over 35,000 educators each month.
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The Latest from the Blog
What Mentally Strong Teachers DON’T Do
Dear colleague, In my last article, I did some poor writing unintentionally, alluding to these things that mentally strong teachers don’t do but then not really listing those things. What I’ve written below is my teacher-centered take on psychoanalyst Amy Morin’s book, 13 Things Mentally Strong People Don’t Do. These aren’t Amy’s words verbatim, but […]
How Psychoanalyst Amy Morin Teaches Through Non-Examples
In 13 Things Mentally Strong Parents Don’t Do, psychotherapist Amy Morin demonstrates a great teaching move: using non-examples. Whether you’re teaching elementary math, high school science, community college composition, or whatever-else-have-you, this idea of teaching from non-examples is really helpful. Now of course, non-examples can be confusing, so you’ve got to be clear about your […]
The Keys to Hitting a Target
Dear colleague, For the past few summers in Michigan, my family and I have spent one week at a family camp, and one of our favorite camp activities is heading to the riflery and archery ranges and working on our marksmanship. Being town dwellers like we are, shooting 22s or bows and arrows isn’t something […]
Woodenization Example: Improving at Short Answer Questions + Teaching the Rubric
Dear colleague, Here’s a quick Woodenization example for a couple of biggies in my classroom: After my students wrote their first SAQs of the school year, I worked hard to give them fast, simple feedback. Using our single-point rubrics (see pp. 184-185 in your copy of These 6 Things), I did my darnedest to have […]
Why “Work Harder” is a Terrible Plan
Dear colleague, Another thing my students often do when setting goals earlier on in the semester is say that their goal (or Wish in WOOP parlance) is to improve their grades and their Plan is to work harder. “Working harder,” I tell them, “is a terrific recipe for being anxious and getting down on yourself. […]
The Best Pop-Up Debate Prompt in my Repertoire (Valued Within Exercise)
Dear colleague, Today, let’s look at a Valued Within exercise that we can do via one of my favorite instructional activities: Pop-Up Debates. As you’ll recall, Valued Within exercises are any activity that has students figuring out why the work of learning is valuable to them. Unlike Mini-Sermons, in which creating and communicating Value messages […]
To Be Versus to Seem
Dear colleague, A friend sent me this article on AI recently, titled “Subcontracting Our Minds.” In case the title doesn’t make it obvious, the author is not an AI optimist. Though I found the author’s arguments compelling, what I loved most was his surfacing of an old Rousseau argument that it is necessary “to be […]
The Argument Game Works Well With Children (Valued Within Exercise)
Dear colleague, At a workshop I was leading in Texas a few months ago, a colleague asked me in the lunch line if I ever use the Five Key Beliefs methodology from The Will to Learn with my own children at home. The answer is yes, I do approach parenting with this lens, quite often. […]
Mathy (or Sciency or Historyish) Moments (Valued Within Exercise)
Dear colleague, For today’s Valued Within example, let’s look at an idea that’s not mine at all. This one comes from Adam Craig in Massachusetts. Each weekend, Adam’s students have a simple homework assignment: find a mathy moment in real life. On Monday, Adam asks his students to report out what they found. Within a […]
Why Conversations (Valued Within Exercise)
Dear colleague, As I’ve been saying, the Value Puzzle can be solved from two angles: teacher-generated Mini-Sermons and student-generated Valued Within exercises. The Utility-Value “T-Chart” Intervention that we looked at last time is a prime example of a “Valued Within” exercise. Today we’ll look at another. Some years ago, I was engaged in a PD […]
The “Why This Could Matter” T-Chart (Valued Within Exercise)
Dear colleague, Mini-sermons are a key move for Value cultivation in the classroom. When a credible teacher takes 30-120 seconds to explain to students in an authentic, creative, and gentle way why the work at hand is valuable AND when the teacher does this on a regular basis, do not underestimate the inner changes produced […]
Pop-Up Debate LIVE Workshop
Dear colleague, Today was one of those days: full schedule yesterday, full evening last night, busy morning this morning. As I was driving to school, a wave of anxiety and guilt washed over me: My first hour lesson wasn’t in place! And class was set to start in under thirty minutes. Noooooooot good. Thankfully, I […]
The Value Puzzle
Dear colleague, I don’t think it’s melodramatic to state the following: The vast majority of students today have a deeply impoverished view of the value of an education. It’s way more popular today to decry the pointlessness of learning school subjects than it is to Value them. And on top of this, a pre-COVID national […]
The Stockdale Paradox
Dear colleague, Someone asked me at a PD recently, “What’s the most important teacher book you ever read?” At the time they asked me, there just happened to be a copy of Jim Collins’ Good to Great sitting on a table nearby. I picked up the volume and I said, “Let’s go with this one.” […]
A Thousand Is More Than Four: The Quiet Power of Teaching
Dear colleague, I run this blog like I run my classroom: I assume nothing about your political leanings and keep private my own. Education, I’ve long said, is all about promoting the long-term flourishing of young people by teaching them to master things that, apart from school, they’d be unlikely to master. This is a […]