Dave Stuart Jr.

Teachers Need Time to Learn about Using Time Well In the first year of my teaching career, like so many of my peers around the nation, I was proud of how many hours I worked. I didn’t count them, of course — I just noted with grim satisfaction when mine was the first car in […]

In a recent paper presented at the NCAPSA American Politics Meeting, researchers Nathan Kalmoe and Lilliana Mason shared findings from a nationally representative survey: 40-60% of Americans express moral disengagement with members of the political party opposed to their own. Let’s break that down. Moral disengagement is a phenomenon defined by Al Bandura and colleagues […]

Years ago, I travelled to Germany with a group of teachers to study the school system there, and one of my traveling companions was an economics teacher named Martha Sevetson Rush. Martha was one of those second-career teachers that exudes a passion for the work. After college she had been a journalist, but once she […]

Beau Larimer is a high school teacher in Bakersfield who also teaches teacher prep at college. I had the privilege of meeting Beau and his colleagues during a professional development workshop on a Saturday in January 2020. Beau created conversations like the one below for his teacher prep students during the covid closures of Spring […]

Hi there! I did a bad job mentioning this on the blog beforehand, but recently I had the pleasure of sitting down for a Zoom “coffee chat” with two of our profession’s most prolific authors: Nancy Frey and Doug Fisher. In the recorded conversation below, you can see Doug, Nancy, and I discussing things like […]

Sometimes, things pile up. A messy desk with layers of paper strewn across it A pile of books waiting to be re-shelved An inbox left unprocessed for a couple days (or weeks) That one counter where the random bits of life’s non-urgent action items collect: a shirt needing a button, a child’s toy requiring superglue […]

We like to talk about pendulum swings in education, but of all of them I’ve seen in my career, none rivals the motion of my internal pendulum during the final months of this 2019-2020 school year. Just as I think I’m getting the hang of the external and internal work of this emergency remote teaching […]

Below are two lesson anchor charts from a pair of elementary classrooms. In one classroom, the students are having a lesson on finding the main idea. In the other, they are listening to the teacher read the myth of Daedalus and Icarus. Here are my questions. Knowing that we lack all kinds of context, answer […]

When I speak or write or teach about motivation, I focus on what classroom teachers like me can control. This is a basic assumption of my work: I’m better off working at what I can affect than I am fixating on matters I don’t control. And after all, the research is clear: student motivation is […]

A week or so ago, I was having a conversation with Lynsay Fabio, the main author on our Classroom Management Course. If you’re unfamiliar with it, the CMC is (we think) the straightest, quickest path to understanding and practicing the fundamentals of managing student behavior. And one of the reasons we’re confident in its quality […]

This afternoon, my students took the world’s first-ever AP World History: Modern assessment, and they did so from their cars and homes and wherever else they’ve figured out how to get Wifi. Needless to say, there is plenty that they’re bound to be anxious about. Thankfully, the research evidence on test anxiety is that even […]

Recently, my family purchased an inexpensive used piano. My wife and children have all had piano lessons from someone who knows how to teach piano. Thanks to good teaching plus good practice, they are at various stages in the mastery process. But honestly, my children haven’t always loved practicing the piano, and my wife didn’t […]

I wrote a post this morning sharing a simple end-of-year survey for measuring the five key beliefs. The survey was developed by Ohio educator Kristin Foxworth-O’Brien. Within an hour or so, I received a great addition to surveys like this from Sarah McCambridge of Bishop Miege High School in Kansas. Sarah teaches photography, and she […]

There’s tons of science about human motivation, and in my work I’ve argued that a nice way of conceptualizing this science is in this idea: beliefs drive behavior. The degree to which our students 1) do the work of learning and 2) do it with care and effort can be predicted by the degree to […]

Human beings can explore space, cure disease, climb mountains, and compose epics, but one thing they cannot do is force a change in the internal world of another human. You and I cannot force a change in the hearts of the students on our rosters — nor could Gandhi, nor could King. This is an […]

The biggest gains in our professional lives don’t come from massive, one-time pushes. That weekend getaway to plan out next year’s curricula? It’s not the key. The really late night we plan to spend this Friday to get the stack of papers graded? Only a band-aid. The big gains come from consistency — from showing […]