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 […]
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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
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 […]
*Everyone* Is Better Off With More Mastery
Dear colleague, “Here at Musora, we believe that everyone would be better off if they played a musical instrument.” When I heard this line in the middle of a jazz band improv video I came across the other day, I immediately heard what the creator was doing: cultivating the Value belief in his listeners. It […]
No Top to the Mountain
Dear colleague, To make a really good Everest Statement (see Ch 1 of These 6 Things or this article), you want to describe a mountain that has no real top to it. Let me show you some examples of what I mean and then explain why it’s important. Here’s the statement I use for my […]
Why We Start Class Well
Dear colleague, I’ve spent this month riffing on the idea of the Value of an education. Even in a world where robots make podcasts, bad arguments abound, “anything I need to know is on my phone,” and writing is way more work than prompting ChatGPT, I’m more confident than ever that classes filled with knowledge-building, […]
Why We Argue
Dear colleague, Not sure if you’ve heard, but there’s an election coming up in the United States. (For more on how I’ve been teaching this election, you can read this article written by our local School News Network in which my work is featured a bit, or check out this video.) But today, we’re not […]
Why We Build Knowledge (Ft. Kelly Gallagher)
Dear colleague, In Kelly Gallagher’s new book, To Read Stuff You Have to Know Stuff: Helping Students Build and Use Prior Knowledge, he offers an abundance of mini-sermon material for the Value of building knowledge. As the title proclaims, Gallagher’s apologetics for knowledge-building focus especially on the role that knowledge plays in reading comprehension. But […]
Why We Write
Dear colleague, In a world where AI can produce “better” and faster and clearer writing than you and I can, does writing still matter? Is this something we should have our students do, all across the school day? And if so, why? In this article, I want to share the earnest, robust approach I’m taking […]