It’s so easy to overlook student motivation as a serious realm of study for several reasons: So in this brief article/video combo, let me give three reasons why student motivation deserves our attention, reflection, contemplation, and professionalism. (You’ll get my gist through just reading or just viewing, but you’ll get a fuller sense of what […]
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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
“School is a word game”
I often remind my students that school is a word game. I specifically do this in a few situations: For these reasons and more, I was pumped when our colleague Continuing Ed sent along this three-minute video from Nature: (Not seeing a video? Click here.) Don’t have three minutes? The gist is this: knowledge of […]
📗Exciting News📗 + You’re More Powerful than DALL-E 2
Dear colleague, The exciting news is below this post. If you’ve never seen DALL-E 2, you ought to take 15 minutes and head down its wormhole. I’ve done a few things in the past ten years that have felt a bit like peaking at the future — trying on my brother’s VR headset thing; test-driving […]
ChatGPT: No Thing But a Chicken Wing
Dear colleague, Recently a bunch of you have been asking, “So, Dave, what’re your thoughts on ChatGPT? Is this the end of English? The end of teaching? The end of thought!?!?!?!?” And while I’m already exhausted by all the hot takes on this in the education world, I am willing to give some lukewarm takes […]
Should Students Sit in Rows?
Engagement isn’t something you can infer from smiling faces or a classroom arrangement. Engagement is what the brain attends to. Source: Teacher-blogger Blake Harvard Should students sit in rows? In my view, there are only two silly answers to this question: The answer, as all sensible folks know, is more nuanced: it depends. In my […]
Coming This Month: The Credibility Signal Booster Mini-Course
Dear colleague, Here’s a 2:24 video about what I’ve got coming; please watch it. 😊 Here are the details: (That last part is super cool because the book covers not just Credibility but also the other four Key Beliefs beneath student motivation. There’s so much in the book that I haven’t shared yet here on […]
Underdemanded v. Overdemanded
“Young people should not be overdemanded. However, we have also to consider the fact that at least today, in the age of an affluent society, most people are underdemanded rather than overdemanded.”– Viktor Frankl, emphasis mine (1966) In the excerpt above, Frankl touches on a timeless educator challenge: for the folks we teach to optimally […]
How to Teach Secondary Students to Improve Their Penmanship (According to a Non-Expert)
Whenever I can have my students do work on paper, I do. Paper is less wrought with temptation than a Chrome tab is; it requires no battery charge; you can move it around between people and places without copying a link or clicking a button. I’m no Luddite, but I love the simplicity of paper. […]
Three Student Questions to Start (or Spark) Your School Year
This year on the first day of school, I asked my students to complete three short answer questions. (In my class, that’s a question that can be answered in 2-3 sentences; I use these a lot.) These are the three questions I asked my students to answer: Here’s a screenshot of the slide I use. […]
The Student Motivation Summit
This March, I’m partnering with the Illinois ASCD to put on a first-of-its-kind student motivation summit. It’ll be a day of PD, led by me, on the best things I’ve learned in my classroom, my research, my travels, and my book-writing about student motivation in secondary schools. I hope you’ll consider attending, either in-person or […]
The Best PD Is Often Next Door
As far as impactful PD goes, there’s not much that can compete with sitting in on the practice of one of the colleagues in your own building. Once in a while, it’s helpful to identify some folks that you might like watching. You can do things like: (Fill in those blanks with an area of […]
Happy Holidays = A Great Time for a Hard Pause on School
Hey there, colleague! I hope this message finds you well and festive. I’ll be out of your inbox the next two weeks so as to help you do the good and wise work of a hard detach from all things school for a bit. I want to encourage you with full permission to forget that […]
Underused Value Angle: Science Class is Beautiful
I often say in my workshops that when you’re looking at the Rainbow of Why, the power is on the bottom. I think that in school we’re way too quick to tell students “when they’ll ever use this” (that’s utility on the graphic above) and we’re way too slow to paint a picture of how […]
What You Think v. What Students Think
“Teaching is successful only as it causes people to think for themselves. What the teacher thinks matters little; what she makes the child think matters much.“ – Alice Moore Hubbard (1909) Alice Hubbard lived a remarkable life. She was a colleague of ours and a multi-published author, as well as a vocal advocate for women’s […]
Teaching Students Why We Review Like We Do
A bit ago in class I used a trick that I learned from one of our global colleagues at TASIS American International School in England just outside of London. (Below is a photo that some of us took together when my wife and I visited their school recently.) (The person I need to credit specifically […]
The Circle of Power: Something Good for the Last Five Minutes of Class
One instructional practice that my principal has focused on this year is bell-to-bell learning. Thankfully, he doesn’t define this militaristically — students at their desks grinding from start to finish. Instead, he strikes what I call the gentle urgency balance, which I think is key for signaling Credibility to students. Urgent: on the one hand, […]