Dave Stuart Jr.

For years, I’ve been marking student birthdays as follows. Let’s say it’s Hayleigh’s birthday today. During class, I call on Hayleigh and I ask her, “Hayleigh, what is one thing you’ve learned about life?” I record what she shares in a spreadsheet, and after she shares I say, “Happy birthday,” with a big smile. From […]

The next time you read a book or a blog written by a teacher-author, here’s something to remember: the reason that things work in their class is likely just as much a function of their credibility with students as it is a function of the quality of the things they do in their class. What […]

The default conditions of work in education, whether you’re a teacher or a coach or an administrator, is that it’s overwhelming. There is, and always will be, too much to do. This isn’t a problem faced only by novices. The difference between experts and novices isn’t that experts find a way to do it all […]

Recently, my district gave me a chance to think about a key area of work for any school system that seeks to maximize its long-term flourishing outcomes for both its staff and its students. That key area? New teacher mentoring programs. Whether you’re in a setting like mine, or a smaller one, or a larger […]

Recently I held the first pop-up debate of the school year in my on-level world history courses. (For my most thorough treatment of pop-up debates, see Ch 4 of These 6 Things.) The lesson began with the following prompt: They had five minutes to write a response, and then I asked them to share something […]

Two of the four groups I teach each day are ninth grade AP World History students. These kids opt-in to the open enrollment class of their own volition, and their most-cited reason for taking on such a daunting challenge — an Advanced Placement course during their ninth grade year — is because they want to […]

The other day I gave my students a scenario to write about as their 100-word warm-up: Ninth graders around the United States are having a hard time caring about school. To some, it’s so boring or pointless that they consider dropping out — even in ninth grade. Imagine you are writing an article to these […]

What would happen if we were to select a literate person from each of the past thirty centuries and ask that person to tell us which of the following reading comprehension skills is most important? What would they tell us? Identifying the main idea Making an inference Sequencing Drawing conclusions Relating background knowledge All but […]

If there’s an emoji to describe my writer’s mind during the last 4-5 months, it would be the one with the nuclear explosion coming out of the top of the head: 🤯 You see, before this past summer started, I scheduled fewer speaking engagements than normal so that I could bury myself in research. When […]

As I shared last time, the late Austrian management philosopher Peter Drucker spent his six-decade working life in pursuit of one big question. How do we make society both more productive and more humane? This is what Drucker wanted to know. The question fascinates me because it is so difficult, so important, so balanced. Any […]

There’s a question that’s been nagging at me for months and months, starting at the end of last school year, persisting at times through the summer, and now louder and clearer with a new school year under way. It’s been a hard one for me to voice because I’m keen on focusing on what I […]

Get talking with a productivity buff about email, and you’re bound to hear OHIO, an acronym that stands for “Only Handle It Once.” The idea is pretty simple: if you’re going to open an email, then right then and there you’ve also got to deal with it by responding, archiving, forwarding (shudder), or task-listing. You […]

Today as I met my students for the first time, I couldn’t help recalling an old Hebrew hymn in which the author writes, “I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well.” While perhaps not many of us public school teachers share the Hebrew poet’s […]

All of our tasks exist on a spectrum. On one end are the tasks that directly touch the core purpose of our jobs, and on the other end are the tasks that we ought to try skipping. But which tasks are those? Which can we not just satisfice, but skip? To have a chance of […]

If you and I are going to stay sane this year — sane as in healthy, of sound mind, common sensical, practical — then we’ll need to practice what I’ve come to call the precious s’s: satisficing and skipping. Satisficing is what we do when we accept an available option as satisfactory rather than working […]

Then you’ve got to be kind to people when they’re mean or rude to you. This is how the virtues strengthen: not by doing them when they’re easy, but by doing them when they’re hard. Consider: You cannot get braver unless you do what needs to be done when what needs to be done makes […]