Dave Stuart Jr.

Teaching Simplified.

2023-2024 School Year in Review

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Dear colleague,

This was a school year of refinding my footing and figuring out what I'm here for, as a husband, dad, teacher, and writer. I'll spare you the inner journey with all its trials and tribulations, but suffice it to say that I am grateful for the inner work my life required this year and the newfound clarities and freedoms this work is slowly but surely providing.

Though my personal journeying is outside the purview of this blog, my professional one is apropos. I'd like to share with you the discoveries provided by my work this year as a teacher and a writer.

Quick prefatory author's request

As you'll read below, this school year's creative work was an extended labor of love. If you're interested in showing appreciation for these efforts, here are the best ways.

  1. The best way: If something I created this year made a difference for you, take a minute to share it with folks you work with and tell them why you think the newsletter is worth the attention you give it.
  2. Another super helpful way: If you're one of the 3,500 or so folks who own a copy of The Will to Learn, I would be so grateful for your review of the book on Amazon. Right now, the book has a very small number of reviews for how well it's sold, and for folks unfamiliar with my work who discover the book on Amazon, this low review count can hurt the book's credibility. You can review it here.

Thanks so much for considering those things. Now let's process what I discovered in my classroom this year.

Teaching discoveries

I'll share three experiments I ran in my class this year that proved fruitful in my understanding of how to help students toward mastery. One was an all year pop-up debate sequence, one was a five-week writing boot camp, and one was a one-day Belonging intervention.

The pop-up debate experiment: 20 debates in one school year

At the end of last school year, I was intrigued by students who told me that pop-up debates were among the best content review activities that we did. (I wrote about this here.) Students reported that pop-up debates helped them both deepen their understanding of material and remember it. And of course, pop-up debates do much more than this (e.g., improve student argumentation, improve student confidence and skill in the area of public speaking, cultivate a class culture of “do hard things”) — hence my love for them.

So this year, I decided to attempt 20 pop-up debates in my two-semester course, and I decided that I'd document the whole thing on YouTube. (That playlist is here.)

It was quite a journey getting to 20 pop-up debates, and the payoff was significant.

By the end of the school year:

  • 100% of students reported an increase in their confidence in public speaking. This includes the large number of students I teach who were deathly afraid of public speaking when the year began.
  • Some of my students' other teachers began coming to me sharing transformations they had seen in our shared students in this area of public speaking. Students were able to articulate their thoughts more clearly and confidently, and some students who began the year withdrawn or quiet were now steady contributors to class discussions.

In terms of general patterns of skill acquisition, I found that there are three I needed to help students overcome throughout the debate progression.

  • Hurdle 1: Anxiety. First, many students needed to overcome debilitating anxiety pertaining to public speaking. I've both written and created a video on what I do to help with that. This method continues to reliably guide my students over the hurdle of anxiety.
  • Hurdle 2: Speech delivery. While anxiety is easily overcome through the methods in those resources above, speech delivery requires repeated instruction and specific feedback. For the instruction, I once again used Erik Palmer's PVLEGS, to great effect. This is all you need to help students understand and do something about their speech delivery weaknesses (one of the videos on incorporating PVLEGS is here). And for the feedback, I used during-debate feedback and eventually, recording my students and letting them watch themselves the next day (video on that here).
    • Regarding Palmer's PVLEGS, I discovered this year that you can break the acronym down into preventative and proactive elements.
      • Poise, Voice, and Eye Contact are preventative in that they prevent your listeners from dismissing what you have to say through distracting behaviors. When your voice is hard to hear, or your speech is riddled with filler words, or your back is turned to a listener, the listener will likely disengage before giving your words a real hearing. Taking care of these doesn't add anything special to your speech, it just makes sure that you're not detracting from your speech with distracting behaviors.
      • Life, Gestures, and Speed are proactive in that they make your speech extra interesting. When these are present in a student speech, you can feel the class leaning in. They are magnetic, drawing the audience in.
  • Hurdle 3: Speech content (connectivity, refutation, evidence). Finally, we get to the content of student speeches, which I began focusing on during Pop-Up Debate #11. You may be wondering, “Why doesn't this come first, Dave?” And my answer is, “Without handling the first two hurdles, there's still too much of a cognitive and motivational barrier to improving the sophistication of student arguments.” This observation could be from my own biases or from the age of students I work with (14- and 15-year-olds). In general, I find that the first two hurdles help students build the Value, Effort, Efficacy, and Belonging beliefs to such a degree that complexity of thought is very easy to develop because now their speeches are something they care about, and that care drives them to produce gains that I never could were I just cajoling and coercing them into improvement.

To see student samples during the final pop-up debates, this is the video to check out. They are still not perfect (and if my own development as a speaker is any measure, they never will be), but they are markedly improved in their confidence, their delivery, and their complexity of thought.

A quick note on the recursiveness of skill development

If you look at the things I focused on as a teacher throughout the pop-up debate progression playlist, you'll notice that Hurdles 2 and 3 above aren't linear. As students take on the increased cognitive demand of attending to their speech content (Hurdle 3), they often regress in their demonstration of mastery in speech delivery (Hurdle 2). That recursiveness of skill development is super normal, as I wrote about here.

A quick note on prompts that help deepen content comprehension

My favorite application of PUDs this year was in using them for content review. Here are prompts that were aimed at that:

  • Which are more important: STATES (Unit 1) or TRADE ROUTES (Unit 2)?
    • This asked students to compare the main content foci of units 1 and 2
  • Which land-based empire was the most impressive, and why?
    • There were 7ish land-based empires that we studied in this unit. Here I'm asking students to bring in their own Value beliefs and make a judgment on which empire impressed them the most. There's content review here, and there's also Valued Within work (see Strategy #6 in The Will to Learn).
  • What was the most important concept so far in Units 3 or 4?
  • Which of the resistance movements in 4.6 do you believe is most important? Explain your reasoning with evidence and logic.
  • Which Enlightenment philosopher has had the biggest impact on today’s world?
  • Which development in Unit 5 is the most important to world history, and why?
  • Which historical figure is the most important person (MIP) for the whole course so far?
  • Which of the MAIN causes of WWI is the MOST important?
  • What is the most interesting feature of WWI, in your opinion?

These are the content-related prompts I used in PUDs 1-11 — which gives you a sense of how often I'm asking questions that promote content review and deepening students' understanding of how the things we are learning interrelate. And notice that many of these prompts also get after the dynamics I describe in Strategy #6 in The Will to Learn. Any time we ask students to give their opinion on which content is the most “impressive” or “important” or “interesting,” we're guiding them to figure out what content matters to them. This is a very powerful long-term play toward cultivating the Value belief.

In sum

This year has renewed my faith in providing students with a large quantity of pop-up debates in any course I teach. With the prompts mentioned above, PUDs are a reliable method for placing the cognitive load on my students' shoulders and making room for the connections and growth that only public speaking can produce.

The fast feedback writing “boot camp” experiment: 10 pieces of writing in 5 weeks

Coming out of spring break, I was not content with the degree to which my students could construct essays and short-answer responses to content-based questions. Because of this, I decided to run a “boot camp” for two classes of students in which we would write as many pieces as we productively could during a five-week period. For each of these, I would:

  • Teach the type of writing with exemplars (our types of writing were Short Answer Questions [SAQs], Document-Based Questions [DBQs], and Longer Essay Questions [LEQs]; all of them were on-demand writing pieces that students completed in class).
  • Give the prompt and let students write for a set time limit (40 minutes for SAQs; 57 minutes for DBQs [that's how long my class periods are]; 40 minutes for LEQs).
  • Spend the 2-3 hours it takes to score the student work and give it back the next school day, along with whole-class guidance on how to remedy common problems.

Next day feedback on two class sets of essays…really?

Yes, really. The thing with feedback is that with each day that passes between the writing of the piece and getting feedback on it, the student growth return on that feedback decays at an almost exponential rate. I've written about this a bit before, and the way I normally grapple with this reality is by eschewing individualized feedback on student writing for the whole-class methods I outline in the Writing chapter of These 6 Things. For feedback to be maximally useful, it's more important to make it timely and actionable than it is to make it individualized — hence my tendency to use whole-class feedback. But for the sake of this experiment, I wanted to try giving lots of individual feedback on lots of pieces of writing.

For each type of writing, I used scoring guidelines to norm myself to the College Board's standards (these were my two sections of ninth grade AP World History), and I had to remind myself repeatedly to err on the side of mercilessness. That sounds heartless, but it's just me knowing that in the prior months I was too lenient with the rubrics and this resulted in a lack of clarity for my students. If I wanted them to be sure they understood each element to the rubric, I needed to use the rubric and nothing else to determine their scores.

Interestingly, though this norming process took me extra time on the front end of the boot camp, it ultimately enabled me to work through papers with a level of confidence, speed, and accuracy that I'd not experienced in the past.

Regarding how I managed my time to score this many essays (~660 in five weeks), I found that it took me 2-3 hours to score each set. Every time my second class of students was working in class on a piece of writing, I was scoring the work from the previous class. During my lunch, I was scoring. Prep, I was scoring. After school until 5 p.m., I was scoring. Once or twice, I was scoring at night after the kids went to bed (a general no-no for me) or waking up early to finish a set. The experiment wasn't meant to set a new norm for me as much as it was to see how much students could grow during a relatively short amount of time (5 weeks compared to the 40-week school year).

The results were what you'd expect.

Giving so much focus and effort to improving our writing led, inevitably, to us improving our writing. Students developed at different rates, with some achieving mastery halfway through the process and some still discovering things from the feedback I gave on the final essays.

Here are some samples — click for larger images.

Sample Student 1, DBQ #1:

Sample Student 1, DBQ #6:

Sample Student 2, DBQ #1:

Sample Student 2, DBQ #6:

It's the growing sophistication with the various skills expected by the rubrics that I was most proud of.

There were some extra benefits to the experiment, such as:

  • A noticeable increase in my Credibility with some students
  • A noticeable improvement in the Effort and Efficacy beliefs in some of my more poorly motivated or struggling students
  • A noticeable increase in the degree to which students felt a sense of camaraderie with one another (Belonging) through this boot camp experience

I'm not positive I'll try this again, but I will take away important lessons about how feedback, focus, and quantity can improve student writing. (All of which I discuss in the Writing chapter of These 6 Things. Also in that chapter, I share the most common type of feedback that I give, which is whole-class feedback v. the individualized feedback I focused on in this experiment.)

The one-day Belonging intervention

Last, here's something I did just a week or so ago with my students as we approached the end of the year.

Basically, I wanted my current students to provide material to help next year's students with the Belonging belief.

When they came in to class, I told them that they'd be filming a short video of themselves on Flipgrid describing any way in which they wrestled this year with feeling like they didn't belong in my class.

Here is how I asked them to structure their mini-videos:

And this is a sampling of what students created:

This is what I'd call a two-fer:

  • My current students, in completing this activity, solidified their Belonging belief by going through this process.
  • My next year students, in viewing these videos during September or October, will be given a chance to normalize their struggle (Strategy #10 in The Will to Learn) via what is essential an attributional retraining intervention (see Chapter 2 of These 6 Things).

Writing discoveries

The thing with being a teacher-writer is that you're not just a writer. Once your ideas are developed, there is a lot of work that goes into spreading, testing, and refining those ideas. Writing a book is a part of that process, but it's just a part.

Gratefully, this was not a year in which I wrote any new books. With the release of The Will to Learn in May 2023, this entire school year was one in which I refound my footing as a developer of ideas versus a writer of books. I took immense pleasure in refining the ideas in The Will to Learn and riffing on them via blog articles and YouTube videos.

On the blog, I published 82 articles, starting with “The Best Ways Out of the Web” and ending with the one you're reading. I thought it would be interesting to categorize that output, as there was no big picture rhyme or reason to it. Here's how it broke down.

Breakdown of articles published in the 23-24 school year

Most of them had to do with the Five Key Beliefs methodology for student motivation that I write about in The Will to Learn.

Some of the articles I wrote riffed upon ideas I brought forth in my 2018 book These 6 Things. (That book, by the way, continues to be centrally relevant to my teaching practice. I'm grateful for that because my goal in writing the book was to write something I'd still be happy to recommend for the rest of my career. Eight years out, I can say, “So far, so good.”) I've organized articles I wrote this year that relate to the six recommendations of These 6 Things in the list below.

A smattering had to do with the difficult inner work of teaching. Those were:

A handful were self-serving attempts at developing clarity for myself as a teacher-writer or telling you, colleague, what your readership means to me:

Two were guest posts by incredible educators:

And finally, a group of them were focused on sharing some ideas inside of the new asynchronous Principles of Learning course I created:

My thoughts on the articles I wrote

So, 82 articles. I am amazed at that output, given how challenging this year was for me personally. But what I find as I approach the 1,000 article mark for this website (we're currently at 980) is that article-writing is pretty efficient process for me at this point. Most article are short (1,000 words or less) and can be written in a single sitting. Many of them don't get revised after that — what you see is what I wrote, plus some God-bless-her copyediting by my longtime copy editor, Rachael Farwell. (TY, Rachael!)

In other words, writing blog articles is good for my mind and doesn't take terribly long. It's a mix of what's on my mind right now, and much of that comes from my conversations with teachers around the world or what I'm seeing in my classroom each day or what I'm reading.

My thoughts on article writing for the next school year (2024-2025)

Next school year, I hope to prioritize writing articles that help teachers with where they are in the current school year (e.g., mid-July through September, focus on the start of the year; October through March, focus on mid-year concerns; April through June, focus on end-of-year work). This summer I also hope to work on organizing all of these articles I've written so they are more accessible to teachers searching for solutions to specific problems or elaborations on specific key concepts in my books. As I continue to grapple with what it means to write online in a world where blogs with 100x the word count as mine can be generated by ChatGPTers in a matter of days, I have to focus on making this blog a more human, welcoming, and accessible place. This, plus the relationships you and I build through these articles, is the only moat that makes sense to me in defending against the threat of machine-generated “content.”

Speaking of adjusting my writing practice to meet the changing Internet, let's talk about videos

This year I also published 72 new videos on YouTube. I made this effort for a couple of reasons:

  • I have years of material on my blog that I've not shared via video, and I want to make my ideas accessible to a new generation of teachers who may be less likely to read a blog and more likely to watch a video.
  • Videos are more likely to be shared at staff meetings and PD days than blog articles.
  • Videos give readers a way of “knowing me” that written words can't.
  • I enjoy the challenge of communicating via video.
  • I'm an avid YouTube user myself. I love all the interesting topics I can learn about and listen to. In this way, I think my relationship with YouTube is similar to how a lot of folks relate to podcasts.

With that said, gaining traction on YouTube reminds me a lot of what it was like gaining traction with my blog in its earliest years (2012-2015). Meaning that you have to create a lot of material and very little of that material gets viewed all that much.

To illustrate what I mean, consider this stat: of these 72 new videos, only 12 were viewed more than 500 times:

Some of my older videos were also viewed a lot this year:

The reason I share those views is to demonstrate that putting your ideas into the world is not a “get rich quick” scheme in any way. It takes a long time for ideas to gain traction, especially in a content-riddled internet like ours. But: if you believe your ideas can help as I do, I find the labor restorative and generative. (Mostly. Sometimes I do get tired and take breaks.)

I also published a new course with 43 videos in it this year, The Principles of Learning Course. This was the hay bale that almost broke my camel's back this year. It was a lot of labor during the middle months of the year. I'm grateful with the end product, but it was challenging. Next year, I don't plan on creating any new courses, focusing instead on helping the ideas in The Will to Learn to spread and strengthen. I see the fruits in my class and my own potential to do better with those concepts. I want to help more folks do this work and lead this work.

Closing thoughts on my work as a teacher-writer

As I reflect on this past year's work as a teacher-writer, here are my big takeaways in now particular order:

  1. Social media is overrated. While I do see that social media is an important way the word gets out about your work as a writer, I think lots of writers get distracted by building a social media following. When I look back at how much the social media landscape has changed since I started writing in 2012, I'm glad I didn't sweat getting big on Facebook or Twitter or Tiktok. I'm happy for folks who use those avenues to find success — good on ya. I just know that for me, it's all about the writing and the creating. When I focus on 1) writing lots of things and getting them out into the world consistently, and 2) taking to heart the questions and feedback I receive as I go, my work improves. If I do these two things, I gain clarity — an exceedingly valuable resource in today's muddled age.
  2. I HAVE to possess two kinds of WHYs — one that's selfish and one that's not. When I started writing, I had two settled convictions. These continue to stoke the fires of my own Five Key Beliefs toward the work of teacher-writing.
    • Writing would scratch a personal itch in my soul to process the things I was seeing, thinking about, reading about, and experiencing in my classroom, AND the writing process would clarify my thoughts and feelings like not writing never would. This meant I had a “can't miss” goal for writing: to improve my own condition, to strengthen my own soul.
    • There was not enough teacher stuff on the Internet written by ACTUAL teachers who are ACTUALLY REAL PEOPLE seeking to build full lives (rather than just feed their egos). This meant I had a “moonshot” goal for writing: to make the Internet a bit of a better place for teachers like me. Not everyone appreciates or needs the hyper-simplified methods I espouse. But some folks do. Those are the folks I write for.
  3. It's way better to take five years to write a book you can expand upon for ten years than it is to take one year to write a book you need to immediately follow up with another book. These 6 Things came out in 2018, and it took me about five years to write it; The Will to Learn came out in 2023, and when you consider how that book is basically a massive expansion of Chapter 2 of These 6 Things, it's fair to say that it took me 10 years to write it. (When I say “write it,” I include the huge loads of time, research, reflection, and prayer it takes me to get to the book proposal, and then of course the time it takes to get from the proposal to the finished manuscript to the book in your hand.) I'm very grateful that, a year out from the publication of The Will to Learn, I sense I'm just getting started on unpacking that book and what it can do for our profession. And I'm grateful because I still find student motivation to be such a fascinating and rewarding and humanizing area of the work of teaching. I love talking to schools about this topic, I love seeing my ideas continue to improve and sharpen, and I love meeting teachers who are taking the ideas I've shared and making them 100x better with their own strengths and giftings.

And finally, colleague — as I close out this year's writing, I am so grateful for you. Knowing that you'll be reading is what helps me push in to those experimental areas I wrote about in the first half of this article. It gives me an onus to open up a new post and start writing. It makes me attentive to some of those little details in my classrooms each day that become profound examples of the stuff at the very foundations of teaching and learning.

It is with much love and respect that, on my last day of teaching this year, I sign off today.

Next year, I'll be teaching right beside you, yet again.

Yours,

DSJR

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Kathy Below (Sandusky City Schools, Ohio) says

    Hi Dave,
    My school year is ending today and I’m evaluating all the activities that my students and I completed this school year. Of course, I always feel that I could have done more, worked harder, stressed less, etc, etc. Next year, I get to teach a new class: Speech and Debate–my go to book is Well Spoken by Erik Palmer. Thank you for talking about him because I have used his PVLEGS material in my classes for the last several years and also use Pop Up Debate as well. I’m not sure I could fit in 20 PUDs, but you have put out the challenge. And then there’s writing. Can’t get enough of it. Few students embrace it. My goal for next year is to concentrate on feedback. One resource that I have used in the past but forgot about this year is Mote. Have you tried it? It is voice messaging that can be used with my Google Classroom. I have also vowed to use pen and blue books for writing–we’ll see. But if I do, you can still use Mote and that is my plan. You can use Mote in Gmail as well. Well, that’s all for now. Thank you again for your weekly motivations and experiences. I appreciate all your hard work.

    Reply

    • davestuartjr says

      Kathy, it’s always my pleasure recommending Erik’s work, as it’s been such a boon in my classroom, too. I haven’t done much w/ Mote, but I’m intrigued.

      Reply

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