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Dave Stuart Jr.

Teaching Simplified.

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The Whole of Dave’s Writing, All On One Page

I'm a teacher who writes. This is the page where you can find everything I've written. With every article I write, my goal is to help you (and me) grow more effective and more stable in our work with students. More learning, less stress: that's the gist of my work.

New articles are sent to my popular (and free) email newsletter. Below, you'll find links to everything I've written to date. Since it's a lot (nearly 900,000 words), I'll start with some of my more popular posts.

Helpful Explainers about Root Issues in Teaching

What's the deal with student motivation?

As of 2023, I've got a book out that provides my most comprehensive and practical take on student motivation. It's ideal for secondary faculties and is written by a teacher for teachers. I don't think you'll find anything deeper or more explanatory on this topic anywhere. The book is called The Will to Learn, and you can learn more about it here or click on the picture of the book at right.

If you'd prefer the free route, you'll find a blog series I did on this topic while preparing to write the book. Those links are below.

Either way, grab a cuppa and let's do this.

  • Series Intro, Part I: On the Teaching of Souls
  • Series Intro, Part II: The Path to the Head is the Heart
  • Series Intro, Part III: Five Critical Qualities about the Five Key Beliefs, in Order of Actionability
  • Credibility Guide: Three Simple, Robust Strategies for Building the Credibility Belief
  • Value Guide: Three Simple, Robust Strategies for Building the Value Belief
  • Effort Guide: Three Simple, Robust Methods for Establishing Effort
  • Efficacy Guide: Three Simple, Robust Strategies for Building the Efficacy Belief
  • Belonging Guide: Three Simple, Robust Strategies for Building the Belonging Belief

What's the deal with teacher motivation?

I'm currently working through my most comprehensive take yet on the fundamentals of our motivation — mine and yours, us educators. This is waaaay deeper, more useful, and more robustly hopeful than the stuff you typically read on burnout or self-care.

  • Series Intro, Part I: The Teacher's Journey: A Deeper, Better Way of Thinking (and Doing Something) about Burnout and Demoralization
  • Series Intro, Part II: Efficiency Hasn't Saved Us
  • Series Intro, Part III: The Mechanics of Teacher Burnout (AKA the Workload-Pressure Cycle)
  • Series Intro, Part IV: A Strategic, Smart Approach to Depressurizing the Teacher Soul
  • Depressurizing the Teacher Soul Mini-Guides:
    • On Exercise: “All or Nothing” Exercise Exhausts the Soul
    • On Emotionally Honest Support Groups: Groups Where We're Known
    • On Swearing Off Judgment: The Day Mr. Rogers Stopped Judging
    • More to come!

Helpful Books

This blog can be very overwhelming, as it contains all of my rough draft thinking as a classroom teacher-writer since I started writing publicly in 2012. Thankfully, there's now a polished and refined version of much of what I had written on the blog as of 2018. It's called These 6 Things: How to Focus Your Teaching on What Matters Most.

I'm grateful to report that These 6 Things has been called “a how-to guide for teaching with your head and your heart” and “among the most helpful, practical, insightful teaching resources” available. It's been read and appreciated by middle school math teachers in California, college writing instructors in Idaho, heads of schools in Dubai, and elementary teachers in Michigan. It's the shortest path into understanding how I think about and approach our work as educators.

If you don't have a year to sift through my blog, consider getting the book, first for you and then for your team 🙂

The first chapter is here — no opt-in required.

In June 2022, two colleagues and I released another helpful book, this one specifically for secondary English Language Arts (ELA) educators.

These two colleagues are truly excellent. Matthew Kay is the author of the bestselling Not Light But Fire: How to Lead Meaningful Race Conversations in the Classroom and Matthew Johnson is the author of Flash Feedback: Responding to Student Writing Better and Faster, Without Burning Out. When writing this book, we each wrote to our strengths and aimed at completing a resource we wish we had had when starting out as ELA teachers. We hope it helps.

You can get it here.

And finally, in May 2023 I came out with what I meant to be a timeless entry in the literature on student motivation. I'm not a “publish tons of books” guy. I only plan to write books that I believe will be so helpful that they must be put out into the world. The book is called The Will to Learn.

You can get it here.

Most Popular

Keeping in mind that popular doesn't always mean best, these are articles that've been shared and read by lots of thousands of educators like you and me.

  • Mechanics Instruction that Sticks: Using Simple Warm-Ups to Improve Student Writing
  • Latin Word Chunks: A Case Study in Smart, Low-Stress Knowledge-Building
  • Nine Instructional Moves for Teaching Texts
  • Beyond the Fear of Public Speaking: Making the First Pop-Up Debate a Success for All Students
  • The 300-Word Guide to Long-Term Flourishing
  • 9 Principles for Working Better with Fellow Educators
  • There Are No Silver Bullets, but There Are Swords
  • Purposeful Annotation: A “Close Reading” Strategy that Makes Sense to My Students
  • There and Back Again: My Journey with Gallagher’s Article of the Week Assignment

Search My Writing

Here's a tool for searching my blog.

Elsewhere on the Web

I have not spent much time or effort writing for other outlets, but what I have written (or been featured in) you can find below:

  • The Marshall Memo: Issues #845, 847, 848, 870, 874, 917, 970, 971
  • Edutopia
  • NEA Today: “Who Stands Between Fake News and Students? Educators”
  • “The Best of Our Knowledge” radio interview, titled “So You Wanna be a Teacher”
  • The National Speech and Debate League's Rostrum Journal, Nov/Dec 2019
  • The DonorsChoose.org blog
  • The Language Arts Journal of Michigan: Volume 34, Issue 2

I've also been on a few podcasts:

  • Cult of Pedagogy w/ Jenn Gonzalez
  • Truths for Teachers w/ Angela Watson
  • Teacher to Teacher
  • On the Right Road Radio w/ Paula Phillips
  • Thrive Thursday w/ Doug Fisher and Nancy Frey
  • Class Dismissed w/ Nick Ortego
  • Writing Matters w/ Troy Hicks
  • Talks with Teachers w/ Brian Sztabnik
  • One Percent Better w/ Joe Ferraro
  • John Poelstra Show w/ John Poelstra
  • The Distilled Man w/ Kyle Ingham
  • Life on Brand w/ Hien Lam and Matt Hansen
  • CBD Podcast w/ Peter Grostic (and here's a Part 2)
  • The Chromebook Classroom w/ John Sowash

The Full List: 1,000+ articles, 1,000,000+ words

And finally, here's a list of all of my articles are in chronological order. Enjoy.

2025 • 2024 • 2023 • 2022 • 2021 • 2020 • 2019 • 2018 • 2017 • 2016 • 2015 • 2014 • 2013 • 2012

2025
  • Everest Statements in Elementary School?
  • Two (of Many) Things I'm (Intentionally) Not Good At
  • Learning Takes Drafts: 13 Years of DSJ (Blog Birthday 🥳)
  • Three Levels of MGCs
  • What If Students Get Too Personal?
  • The MGC Inflection Point
  • Every Student Known
  • How to Woodenize Working Memory (Woodenization Example)
  • Are Worksheets Bad?
  • What's a Distraction? (Woodenization Example)
  • 3 Things You Can Learn From Fixing a Faucet
  • A Simple Pre- and Post-Test Exercise (Unpack Outcomes Example)
  • The Trouble With Sitting Behind Our Desks
  • Are We Becoming Grumbles?
  • Busy About the Business
  • Focused Finish: MGCs Aimed at Purpose, Goals, and Growth
  • Let's Finish the Year Together
  • What's Your Focused Finish?
  • How an 8th Grade Teacher Made an Everest Statement for Reading and Had Her Students Make One for Writing
  • How David Reese Mini-Sermonized an Assignment's Instructions
  • An Incredible Moment in Caleb N's English Class
  • More Caroline Ong Mini-Sermons
  • Just Three Types
  • 💪 It's the Final Countdown 🎶
  • Live Talks
  • School's PERMAnent Value
  • Have We Entered the Student Motivation Apocalypse?
  • The Four Keys to Efficacy
  • If My Phone Distracts Me… Except There Is No If
  • What's Woodenization All About?
  • Three Ways to Stoke the Value Fireplace
  • 90% of Our Students…
  • The Biggest Problem (and Opportunity) With Educational AI…
  • The Subversive Nature of a Good Mini-Sermon
  • It Works If We Work It
2024
  • Wishing You a Regret-Free Winter Break 😁
  • What Mentally Strong Teachers DON'T Do
  • How Psychoanalyst Amy Morin Teaches Through Non-Examples
  • The Keys to Hitting a Target
  • Woodenization Example: Improving at Short Answer Questions + Teaching the Rubric
  • Why “Work Harder” is a Terrible Plan
  • The Best Pop-Up Debate Prompt in my Repertoire (Valued Within Exercise)
  • To Be Versus to Seem
  • The Argument Game Works Well With Children (Valued Within Exercise)
  • Mathy (or Sciency or Historyish) Moments (Valued Within Exercise)
  • Why Conversations (Valued Within Exercise)
  • The “Why This Could Matter” T-Chart (Valued Within Exercise)
  • Pop-Up Debate LIVE Workshop
  • The Value Puzzle
  • The Stockdale Paradox
  • A Thousand Is More Than Four: The Quiet Power of Teaching
  • *Everyone* Is Better Off With More Mastery
  • No Top to the Mountain
  • Why We Start Class Well
  • Why We Argue
  • Why We Build Knowledge (Ft. Kelly Gallagher)
  • Why We Write
  • Why We Do What We Do
  • Mini-Sermons – DSJR Student Motivation Guide
  • The Robots Have Won…Sort Of.
  • Let's Zoom It Out
  • An Old Dog Learning From an Old Trick: Lessons Learned from the September Invitation
  • An Experiment in Curiosity and Well-Being
  • What are you curious about right now?
  • Tips for Starting Pop-Up Debates Well
  • Using MGCs to Stoke Student Work Ethic
  • Teacher Transformation: The Two Things It Takes
  • MGCs Can Be EXHAUSTING
  • September Invitation: Let's MGC Our Hearts Out
  • The Bell is My Boss, Too
  • Motivation: The Cause of Doing Work or the Effect?
  • Five First Week Reflections
  • The Value Belief – DSJR Student Motivation Guide
  • Moments of Genuine Connection (MGCs) – DSJR Student Motivation Guide
  • Teacher Credibility – DSJR Student Motivation Guide
  • The Five Key Beliefs Beneath Student Motivation – DSJR Guide
  • This School Year, Try the Minimalist Approach to Student Motivation
  • The Complete Guide to Pop-Up Debates – a DSJR Guide
  • How to Get Through Your Curriculum This Year (Credibility Booster)
  • The (Few but Purposeful) Classroom Posters I Use
  • Everest Statements and Clarity of Purpose – the Complete DSJR Guide
  • A Complete Classroom Management Guide for an Enjoyable and Productive Learning Environment
  • Everything You Need (and Nothing You Don't) to Start the 2024-2025 School Year Well
  • DSJR is Back: Here's What You Can Expect for Back-to-School Season
  • Normalize Struggle – DSJR Student Motivation Guide
  • The Belonging Belief – DSJR Student Motivation Guide
  • Unpack Outcomes – DSJR Student Motivation Guide
  • Define Success – DSJR Student Motivation Guide
  • Woodenization – DSJR Student Motivation Guide
  • The Effort and Efficacy Beliefs – DSJR Student Motivation Guide
  • Valued Within Exercises – DSJR Student Motivation Guide
  • How to Teach Mechanics and Editing Using Mechanics Instruction that Sticks and Supplements – DSJR One Stop Shop
  • 2023-2024 School Year in Review
  • Why AP Students Are Some of the Worst Motivated Students in Our High Schools (Or: The Most Comprehensive Talk I've Given to Date on Student Motivation)
  • Value Indicator: “When Am I Ever Going to Use This?”
  • Next Year, Don't Start With Belonging
  • Should YOU Write a Book About Teaching?
  • End of Year Efficacy Booster: Unpacking Outcomes via Conversation Challenge
  • We Can't Give What We Don't Have
  • Administrators, You've GOT to Help Us With This ONE Thing Next Year
  • Can Science Class Be Beautiful?
  • End of Year Value Booster: the Led Tasso
  • End of Year Credibility Booster: If You Could Improve ONE Thing About Your Teaching From This Past Year…
  • End of Year Credibility Booster: Final Moments of Genuine Connection (MGCs)
  • End of Year Teacher Clarity Booster: A Mission and a Project
  • End of Year Value Booster: Ask Them
  • Three Outputs of Truly Great Teachers
  • End of Year Value Booster: “What Was It All For?” End of Year Mini-Sermon
  • The Second-Best Time to Tell Students School Matters…
  • Secondary Schools Wanted
  • Using AI as a Parent
  • What I'm Trying to Say Is
  • Three Tips for More MEANINGful Parent/Teacher Conferences
  • Can Teachers Practice Cal Newport's “Slow Productivity”?
  • How to Resolve Pop-Up Debate Power Struggles Where a Student Refuses to Speak
  • Does Teaching a Lesson Make You Brave?
  • In the Tunnel? Find the Beauty.
  • *Unavoidable* Difficulties in Learning: Dr. Stephen Chew's “Choke Points”
  • Forty Things I've Learned So Far
  • Avoidable vs. Unavoidable Difficulty
  • What If a Student Has an Accommodation that Prohibits Speaking in Whole-Class Discussions?
  • Need an Idea for Tomorrow's Lesson Plan? Try a Quiz
  • A Magical Tool 🦄
  • I'm Not Good at Much
  • Students are Novices, and That's Not a Bad Thing
  • The Expert Equation
  • Great Ways to Learn with Colleagues
  • The Science of Teaching Choir
  • Chris Hemsworth Can Lift More Weight than Me
  • Average Efforts + the Long-Term
  • Four Ways Students Forget Things
  • Who's Got It Better Than Us?
  • English Matters: An English Teacher Looks Back, Looks Within, Looks Ahead
  • Is It Possible to Help a Student Who is “Confused About Everything?”
  • Happy New Year, Colleague — Three Kinds of Goals
2023
  • A Somber Yet Hopeful Holiday Blessing
  • Efficacy and the Brain 101 – David Reese Guest Post
  • The Kind of Weird You Want to Be
  • Observe Average Teachers, Too
  • Unpacking a Student Letter
  • Thankful for You, Colleague
  • Dear Workaholic Colleague
  • What Bill Watterson Teaches Teachers
  • The Familiarity Trap
  • Feedback is 🔥 (But LOTS of Teachers Misunderstand and Overcomplicate It)
  • Test Stress and Anxiety are Not Inevitable
  • The Most Important Technology in My Classroom
  • Two Simple Questions to Help Students Improve Performance in Your Current Unit
  • DSJR's Biggest Announcement in Five Years 🥳
  • The Problem with Temporal Distance
  • How to Help Motivate A Student Who Only Wants to Draw
  • What Does It Mean to be an English Teacher?
  • Should You Quit Your Teaching Job? (Or: It's October Again)
  • Should We Please and Thank Students?
  • 25 Questions to Ask During 2x10s
  • You're Just Not Enough, and Neither Am I
  • Smallies v. Biggies
  • The Simple Slide I Use to Structure My Lessons
  • A Simple Method for Checking Student Vocab Comprehension During Tests
  • To Spot AI, You've Gotta Know Stuff
  • None the Worser
  • Pop-Up Debates as Comprehension Improvement? Apparently, Yes!
  • Pick a Student, Any Student
  • “One of the teachers I work with is bad at their job. Does this hurt my credibility, too?”
  • The Five Key Beliefs in a Pep Talk from The Bear
  • Getting Specific with Valued, Known, Respected
  • Ya Gotta Clear the Clouds
  • A Seek and Find Challenge for the First Weeks of School
  • Using the Godfather to Help with Belonging
  • The Four Pillars: Defining Success at the Start of the Year (and Often Thereafter)
  • Did Last Year's Teachers Fail? Or, a Reflection on the Recursivity of Growing Greater Skills
  • 42 Prompts to Get Students Speaking or Writing at the Start of the School Year
  • Can Writing More Make Sense in Classes like Phys Ed, Band, or Computer Science?
  • This Year, Get Your Students Writing Provisionally
  • I Used to Think I Had to Do It All and Be It All…
  • This Fall, Create a Cosmos
  • The DSJR Mini-Courses
  • The Best Ways Out of the Web
  • The DSJ PD Topic Menu: Things I Can Help With
  • User X Tool = Output
  • What Would You Most Like to Learn About This Summer?
  • The Time I Asked ChatGPT to Write an Essay Comparing Narnia, The Shining, and Rocky
  • I Was Wrong About ChatGPT and AI (Part 2 of 3): What I'm Not Saying and Why I'm Interested
  • The Thing with Cheating
  • I Was Wrong About ChatGPT and AI (Part 1 of 3)
  • You Can't Coerce Care
  • Does Goal-Setting Help or Harm Teacher Motivation?
  • Ten Reasons It's Good
  • The Introvert and Extrovert Pressure Curves
  • Does Teaching Students to Count Count as Much as Teaching Them What Counts?
  • A Time for Ish
  • What I Talk About When I Talk to My Children about Spelling
  • The Yerkes-Dodson Dilemma
  • The teacher's work is like the landscape
  • The Gist of a Gisty Book
  • Should Teachers Show Examples of Their Own Work to Students?
  • As Great as the Best
  • Should School Librarians Track Attempted MGCs?
  • How Do I Get There? vs. You Must Go
  • We Lack Clarity, Not Strategies
  • Booker T. Washington on the Efficacy Belief
  • On the Building of Strong Children
  • The Five Key Beliefs in Five-ish Minutes
  • An Ode to the Teacher Who Introduced Me to Etymology
  • In A World Gone Wild, Why Care About Student Motivation?
  • “School is a word game”
  • 📗Exciting News📗 + You're More Powerful than DALL-E 2
  • ChatGPT: No Thing But a Chicken Wing
  • Should Students Sit in Rows?
  • Coming This Month: The Credibility Signal Booster Mini-Course
  • Underdemanded v. Overdemanded
  • How to Teach Secondary Students to Improve Their Penmanship (According to a Non-Expert)
  • Three Student Questions to Start (or Spark) Your School Year
  • The Student Motivation Summit
  • The Best PD Is Often Next Door
2022
  • Happy Holidays = A Great Time for a Hard Pause on School
  • Underused Value Angle: Science Class is Beautiful
  • What You Think v. What Students Think
  • Teaching Students Why We Review Like We Do
  • The Circle of Power: Something Good for the Last Five Minutes of Class
  • How Do the CASEL 5 Relate to the Five Key Beliefs?
  • Think and Thank on Your Scarletts Today
  • The Zoom Out Method
  • Woodenize All of It
  • What If We Had Time?
  • Faculty and Staff Door Signs: A Simple Schoolwide Credibility Signal
  • Satisficing ≠ Quiet Quitting
  • Competence ≠ Perfection
  • The Gift of Many Teachers
  • This Weekend, Maybe Work on a Work Schedule
  • Longevity as Its Own Form of Greatness
  • Being a Credible Teacher is Like Having a Good Wine Label
  • It's “Finished”
  • Two Principles for Normalizing Struggle in a Given Classroom
  • High Expectations: An Ingredient, Not a Meal
  • Common Misperceptions Regarding Moments of Genuine Connection
  • Such a Doggone Good Feeling
  • “We're the Fork to the Community's Farm”
  • How to Feel Less Nuts This School Year
  • Maybe Say It Again
  • But Have You Taught Them How?
  • Who Else But Us?
  • The Beautiful Question
  • We're Signal Senders
  • Should You Tell Students You Like Them?
  • Youthful Purpose Guru Bill Damon's “Golden Opportunity”
  • Waiting on Stars (Or You've Never Met a Student that Wants to be Demotivated in School)
  • Diving Deeper into Caroline Ong's “Math is Beautiful” High Horse — In Her Own Words
  • The Rainbow of Why: Go Jackson Pollock with Those Colors
  • An Apologist Winsome and Sure: Caroline Ong's “Math is Beautiful High Horse” Example
  • How to *Have Fun* Helping Your Students Value School This Year
  • The Inner Work (Teaching Simplified for Back to School Series)
  • Have Your 🍰 and Eat It, Too
  • Think on Helpful Things (Teaching Simplified, August 2022)
  • Simple Rules, Visualized (Teaching Simplified Series, August 2022)
  • Two Start-of-the-Year Questions for Educators (Teaching Simplified Series, 2022)
  • From “Argh to Agency:” Unveiling Season 11 of This Blog
  • Closing Out the School Year: A Letter to My Colleagues
  • A Time to Weep and a Time to Love
  • School Year Shut Down: Dedicate the Year Behind
  • Reframing the End of School Countdown
  • School Year Shut Down: Acknowledge a Colleague
  • School Year Shut Down: Fill a Box with Stuff*
  • School Year Shut Down: Rest Your Best
  • School Year Shut Down: Getting Our Souls Ready for Summer
  • New Book! 📖 Answers to Your Biggest Questions About Teaching Middle and High School ELA
  • Caren Saunders' Simple Template for Replying to Students Who Email Her about Improving Their Grade
  • Self-Assessment: Paul Graham on Three Traits of Great Teachers
  • A Pop-Up Debate for Helping Students Value Writing
  • EOY Motivation Moves, Part 4: Five Homes, Five Days
  • EOY Motivation Moves, Part 3: Tell Me Five
  • End of Year Motivation Moves, Part 2 — Work the Roster
  • Student Motivation at the End of the School Year
  • Value Booster: Why Are You Here?
  • Learning Lesson 8: It's Easy to Trick Yourself into Thinking You Know More Than You Know
  • Learning Lesson 7: Bad Learning Strategies Are Popular
  • Learning Lesson 6: Multitasking is popular, but it doesn't work
  • Learning Lesson 5: We Forget Stuff
  • Learning Lesson 4: Working Memory is Limited
  • Learning Lesson 3: Concentration is hard
  • Learning Lesson 2: Attention is Narrow
  • Learning Lesson 1: The Goal is Long-Term Memory
  • Eight Lessons for Enhancing the Effort and Efficacy Beliefs
  • Credibility/Value Booster: Is that a Treasure Chest I See You Carrying?
  • Simple Credibility Booster: Brian Sztabnik's Sermonizing Ritual
  • Dave's Favorite Books on Aging for Educators 🥳
  • What I Do When a Parent, Guardian, or Student Emails Me Re: Make-Up Work or “How to Get My Grade Up”
  • The Teacher's First Test of the Day, Part 2 (Or How to Boost Your Credibility and Sanity with a Clear and Reinforced Start-of-Class Procedure)
  • The Teacher's First Test of the Day, Part 1
  • What I Learned Watching a High School Math Teacher Talk Numbers with a Four-Year-Old
  • Credibility Booster: Count Down
  • Credibility Booster: Fred's Best Line
  • Credibility Booster: MGCing the Whole Class in a Single Class Period
  • Credibility Booster: Sharing Bits o' Pedagogy
  • What's a “Minimum Viable Understanding” of the Five Key Beliefs?
  • Competence is Queen
  • Print the Doggone Paper! 🙂
  • Credibility Booster: How to Get Better at Authoritative Teacher Presence
  • 20 Simple, Low Stress Ideas for Boosting Teacher Credibility
  • “I Can't Handle Five Key Beliefs Right Now. Gimme Just One.”
  • The Inputs-Outputs Question
  • Adjustment En Route to Everest
2021
  • Thoughts Worth Thinkin'
  • What Makes Good PD Good? DSJ Annual Review for 2021
  • Finally, a Breathing Trick I Can Remember
  • A Good Day to Laugh
  • Attending to Others When What You Crave Is Attention
  • The Thing About Minds (with Help from Toni Morrison)
  • New — Dave's Faves Holiday Gift Guide 🎁
  • Let's Be on Pause: A Thanksgiving Message from DSJR
  • Depressurizing Emotion: How to Calm a Hostile Written Conversation Using BIFF
  • Depressurizing the Body: The Bummer about Bedtime Revenge
  • Depressurizing Our Relationships: The Day Mr. Rogers Stopped Judging
  • Groups Where We're Known
  • “All or Nothing” Exercise Exhausts the Soul
  • A Strategic, Smart Approach to Depressurizing the Teacher Soul
  • The Mechanics of Teacher Burnout (AKA the Workload-Pressure Cycle)
  • Efficiency Hasn't Saved Us
  • The Teacher's Journey: A Deeper, Better Way of Thinking (and Doing Something) about Burnout and Demoralization
  • Need Help with Student Motivation or Teacher Time Management? Start Here. (Plus: What's Next on the Blog🤘)
  • How to Heal a Divided World: 🌎📝 Argumentative Writing that Actually Listens to the Other Side
  • This Is How I Teach Students to Take Notes for Learning
  • A Shift then a Skip: Here's How One Teacher's Job Changed with a Simple Change in Thinking
  • How to Get Better at Satisficing as an Educator
  • The Best Question for Helping You Simplify Lessons, Curricula, Policies, or Procedures
  • A Few Helpful Ideas for Resting as an Educator
  • The Case for Lumpiness
  • Let's Pick Some Sled Dogs
  • We're Too Hospitable to Pointlessness
  • A Simple Syllabus Language Change that Helped a Teacher Get the Breakthrough
  • To Decide is to Cut
  • Not a Lot of Time
  • Guide: Three Simple, Robust Methods for Establishing Belonging in the First Weeks of School
  • Get To
  • Guide: Three Simple, Robust Methods for Establishing Efficacy in the First Weeks of School
  • The Trouble with “Praise the Process, Not the Person”
  • Guide: Three Simple, Robust Methods for Establishing Effort in the First Weeks of School
  • The Desire for Knowledge: One of the Most Underplayed Approaches to Value-Based Motivation in US Public Education Today
  • Guide: Three Simple, Robust Methods for Establishing Value in the First Weeks of School
  • Freaked Out About the First Day of School? Three Quick Things that Help
  • Can Ten Minutes of Reading Change a Whole Semester of Teaching? It May Have for This Teacher
  • Guide: Three Simple, Robust Methods for Establishing Teacher Credibility in the First Weeks of School
  • Steady Goes It: It's Tortoise Time
  • Five Critical Qualities about the Five Key Beliefs, in Order of Actionability
  • Not a Switchboard, but a Garden
  • The Path to the Head is the Heart
  • But What About Social-Emotional Learning?
  • What's the Deal with Student Motivation? Or: On the Teaching of Souls
  • Guaranteed, Viable, and Good Curricula… and a Note about Legos
  • 3 Simple Ways to Practice Classroom Management on Your Kids This Summer
  • Efficiency Matters and Perfection is a Mirage: Updates to the Article of the Week for 2021-2022
  • Embodying What's Good and True
  • “I'm Already Stressing About Next Year. What Can I Do?”
  • The Best Thing to Do This Summer
  • Video Response: “My School Is Planning More ‘New' than Ever: What Do I Do?”
  • Finish Like We'd Like to Start: The Return of These 6 Things
  • I'm In. Here's the (Start of the) Plan.
  • Here's the Thing: We Could Do Something Else
  • Habituate What You Can, Motivate What You Can’t
  • Self-Disqualification (+ What To Do About It)
  • You Really Don't Know
  • The Teacher's Journey
  • The Change to Come
  • The Two Bottlenecks
  • Highly Qualified < Highly Competent
  • We're in the Counterculture Business
  • It Might Not Be Zoom Fatigue
  • What If Schools Were Places Where the Value of Learning Was Obvious?
  • Ten Things Leaders Can Do to Improve Teacher Morale in Early 2021
  • Learning Strategy: Teaching Students to Use Quizlet Effectively
  • The Whole World Blind
  • How to Help Students Value Learning Just Because It's Learning (Video)
2020
  • “We're On Pause”
  • What Keeps the Fire? Here Are Two Skillsets that Motivated Career Educators Have in Common
  • Things That Help: Taking a Walk When I'm Stuck, or the Five-Out-Five-In
  • “Cameras On… Please?” Ideas for Turning Empty Squares into Faces
  • Sandcastles v. the Himalayas: On Weak and Strong Boundaries
  • The Workload-Pressure Paradox
  • Thankful for You
  • Things That Help: Weekly Wrap-Up Video for Parents
  • How to Teach and Reinforce Norms for the Synchronous Remote Classroom: Here's the Simple Approach I Used
  • How I Handled Misbehaviors on the First Day of Zoom Classroom
  • Things That Help: “Good Times”
  • My School Just Went Remote: Here Are Ten Things That Are Helping
  • Things That Help: Lisa Van Gemert's Content Capsules Method for Creating Joyful, Knowledge-Rich Learning Spaces, Remotely or In-Person
  • Things That Help: Emails as Letters
  • Books That Helped: October 2020
  • Things That Help: Five Tips for Better PD This (Crazy) School Year
  • The Will to Learn: Practical Methods for Improving Motivation (Session Description)
  • Workload and Pressure: Things That Help Teachers During Times Like These (Session Description)
  • Things That Help: One Fourth Grade Teacher's Simple Method for Positive Parent Contacts During Distance Learning
  • Reflection Questions for a Simpler, Clearer Calendar
  • Ten (Or So) Things That Are Helping Right Now
  • A Micro-Primer on How Motivation Works in People, Why Demoralization is So Prevalent Right Now Amongst Teachers, and What We Can Do About It
  • Things That Help: “I Can't Fix Everything, Or Sometimes Anything”
  • The #EducatorEncouragement Project: A Small Favor for Our Profession
  • Things that Help: Calling Out the Goodness You See in Students
  • The Surprisingly Similar Troubles with Strategies Based on Coercion or Engagement
  • Things That Help: Venting in a Vacuum
  • DSJ Digest: On Difficulty, Twitter, Yelling, and Naps
  • Things That Help: Go Home Early One Day to “Work from Home,” but Instead of Working Climb Into Your Bed and Pull the Covers Up to Your Chin and Sleep Like a Child
  • Why Is This So Hard? On Workload, Pressure, and the Ways through the Woods
  • Two Simple Techniques for Increasing Meaningful Interaction During In-Person PD
  • Video: Five Ways to Find More Time to Read Books
  • Weekends Can Restore, But They Don't Do It On Autopilot: Here Are Two Simple Practices That Can Help
  • Inside the Mind of a Master Teacher: Here's How Lynsay Fabio Would Approach Classroom Management During Distance Learning
  • Here's How and Why to Use Guided Meditation as a Teacher During COVID
  • A Simple Tweak for Tracking Moments of Genuine Connection in Band
  • Here's How One Teacher Humanized the Heck Out of Her Online Learning Space with a Story-Driven Intro Video
  • What to Do When Your Asynchronous Video Lessons Aren't Great But You've Got to Post Them Before You Go Crazy
  • How (and Why) to Leave Audio Feedback on Student Work This Year, Whether During In-Person or Distance Learning
  • Catchphrases that Work: “Is this a Mosquito Wing Thing?”
  • Eight Tips for Using the *New* Editing Practice that Sticks
  • A Million Words or Fewer: Deborah Bova's Tried-and-True Method for Learning from Parents at the Start of Distance Learning
  • A Middle School Science Team in New Mexico Rocks their Distance Learning Intro Video with Humor and Passion
  • An Interview w/ Troy Hicks for the Writing Matters Podcast
  • How to Deal with Bad Feelings About Teaching This Year: A Self-Examination Protocol for Understanding (and Starting to Do Something About) Negative Teacher Emotions
  • People, Not Passwords: Why You Need a Catchphrase or Two to Define Your Challenges This Fall
  • A Three-Question Checklist for Building Stronger Relationships through Moments of Genuine Connection
  • How to Use Mechanics Instruction that Sticks When Teaching Remotely: Thoughts from the Author, Doug Stark
  • How to Humanize Your Classroom or School When You're Teaching from a Distance: Principles and Practices
  • How to Train Your Will to Want to Teach Again, Despite Everything: Principles and a Practice
  • How to Build Strong Relationships with Students if You're Starting the Year Online: Principles and Practices
  • Four Months In: How's Your Will to Teach? (Plus Writing Intentions for Back to School)
  • A Beautiful, Simple Strategy for Improving Your School Culture
  • Three Questions to Ask After Every Conversation, According to Author Kate Murphy
  • Flexibility v. Consistency: The Paradox We've Got to Wrestle With
  • Lots of Nails
  • A Humane Email Norm that More Districts Should Consider
  • Summer Books: On Race, Listening, and Work
  • “If You're Not Building Knowledge, You're Not Teaching Reading.”
  • Beyond Coercion: Thinking Deeper than Carrots and Sticks
  • Teachers Need Time to Learn about Using Time
  • Debunking Relevance as *the* Key to Student Motivation
  • What Has the Spring of 2020 Taught Us about Student Motivation?
  • The Spectre of Moral Disengagement: What It Is, Why It Matters
  • A Conversation w/ Beau Larimer re: These 6 Things
  • Livestream Recording: A Conversation with Nancy Frey and Doug Fisher re: Motivation Amidst the Closures
  • What If We Took an Hour?
  • On Internal Pendulums, Tsunamis of Urgency, and Two Life-Giving Disciplines for Educators
  • Which Is the Better Lesson? An Illustration of What an Equity-Producing, Knowledge-Rich Curriculum Looks Like
  • Motivation is Heavily Affected by K-12 Curricula, Too
  • Is Classroom Management Icky? And Does It Even Matter for This Fall?
  • (Video) Guiding Students through a Simple Test Anxiety Reduction Activity
  • Shouldn’t We Just Have Students Teach Themselves?
  • Addendum: Making End-of-Year Surveys More Useful by Listing Specific Assignments
  • An End-of-Year Survey for Measuring the Five Key Beliefs
  • Something to Hate or Something to Relish
  • Consistency Breeds Ability
  • Occupational Burnout is a Thing, According to the World Health Organization
  • Flash Feedback: There's a Way to Tame the Feedback Monster
  • What Star Wars Can Teach Us About Emergency Remote Teaching and Learning: An Attempt at Useful Fun Amidst All This
  • How to Rig Google Classroom to Act as an Office Hours Paging System (Video)
  • Moments of Genuine Connection via Google Classroom: How One Savvy Teacher Makes MGCs More Powerful Amidst Phase 1
  • Just Because “Drill and Kill” Rhyme…
  • How Do We Make Class Video Meetings Less Awkward?
  • What Do Moments of Genuine Connection Look Like Amidst Emergency Remote Teaching?
  • “How Do You Remember What You Read?”: Helpful Practices for Improving Our Recall of Professional Reading
  • Updates to All the PD Things I Do
  • Zooming All the Way Out: Thinking in Phases
  • We've Got to Teach Sleep
  • 3 More Sample Lessons for Enrichment-Oriented Emergency Remote Learning*
  • Example of an Emergency Remote Teaching Enrichment Activity: Learning Strategy Brainstorm (Any Subject, Gr 4-12)
  • Example of an Emergency Remote Teaching Enrichment Activity: Counting Grass… Because Why Not!? (Math, Gr 4-12)
  • Example of an Emergency Remote Teaching Enrichment Activity: Nature Study (Biology, Art, ELA, Gr 4-12)
  • Here's an Example of a Distance Learning Enrichment Activity: 20 for 20 (Social Studies or ELA, Gr 4-12)
  • The Good News, the Bad News, and the Start of A Solution for Keeping Distance Learning Simple
  • It Turns Out that Knowledge Really Is Power: So, What’s In Your Portfolio?
  • Maslow Was Right: What His Theory Can Teach Us about Moving Ahead
  • What We Control
  • Leadership Looks Like This
  • When It Comes to Student Motivation, There Are No Novices
  • At the Core of Student Apathy…
  • Thinking in Public: The Inquiry Path that Led to This Post
  • Simple Intervention: Bill Damon's Approach to Helping Students Value School
  • Rules of Thumb When Giving Explanations
  • Learning vs. Task-Completing
  • A Phone ≠ A Brain
  • But What About That One Student? Use 2×10
  • How to Repair Relationships (And Why You Might As Well Accept that You'll Need To)
  • The Law of Entropy Says You'll Need to Focus
  • Good Teaching + Good Practice
  • Is the US Naturalization Test a Standard for Fair, Straightforward Assessments of Knowledge?
  • If Your Class Has Tests, You Have to Teach Students How to Study
  • The Two Rules of Resilience
  • When You're Speaking to Students, Speak Your Best (Plus a Primer on How We Learn to Read)
  • “Reading Level” Mostly Means Knowledge Level
  • Moments of Genuine Connection Are Awkward Sometimes
  • Why Specific Plans Are Helpful and Vague Ones Are Suffocating
  • The Customizability of Our Inner Worlds
  • Principles Must be Proven; Use “Value Drills” to Help
2019
  • Should Welders Care About History Class — or Algebra 2? Or Literature?
  • What About When Effort Doesn’t Work?
  • Simple Intervention: Birthday Buddies
  • Ten Essential Practices for Learning
  • The Peter Effect: Strong Teaching Depends on Strong Understanding
  • Video: 10 Ways to Stay Motivated as You Work on Student Motivation
  • Video: What the Beliefs Are and Aren't
  • Ptolemy v. Copernicus
  • The Magic Wand Experiment: Learning to Explicitly Teach What We Want Our Students to Do Well
  • How to Write a Great, Kind Email (That Is, How to Write All Emails)
  • Staying Checked In
  • Why Every English Teacher Should Consider “Reading Reconsidered”
  • Obscurity of Purpose Leads to the Wasting of Time
  • On Sunk Costs (and Whether You Should Change Your Curriculum Even When You Recently Spent a Lot of Money on the Current One)
  • The Four Pillars of High School Success
  • An Everest Statement for a Social Studies Department
  • Why ‘the Best’? Will Good Do Instead?
  • The First Key to Connecting Well with All Students is to Like Them; This Often Takes Work
  • The Best Way to Make Students Feel Valued, Known, and Respected…
  • Small Tweaks for Making Chris Hulleman’s Build Connections Intervention Work Even Better
  • On the Labeling of Students
  • The Dumbest Intervention Ever
  • A Small Tweak to a Simple Classroom Birthday Tradition (Plus Its Impacts on Motivation)
  • Keep in Mind that They’re Credible
  • Both Experts and Novices Are Constantly At or Over the Brink of Overwhelm — And Yet Hope Is Not Lost
  • Guidelines for Developing New Teacher Mentoring Programs (NTMPs)
  • Two Very Different Pop-Up Debates on the Same Day
  • The Snowball
  • What If Our Students Are Bored Because We’ve Taught Them So Little?
  • Reading Comprehension Is Primarily a Function of Knowledge. It’s Not a Skill!
  • What Do You Do When Your Head Blows Up?
  • Striking Drucker's Balance
  • Are Our Schools Humane?
  • Only Handle It Once (OHIO): A Simple Discipline for Making More of Your Time
  • Fearfully and Wonderfully
  • The Precious S's, Part 2: Skipping
  • The Precious S’s, Part 1: Satisficing
  • Would You Like to be a Kinder Person?
  • Using Feedback-Rich Processes to Test Whether or Not We Know Something
  • You and the Puppet: Greg Ashman's Mind Trick for Helping with Emotional Constancy
  • You'll Need Rules
  • The Power of the Humdrum: Why Your First Day of School Isn't Going to Make or Break Your School Year
  • “Stand and Practice? What Kind of PD is That?”
  • Fixing the Bottoms of Our Buckets: Introducing the Classroom Management Course
  • Something More than Balance
  • The Ego Detector
  • Here's How to Overcome Student Speaking Anxiety
  • Nine Tips for More Energy
  • Australia! Key Takeaways from My Week at a Re-Engagement College
  • Knowledge-Building Helps Student Motivation, Too
  • Critical Thinking Comes from Knowledge-Building
  • The Effort Belief in Action: Read Naturally as a Case Study
  • 20 Years x 1 Hour Per Day
  • “How Do You Do It All?”
  • Systems v. Disciplines
  • Two Ways to Make It Less Complicated
  • Why Are You Grading That?
  • Doing Good v. Doing More
  • 10 Tips for Motivating Students Toward Full Engagement in Pop-Up Debates
  • What to Do When You Have Lots of Ideas (and the Dangers of Proactivity)
  • There's Only So Much Juice in an Orange
  • Mind the Gap
  • Belonging Booster: Values Affirmation Exercise
  • The Five Key Fears?
  • The Pedestal Isn't Real
  • You're in the Montage
  • Complicated Isn't Good
  • PowerSchool Grade Notifications Might Not be Good for Kids
  • A Time for Theories
  • A Time to Learn
  • The Digital Declutter Experiment: Spring Cleaning for Your Brain
  • Why I Am a Digital Minimalist (and What the Heck that Means)
  • Slot Machines
  • How to Build Resilience, Part 3: Adaptability
  • 500 Blog Posts: A Case Study in Resilience
  • Four Traits of Rockstar Teacher Teams
  • Focus = Life
  • How to Build Resilience, Part 2: A Strong Sense of Purpose
  • 10 Tips for Teachers from Kate Spade's Manners
  • "It's All About Relationships": We Can Do Better
  • Certainties, Not Exceptions
  • How to Build Resilience, Part 1: Acceptance of Reality
  • Teacher Attrition, the Serenity Prayer, and the Resilient Inner Life
  • Why Academics *Still* Matter for Long-Term Flourishing
  • We Empirically Know that Academics Aren't the Whole Picture of Long-Term Flourishing
  • We Intuitively Know that Academics Aren't the Whole Picture of Long-Term Flourishing
  • 10 Tips for Teachers from Kate Spade's Manners
  • What is Good Professional Development?
  • 24 Tips for Leading Better Professional Development
  • Beware the Planning Fallacy
  • Successful v. Useful: Lessons on Teaching from Jim Collins and Peter Drucker
  • The Shift
  • The Pressure
  • Why I Don't Write Much About Large-Scale Teaching Reform and Policy Change
  • The Time Warp Scenario: How to Get Unstuck On Big Projects
  • Maybe It's Time for a Diet
  • Tough Minds, Tender Hearts
  • How and Why to Use Storytelling in the Classroom
  • How to Show Appropriate Affection for Students
  • When Humor Hurts: The Trouble with Sarcasm
  • How (and Why) to Use Humor in the Classroom
  • “Elementary Children Are Primarily Interested in Subjects that Relate to Their Lives”: Busting a Damaging Myth
  • Trust, but Verify
  • Three Prescriptions for Thinking More Clearly about Teaching, Part 3: Write More
  • Three Prescriptions for Thinking More Clearly about Teaching, Part 2: Consume More Costly Things
  • Three Prescriptions for Thinking More Clearly about Teaching, Part 1: Consume Fewer Urgent Things
2018
  • Looking Back on 2018's Work Outside the Classroom
  • You Actually Can, and Should, Shut if Off
  • Unconscious Thought Theory: This is Why Teacher Intuition Matters
  • We Become What We Do
  • Common Teacher Hang-up: What Do I Do When Debates Get Heated?
  • Why the Best Teaching Strategies Are Like Boxes of Building Blocks
  • Improving Student Motivation via Micro-Commenting on Papers
  • The Quarry Worker's Creed
  • Student Motivation Problems Crush the Kids — and They Crush Us, Too!
  • How (and Why) to Ask Administrators for PD Funding
  • Feeling Burned Out? Read This
  • To the Teacher Who is Struggling Right Now
  • How to Motivate Students to Turn In Their Essays Without Using Brownies
  • The Five Key Beliefs: More than Band-aids
  • Linking My Past Burning Questions with Real Kids
  • What Are Your Burning Questions Right Now?
  • The Argument for Earnest and Amicable Argument
  • The Whirlwind
  • Tech for Tech's Sake Isn't Good in Our Classrooms
  • The Secret Skills of Master Teachers: Atomic Habits
  • The Secret Skills of Master Teachers: Batching Busy (or Shallow) Work for the Sake of Deep Work
  • The Secret Skills of Master Teachers: Predictable Time Off
  • The Secrets Skills of Master Teachers: Managing Your Mood
  • The Secret Skills of Master Teachers: Working Hard (and Smart)
  • The Secret Skills of Master Teachers: Paul Graham and the Right Kind of Procrastination
  • The Secret Skills of Master Teachers: Making Bad Habits Harder and Ambiguous Habits Better
  • The Secret Skills of Master Teachers: Reducing Distractions from Students
  • The Secret Skills of Master Teachers: Are They a Thing?
  • What I Ask
  • What I Do
  • The Work, the Gap, the Mission
  • Exploring Our Unexplored Weaknesses
  • The Teacher as a Mensch
  • The Positive Parent Phone Call
  • Sane Educators = A Good Strategy
  • “Hang Up Philosophy”: A Note on Philosophies of Education
  • Guest Post from Grant Piros: Two Things To Help Schools "Learn Forward"
  • Two Things To Help Schools “Learn Forward”
  • “Worksheets Are the Worst”
  • Fast Feedback is Effective Feedback: Here's How to Do Better
  • Wheel Alignments (and a Change to the Blog)
  • Moments of Genuine Connection: A Piece of Paper, a Clipboard, and a Goal
  • Simplify Responsibly
  • Students Won't Read? Start with Their Beliefs
  • 6 Teaching Insights I Gained through Writing a Book
  • Asking the Right Question: What's It For?
  • Deciding: How I Stopped Quitting Teaching
  • I Quit Teaching
  • The Business (and Educational) Sense of Selfless Service
  • What Would This Look Like If It Were Simple?
  • “Years of Experience”: What Kind?
  • “You're My Favorite Teacher”
  • What to Do When You Need a Credibility Breakthrough: The Student-by-Student Ground Game
  • The CCPR of Teacher Credibility
  • The Folly (and Difficulty) of Yes-itis
  • Warm Self-Critique: A Mark of Great Teachers
  • What (and How) I'm Excited to Read This Summer
  • You Should Stay in Education for a Long Time, But There Is One Catch
  • This Summer, Achieve Something You Care About, and WOOP to Get Started
  • What About Teacher Flourishing?
  • A Simple Trick that Helps Performance Anxiety
  • What is WOOP, and Why Does It Help with Student Motivation?
  • Students of Our Students' Hearts
  • Using Skull and Crossbones Lists to Ctl-A Delete Bad Habit Errors
  • How to Become a More Credible Writing Teacher
  • Simple Interventions: Building Connections to Help Kids Value Coursework
  • Beliefs and Boredom
  • The Five Key Beliefs that Motivate Student Writers
  • The Finish Line
  • How to Improve School Cultures, Part 6: Think Like a Gardener, Work Like a Carpenter
  • How to Improve School Cultures, Part 5: Simple, In-House PD
  • How to Improve School Cultures, Part 4b: A Case Study in Earnest and Amicable Argument as PD
  • How to Improve School Cultures, Part 4: More and Better Arguments
  • How to Improve School Cultures, Part 3: Better Meetings
  • How to Improve School Cultures, Part 2: Collins' Level 5 Leadership
  • How to Improve School Cultures, Part 2: Collins' Level 5 Leadership
  • How to Improve School Cultures, Part 1: Coyle's Three Skills
  • Neomania is Making Us Crazier (and Less Effective) Teachers
  • The #1 Place in School Where Students' Key Beliefs are Shaped
  • Better, Saner Homework Tips, Pt 2: Make It a Good Experience for Students
  • Better, Saner Homework, Pt 1: 6 Tips to Make It More Doable for Us
  • Encouraged, Equipped, and Understood
  • Four Things I Wish Someone Had Told Me When I Was a Student Teacher
  • Time to Retire
  • What Makes Great Professional Development?
  • Learning ≠ Turning On a Video
  • You're Probably Right
  • The Five Questions Our Students Are Asking, All the Time
  • Simple Interventions: Birthdays and Belonging
  • How I Prove to My Students that They Actually Can Memorize Things
  • The (Mis)behaviors that Undermine Our Credibility
  • Ms. Blizzard and the Potential Weight of Single Interactions
  • Humble-Boldness: A Common Trait of the Greatest Teachers
  • Not Just Home Life: A Critical Mass of Belief-Supporting Contexts
  • Five Key Beliefs: The Source of Abbe's Superpowers
  • Semester Two and New for the Sake of New
  • Doing It All vs. Doing One Thing Well
  • The “Disappointing” Key to Impactful Teaching
  • The First Principle of Teaching
  • Thank You and (Belated) Happy New Year
2017
  • On Writing a Book, Pt 5: What Makes a Book Great, and How Much Insanity Does it Take to Try Writing One?
  • On Writing a Book, Pt 4: One Sentence, One Paragraph, One Page
  • On Writing a Book, Pt 3: Distance
  • A Case Study in Simplified Instruction: The Write Structure
  • On Writing a Book, Pt 2: Eating Glass
  • On Writing a Book, Part 1: The Same Aims
  • Temporary Changes at DaveStuartJr.com
  • When Current Events Remain the Job of Single Departments, Kids Won't Graduate Understanding the World Well
  • Writing (and Learning) for Democracy
  • The Skull and Crossbones List
  • Cheap Prizes: We Didn't Get into This for Those
  • The Write Structure: A Simple, Effective Method for Teaching Writing Across the Content Areas
  • The Work Beneath the Work
  • Realistic Idealism
  • Latin Word Chunks: A Case Study in Smart, Low-Stress Knowledge-Building
  • Re-evolution, not Revolution
  • Carry It Through
  • The Best Place to Start
  • Belief Drives Behavior
  • Experience ≠ Practice
  • Learning Strategy: Deep, Focused, 25-Minute Sessions
  • Beware the Belabored Anecdote
  • Learning Strategy: Think Like a Runner
  • Learning Strategy: Mental Contrasting and Implementation Intentions
  • Drafts of Learning
  • Freedom through Restriction
  • A Dangerous Assumption
  • Setting a Summer Reading Project
  • No More (New) Reading
  • Knowledge Builds on Knowledge
  • The Goal of Reading (and Basic Strategies for Achieving It)
  • Two Ways to Improve Listening (and One Way Not To)
  • Quantity, then Quality
  • Common Student Hang-ups: Quote Bombing
  • Common Student Hang-ups: Silo Speeches
  • Exemplars, Sentence Templates, and Checks for Understanding
  • Grading ≠ Feedback, and Sometimes You Don't Need to Do Either
  • The Pyramid of Writing Priorities
  • Want More Writing Across the Content Areas? Validate the Content
  • Writing: The Most Underrated Twenty-First Century Skill
  • Optimal Pressure
  • Less News, Better Brain
  • Improving Pop-Up Debates: Better Prompts
  • The Most Dangerous Word to Your Sanity (and How to Stop Saying It)
  • Learning ≠ Familiarity
  • Learning for Life
  • Relationships: Not a Separate Goal, but a Fruit of and a Means to *the* Goal
  • The Critical Juncture
  • When Teachers Go on Autopilot: How to Recharge the Fundamentals of Instruction
  • The Any-Benefit Approach
  • Improving Pop-Up Debates: Tracking the Argument
  • Fixed-Schedule Productivity
  • Start With the Constraint
  • Productive Curiosity: The Billion Dollar Character Strength?
  • Genuine Encouragement
  • As Little Flash as Possible
  • The Three Layers of Outperforming Classrooms
  • Don't Forget the Table
  • “You Don't Need More Time…
  • Things I Believe about Grading Systems
  • Are We Measuring the Wrong Things?
  • Better and Saner Grading Tip: Start with the End
  • Better and Saner Grading Tip: Stop “Relaxing” While Grading
  • Better and Saner Grading Tip: Get Out the Stopwatch
  • Boiling Down Argument: Five Approaches to Teaching Argument
  • Boiling Down Critical Thinking
  • Simple Sub Plans that Work
  • The Case Against Complaining
  • A Low-Tech Method for Memorizing Every Student's Name in Five Days
  • There's No Such Thing as Critical Thinking Apart from Knowledge
  • Do You Need New, or Will Used Work?
  • Fulkersonian Argument: The Mixture of Debate and Discussion toward which Pop-Up Debates Strive
  • An Expectancy-Value Pop-Up Debate (Valued Within Exercise)
  • A Single-Moding Approach to Teacher Productivity
2016
  • Perfectionism Behind, Improvementism Ahead
  • How Doug Stark Maintains Boundaries with a Large English Language Arts Teaching Load
  • Technician versus Savior versus Professional
  • Our Own Worst — and Most Joyful — Critics
  • Constraints Make Us Better
  • 16 Reflective Questions to Ponder this Month
  • This Month, Make Space for Reflection and Anticipation
  • Purposeful & Active “Reading to Learn”
  • What is the Most Pointless Thing You Do as an Educator?
  • A Simple Activity for Building Self-Regulated Learners
  • Video: My Five-Minute “Defining Everest” Ignite Talk
  • A Simple Set of Activities for Building Public Speaking Comfort in Students
  • “Overachievers” and the Tyranny of Low Expectations
  • A Simple Technique for Affecting Belonging, One Genuine Connection at a Time
  • The Physical Classroom Environment: Why Your Classroom Need Not Be Pretty
  • A Simple “Expectancy-Value” Activity for Helping Students Care about Your Coursework
  • Making Mindsets Matter: Two Approaches to the Challenging Journey from Head to Heart
  • The Four Academic Mindsets: How 25 Words Decimated the 1000s I've Written on Student Motivation
  • The Consortium Framework in 400 Words
  • Predicting Success: Dialing Long-Term Flourishing Back into Things We Might Affect This Year
  • Why Does Student Motivation Matter? And Whose Job Is It, Anyway?
  • How to Use the Non-Freaked Out Framework for Personal PD: A Case Study
  • It's Not the Work, It's the Re-Work: Version 4.0 of the Non-Freaked Out Framework
  • Reader Response: What's the Toughest Thing about Teaching, and How Do You Deal with It?
  • Triple Responsibility: Its Problems and Imperatives
  • Learning is ______________: Here's Why How You Complete that Sentence Matters
  • How to Acquire a Distant or Super Famous Mentor
  • The Growing Dragon of Student Anxiety & Swords for Fighting It
  • Four Non-Negotiable Teacher Mindsets
  • Gotta Want It, Gotta Do It: The Motivational and Executional Hurdles to Student Success
  • Today, Solve a Problem
  • Teaching Trump (and Other Controversial Topics) Without Losing Your Job
  • Our One Enduring Standard (and its Two Components)
  • What Does the Common Core Look Like in Social Studies Classrooms?
  • Character-Switching​ & The Pursuit of the Poised Life
  • “A Perverse Sort of Compassion” and the Point of Strong Teacher-Student Relationships
  • My 11 Objectives for the First Month of School
  • Principles Underlying Mechanics Instruction that Sticks
  • Refutation Two-Chance: A New Frontier for Pop-Up Debate
  • Anti-Teacher Credibility: 10 Great Ways to Become Unbelievable (in a Bad Way)
  • Teacher Credibility: If You Build It, They Will Learn (Here's How)
  • Self-Control is About Goal-Attainment: Here's How to Help Students Develop It
  • The Best Articles on Classroom Management
  • CARE: Four Underlying Principles of Classroom Management
  • A Guide to the Start of the School Year
  • A Simple Activity for Teaching About Procrastination
  • Stopping the Snowball: Catching Struggling Learners Early On
  • The 500-Word Guide to Satisficing for Teachers
  • An Email Management Strategy Built on Discipline and Dignity
  • What I Learned from Reducing my Email Inbox from About a Million* Messages to Zero
  • Stop Obsessing Over Your Uniqueness: How Multiple Discovery Theory Makes Us Better and Saner
  • “Discipline without Emotion”: One Teacher's Use of a Simple Reminder
  • Reader Response: What Is the Most Important Thing You Know Now that You Wish You Knew When You Started?
  • Unicorns and Growth Mindset
  • Inking a Top-Level Goal for Your Career
  • Effort Counts Twice
  • Lessons Learned from my Character Lab Teacher Innovation Grant Research Project
  • One Teacher's Experiment with a Choice-Based Articles of the Week Assignment
  • Pouring Ourselves Out
  • Knowing Stuff is Inseparable from Literacy
  • Some Tests Are Really Great for Students
  • The Pedagogical Benefits of Doing Hard Things
  • A Conversation with Mike Schmoker
  • The Non-Freaked Out Framework: Five Things We've Got to Keep Getting Better At
  • Your Attitude About X
  • A Conversation with Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein
  • Babies, Bathwater, and Grit
  • A Conversation with David Conley
  • The Importance of Externalizing Our Brains
  • A Conversation with Larry Ferlazzo
  • Can't Need It, Gotta Want It
  • A Conversation with Kelly Gallagher
  • Asking the Right Questions: The Best of My Blog, Organized by Question
  • What is the Role of Education?
  • “I Love You and I'm Proud of You” — What Dean L. Stuart Taught Me About Teaching
  • Write 100 Blog Posts
  • How to View Teaching Situations Where the Odds are Against You: A Personal Case Study
  • “Everyone Knows One-and-Done PD Doesn't Work”
  • “How Long Do You Spend Grading Articles of the Week?”
  • “Vision Without Execution is Hallucination”
  • How to Stop “Likes,” “Ums,” and Other Distracting Speaking Behaviors
  • A Simple Classroom Birthday Tradition
  • Conversation Challenge: an Efficient, Simple Small-Group Discussion Strategy
  • Keep These Things in Mind When Thinking about Student Discussions
  • 7 Strategies to Make Content Stick
  • Education, Not Entertainment
  • Myth: If We Supervise and Evaluate Teachers More Intensely, the Quality of Teaching Will Improve
  • Being a Workaholic is not Smart or Romantic
  • Nine Instructional Moves for Teaching Texts
  • Problems = Opportunities
  • Give Me a Number
  • A Non-Freaked Out Approach to Reading like a Professional
  • How to Read (and Actually Enjoy) More Books this Year
  • PERMA and the Science of Flourishing
  • The Work of the Teacher Through Two Lenses
  • A Simple “Craft Your Credo” Classroom Activity
  • Two Practical “Reminder” Strategies for Overcoming Noise-Induced Aimlessness
  • Teaching Success in a Noisy World
  • The #1 Problem with New Years Life-Changey Stuff: Clarity of Purpose
  • A Simple “Back from Winter Break” Classroom Activity
2015
  • My Last Blog Post of 2015: A Letter to My Readers
  • Four Questions Deep
  • Dealing with Teacher Information Overload
  • The Science of Mechanics Instruction that Sticks
  • The Dangers of Externalism
  • When Your State Reduces Your Profession to a Test Score
  • Character Strengths, Integrity, and My Three-Year-Old
  • What Does, and Does Not, Work in School Improvement
  • Why I Would Love If My Children Became Teachers
  • Two Kinds of Curiosity and the One that Science Supports
  • Future You Wants You To Do Two Things
  • 5 Steps to Argumentalizing Instruction
  • The 300-Word Guide to Pop-Up Debate
  • How to Do Hard Things
  • Two Ways to Live the Teacher's Life (and Our Need for Both of Them)
  • Your Students Want to Master What You're Teaching Them
  • Submit an Idea for Cultivating Character; Win a $10,000 Grant
  • 21 Ideas for Developing the Motivational Character Strengths
  • Teachers, Students, and Sleep
  • Helping Students Understand Motivation: The Character Strengths Angle
  • The First Article of the Week of the School Year: Key Teaching Points
  • Truths about Student Motivation
  • Paraphrase Plus: A Central Move of Engaging Classroom Discussions
  • When I Do, and Don't, Get Stressed
  • These 5 Things, All Year Long: An Overview of The Non-Freaked Out Framework for Literacy Instruction
  • This Year, Make Better Choices with Warren Buffett's 25-5 List Technique
  • An Exemplary Exercise for Building Goal-Keeping Kids (includes Downloadable Document)
  • Simple Interventions: Preventing Symptoms of Depression by Teaching Kids that People Can Change
  • The Kind of Science that Teaching Needs
  • Mechanics Instruction that Sticks: Using Simple Warm-Ups to Improve Student Writing
  • “Marly Attacks” and The Power of Expectations
  • The 300-Word Guide to Long-Term Flourishing
  • Beyond the Fear of Public Speaking: Making the First Pop-Up Debate a Success for All Students
  • Starting Strong with the “Transformative” & Simple Think-Pair-Share Strategy
  • 3,500 Teachers Can't Be Wrong: We Need Permission to Focus
  • Cures for First Day of School Overwhelm
  • Simple Questions on the First Day of School that Teach Purpose
  • A First Day of School Activity That Teaches Argument, Which Teaches Thinking (Updated)
  • Get Ready for the School Year with this 5 Minute “Defining Everest” Activity
  • Updates (and Goodbye, Sort of) to the Teaching the Core Blog
  • Why We Teach
  • The Mental Reset Button: Hit It
  • $11,195 through Donors Choose: A Reflection on Generosity
  • Pop-Up Toasts: A Last Day of School Activity that Teaches PVLEGS, Character, and Classiness
  • Defining Everest: A Reflection on the Challenges of Teaching
  • May Forward: Making the Most of a Hard Month for Teachers
  • 3 Years of Teacher Blogging: the Work, the Rewards, the Opportunity
  • 6 Mindsets of Excellent Educators
  • An Example of Deliberate Practice from my Actual Life
  • The Imperative Nature of Deliberate Practice
  • Working Better with Parents
  • How Humility Makes Us Better, Saner Teachers
  • Can Pop-Up Debate Produce Grit in Students?
  • What are the Keystone Habits for Success?
  • Psst…
  • Keystone Habits: Unlocking Success for our Students and Ourselves
  • Autopsy of a Dud Project; Analysis of a Teacher's Heart
  • Why I #LoveTeaching
  • Moving Forward in the Midst of Survival Mode: A Retrospective
  • A Simple, Powerful Tweak on the First Day of School Index Card Activity
  • On Work Schedules, Perfectionism, and Hidden Autonomy
  • How Gratitude Makes Us, and Our Students, Better
  • There Are No Silver Bullets, but There Are Swords
  • Setting a Work Schedule to Make Us Better, Saner Teachers
2014
  • Teaching is Work
  • The Two Most Important Words for Getting Great, According to Daniel Coyle
  • Takeaways from #NCTE14 (and why professional conferences are worth it)
  • We All Need Mentorship: Here's How to Make the Most of It
  • Here's Why the 80/20 Rule Matters for Educators
  • How to Read Professional Development Books: 7 Tactics You Might Not Be Using
  • 14 Tips Toward Better Relationships with Administrators, Parents, & Support Staff
  • 9 Principles for Working Better with Fellow Educators
  • Purposeful Annotation: A “Close Reading” Strategy that Makes Sense to My Students
  • Scaffolds for Dominating the Article of the Week
  • There and Back Again: My Journey with Gallagher's Article of the Week Assignment
  • A Non-Freaked Out Framework for Literacy Instruction Across the Content Areas, Common Core or Otherwise
  • Do Common Core Professional Development Like This
  • Back-to-School To-Do List #2: Establish Burning Questions
  • Back-to-School To-Do List #1: Get Ready for my First-Ever Student Teacher
  • Three Great Points in Erik Palmer's “Effective Communication” Video
  • For Noncognitive Skill Development, Start with Growth Mindset — Here's How
  • Literacy Educators: Let's Get Serious about Noncognitive Skills
  • 4 Jedi Mind Tricks for Avoiding Burnout
  • Impact = Promoting Long-Term Student Flourishing
  • Advice for Teachers Who Try Hard but Feel Hopeless
  • New Thoughts on the Non-Freaked Out Approach to Common Core Literacy
  • On Common Core Text Complexity, the Triangle of Life, and the Freakout
  • “Help! I Need Appropriately Complex Texts for my Elementary and Middle School Students!”
  • Using the Efficient “Take a Stand” Strategy to Hook Kids into a Reading
  • Here's What I Know about Reading for Meaning Statements
  • Moving Forward with Close Reading
  • An Obituary for Close Reading
  • I'm Creating a New eBook. Tell me which you'd like to read
  • PVLEGS: A Public Speaking Acronym that Transforms Students
  • Jim Burke's Common Core Companion series — Here's Why It's Awesome
  • Why I Use the Article of the Week in My Elective Classes
  • 3 Sports Metaphors that Fuel Excellence in My Classroom
  • 9 Skills the Common Core Doesn't List but that Employers Want Anyways
  • Don't You Dare Forget These Truths about Teaching
  • 12 Skills the Common Core AND Employers Want
2013
  • 9 Complex Text Resources I'm Pretty Pumped About Right Now
  • Going a Bit Deeper with the They Say / I Say Two-Paragraph Template
  • No More Painful Research
  • A Simple, Two-Paragraph Template that Helps Kids to Really Argue
  • What Texts Does the Common Core REQUIRE Students to Read?
  • Can a text be inherently worth reading, even if it wilts your soul?
  • What are you struggling with in your classroom right now?
  • Starting the Year with Debate
  • A Non-Freaked Out, Focused Approach to the Common Core — Part 7 — Teach Character
  • The Only 100 Words You Need to Read Today
  • How to Dominate Your Common Core Supply Needs with DonorsChoose.org
  • How Administrators Can Wage War on Bad PD
  • I'm Not Kidding. This is the Best I Got.
  • A Non-Freaked Out, Focused Approach to the Common Core — Part 6 — Write Like Crazy
  • Waging War on the Bad Guys
  • Germany and Long-term Student Flourishing
  • Why I Will and Won't Care if Michigan Legislators Block Funding for CCSS Implementation
  • Dave's Summer 2013 Reading List
  • A Non-Freaked Out, Focused Approach to the Common Core — Part 5 — Every Kid Speaks
  • Non-Freaked Out Common Core — Part 4 — Argument and Debate
  • A Non-Freaked Out, Focused Approach to the Common Core — Part 3 — Close Reading
  • A Non-Freaked Out, Focused Approach to the Common Core — Part 2 — Complex Texts
  • The Non-Freaked Out, Focused Approach to the Common Core
  • What's YOUR Common Core Story?
  • How to NOT Freak Out about the Common Core
  • Simple Rubrics for Common Core Speaking and Listening Standards
  • Goals for 2013
2012
  • Discussions that Promote Societal Belonging
  • Character Strengths — Beyond the Common Core
  • What's the C3 Framework, and How does it Affect Your Social Studies Class?
  • Close Reading, the Common Core, and a Freaking Awesome Prezi
  • Student Teachers Rock
  • Keyboarding Skills and the Common Core
  • How to Get Students to Really Listen, Summarize/Paraphrase, and Respond to Peers
  • Video: One Way to Rock Out CCSS-Friendly, In-class Debates
  • A First Day of School Activity that Teaches Argumentation
  • How to Craft a Bomb-Diggety Resource Request
  • Where have I been all your life? + Updates
  • Common Core L.CCR.6 Explained
  • Common Core L.CCR.5 Explained
  • Common Core L.CCR.4 Explained
  • Common Core L.CCR.3 Explained
  • Common Core L.CCR.2 Explained
  • Common Core L.CCR.1 Explained
  • Common Core SL.CCR.6 Explained
  • Common Core SL.CCR.5 Explained
  • Common Core SL.CCR.4 Explained
  • Common Core SL.CCR.3 Explained
  • Common Core SL.CCR.2 Explained
  • “What Parts of the CCSS are Social Studies Teachers Responsible For?”
  • Common Core SL.CCR.1 Explained
  • 9 Big Ideas within the Speaking and Listening Standards
  • Common Core W.CCR.10 Explained
  • Common Core W.CCR.9 Explained
  • Common Core W.CCR.8 Explained
  • Will Common Core National Assessments Motivate Students to “Enjoy & Appreciate” School?
  • Common Core W.CCR.7 Explained
  • Common Core W.CCR.6 Explained
  • Is the Common Core all about Technology?
  • Common Core W.CCR.5 Explained
  • Common Core W.CCR.4 Explained
  • Common Core W.CCR.3 Explained
  • Why I Moved to TeachingtheCore.com
  • 7 Great Common Core Resources for History AND ELA Teachers
  • Does the Common Core Allow for Creative Writing?
  • Common Core W.CCR.2 Explained
  • 8 Reasons I Embrace Arguments in my Classroom
  • Common Core W.CCR.1 Explained
  • What Texts does the Common Core REQUIRE Students to Read?
  • Common Core R.CCR.10 Explained
  • Common Core R.CCR.9 Explained
  • Common Core R.CCR.8 Explained
  • 5 Ways to Make Rigorous Arguments Fun
  • Happy 4th of July!
  • Common Core R.CCR.7 Explained
  • Why I Support the Common Core
  • Beyond the Common Core Standards
  • Common Core R.CCR.6 Explained
  • Common Core R.CCR.5 Explained
  • A Class Purpose and the Promotion of Student Flourishing
  • Highest Frequency Words in the CCSS for ELA & Literacy
  • Common Core R.CCR.4 Explained
  • Why Gerald Graff's Clueless in Academe is Worth Reading
  • Vacation; Decompression
  • Common Core R.CCR.3 Explained
  • Common Core R.CCR.2 Explained
  • Common Core R.CCR.1 Explained
  • 4 Ways to Screw Up (and Fix) In-class Arguments
  • What's the Big Deal about Text Complexity?
  • 5 Principles in Developing the Common Core
  • 3 Ways to Start Implementing the Common Core Today
  • A Helpful Document for Overviewing the CCSS with Parents
  • Fahrenheit 451, the Butchery of Figurative Language, and the CCSS
  • CCR Anchor Standards in Language: An Overview
  • CCR Anchor Standards in Speaking and Listening: An Overview
  • CCR Anchor Standards in Writing: An Overview
  • What are the “Six Shifts”?
  • 7 Things that a College and Career Ready (CCR) Person Can Do
  • What are the CCSS CCR Anchor Standards?
  • 3 Reasons that the CCSS Should Make Content Teachers Rejoice
  • CCR Anchor Standards in Reading: An Overview
  • Why Did my Students Bomb their Extended Research Paper?
  • Can the Common Core State Standards Promote Student Flourishing?
  • What do Demons have to do with the Common Core State Standards?

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