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.
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 (more than 400,000 words), I'll start with some of my more popular posts.
The Best (Most Helpful) Thing I've Written So Far
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've written on the blog. 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.
Most Popular
These are some of the blog posts that folks have called most useful in the past.
- 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 you can find below:
- The DonorsChoose.org blog
- NEA Today: “Who Stands Between Fake News and Students? Educators”
- “The Best of Our Knowledge” radio interview, titled “So You Wanna be a Teacher”
I've also been on a few podcasts:
- Talks with Teachers
- One Percent Better
- John Poelstra Show
- The Distilled Man
- Life on Brand
- CBD Podcast
- The Chromebook Classroom
The Full List
And finally, here's a list of all of my articles are in chronological order. Enjoy.