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 Most Helpful Things I've Written for Fall 2020
Unprecedented, I think I've heard it called? Right. So let's get to work on the work will that matter most:
- How to Build Strong Relationships with Students if You're Starting the Year Online: Principles and Practices
- 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 Use Mechanics Instruction that Sticks When Teaching Remotely: Thoughts from the Author, Doug Stark
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:
- 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
I've also been on a few podcasts:
- Cult of Pedagogy w/ Jenn Gonzalez
- Truths for Teachers w/ Angela Watson
- 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: 700+ articles
And finally, here's a list of all of my articles are in chronological order. Enjoy.