Of the factors that affect the quality of one’s teaching, I know of few as powerful as the teacher’s understanding of the content being taught. When we deeply know what we’re teaching — whether it’s language conventions or solving equations or phonemic awareness or how to shoot a basketball — we’re more likely to teach […]
Video: 10 Ways to Stay Motivated as You Work on Student Motivation
A little bit ago, I posted an article with a video in it. A number of you wrote and said it helped, and I thank you for that. The video mentioned a second part, and I want to share the second part today. The question is: As we’re working to up our student motivation knowledge […]
Video: What the Beliefs Are and Aren’t
In These 6 Things, I lay out an inside-out approach to student motivation that I think the research suggests. This approach hinges on five key beliefs, and I’ve written about them all over the blog, such as here, here, and here. If you’re already familiar with them, go ahead and look away from the screen […]
Ptolemy v. Copernicus
About twenty-two centuries ago, Greco-Roman philosopher Ptolemy argued in Almagest that the sun and the moon and the other heavenly bodies rotated around the Earth. This geocentric view remained predominant for 1,700 years until the Renaissance’s Nicolaus Copernicus argued for a sun-centered system. In the decades that followed, new-fangled “scientists” like Johannes Kepler and Galileo […]
The Magic Wand Experiment: Learning to Explicitly Teach What We Want Our Students to Do Well
If I came into your school or classroom with a magic wand and said, “Hey, when I wave this thing, every one of your students will do three things with perfect consistency,” what three things would you pick? What three thing do you wish all students would do — for their own good and for […]