Abbe personifies a lot of the habits and traits I want my students to cultivate: working hard each day, maintaining a great attitude, treating others with kindness, keeping track of her work and completing it with care, asking questions when she has them, appreciating a challenge, and on and on. If my classes were filled […]
Semester Two and New for the Sake of New
One of the folks who reviewed an early version of the book I just finished writing had this critique: There aren’t enough new things in this book. Teachers want new — where’s the new? The answer, of course, is that there’s not a ton of new in my book, just like there’s not much new on […]
Doing It All vs. Doing One Thing Well
Note from Dave: This article is by my friend and our colleague, Lindsay Veitch. I find Lindsay’s New Year’s Revelation to be especially poignant to my own season of life right now, and I hope it’s timely for you as well. It was New Year’s Eve, and we were sitting around a spread of appetizers: […]
The “Disappointing” Key to Impactful Teaching
On the first day of my teaching career, I gave my students a rehearsed, hooyah speech. I’m pretty sure it involved standing on a desk, and I know I was decked out in the only suit I owned. I can still picture that classroom in Baltimore, filled with terrified sixth graders. You could almost see […]
The First Principle of Teaching
When you approach a problem by first stripping it down to its most elemental parts, that’s a “first principles” approach to problem-solving. The authors of the Declaration of Independence demonstrate this approach. The relationship between Great Britain and the thirteen colonies was fraught with debate and complexity in 1776, and to explain their solution to […]