Perhaps the guiltiest culprit for our burnout each year is not the latest policy from on high, the newest cumbersome teacher eval rubric, or the fact that “this year’s group is a really rough one.” In my experience, these things create challenging circumstances (and many times the challenge lies not in the things but in […]
Latin Word Chunks: A Case Study in Smart, Low-Stress Knowledge-Building
If you’ve bought into the idea that knowledge matters — that people can’t really think critically or read well or even learn things without knowing stuff — then you’re where I am. The whole skills vs. knowledge debate is a distraction built on a false premise. So now what? I’ve been wrestling with the Now what? for a lot of the summer. Knowledge-building has a chapter in […]
Re-evolution, not Revolution
[Note from Dave: This is a guest essay by Bill Curtin, Illinois educator and VP of the Illinois Association of Teachers of English. I’ve been in contact with Bill for a year or so regarding the upcoming IATE conference (details here; registration here), and I was struck by the piece that he wrote below. I […]
Carry It Through
The hardest thing about the start of the school year isn’t setting up a classroom management plan or all the other things I talk about in the School Year Starter Kit. The hardest thing is carrying through the things that we set up or talk about during that first week into every week that follows, […]
The Best Place to Start
If you’d like to start cultivating those five key beliefs in your students, then may I suggest that the best place to start is not with expectancy-value interventions or growth mindset experiments. Nope. Instead, start with the most influential person in your classroom: you. The effort belief: Do you believe that, through your effort, you can get better at teaching any […]