In the first month of school, my aim is to establish a beachhead from which to launch a successful year with students in which we accomplish more together than any prior year of my career. I go into the year expecting that bad or insane or tragic or frustrating things are liable to happen at […]
Refutation Two-Chance: A New Frontier for Pop-Up Debate
If you ever want to work ahead of me on developing student achievement in the “Go Big on Argument” portion of the Non-Freaked Out Framework, you need to go no further than The Debatifier, the blogging arm of Les Lynn’s stellar Argument-Centered Education. The way Les approaches argument is the Tour De France of my tricycle-riding Pop-Up Debate. In fact, […]
Anti-Teacher Credibility: 10 Great Ways to Become Unbelievable (in a Bad Way)
Last time, I looked at teacher credibility and its four components. (Read that post here.) This time, I want to examine the same crucial topic from a negative angle. What are the ways in which we might lessen our students’ belief in our ability to help them succeed? How might we undermine their perceptions of Trust, […]
Teacher Credibility: If You Build It, They Will Learn (Here’s How)
We’ve all heard the hoo-yah speeches before, the feel-good stuff like, “Be a teacher your students believe in! Be someone they know can take them where they need to go! Make them know that you will make a positive difference in their life! If they believe, they can achieve!!!” Fantastically, however, this theme of the importance of having our kids […]
Self-Control is About Goal-Attainment: Here’s How to Help Students Develop It
The point of teaching kids to develop self-control isn’t to get them to obey or comply or behave as if they’re in a prison. Such caricaturizations or misapplications of instruction around self-control miss it all. Rather, self-control is about helping our kids do what they need to do so they can get where they want […]