Have you ever toyed with the idea of letting your students select the articles for Kelly Gallagher’s article of the week assignment? Stephanie Roederer, a teacher from Kentucky, has done a lot more than ponder it! Below, you’ll read an email Stephanie sent me a month or so ago. Her thought process, strategies, and results are so […]
Pouring Ourselves Out
Every year, you and I pour bits of our lives into our students. Every minute spent teaching, conferring, assessing, and All The Things, every minute is gone, poured out, beyond recovery. Problematically, too many teachers in the USA poured too much of themselves out this year. For them, there was a sloppy abandon to the pouring, […]
Knowing Stuff is Inseparable from Literacy
The point of the Non-Freaked Out Approach to Producing Literate Humans (still working on that title; see Figure 1) is to make it easy for teachers to remember what we ought to become very, very good at. It helps us ask at the end of a hard day, “Did I help my students grow in […]
Some Tests Are Really Great for Students
Tests are easy to vilify in the USA today because there are too many bad ones and there are too many bogus high stakes attached to them. But this school year I’ve seen an extremely difficult test have a profoundly positive effect on its takers. First, my AP World History kids. Prior to this year, I hadn’t taught an advanced course of […]
The Pedagogical Benefits of Doing Hard Things
I’m running a marathon today. At some point, months ago, my little brother and I thought this was a great idea. As the training miles (and skipped training sessions) piled up, my evaluation of the idea decayed. By the final weeks of training, I found myself repeatedly saying to Crystal, “Honey, if I ever talk about wanting to run a marathon […]