If our ultimate goal is less than the long-term flourishing of kids, student motivation doesn’t matter much. English teachers want kids to become lifelong readers because we want them to flourish; science teachers aim at teaching a methodical way of thinking and viewing the world because such thinking is instrumental to a flourishing life; physical education exists […]
Why Does Student Motivation Matter? And Whose Job Is It, Anyway?
In the coming weeks, I’ll be sharing the results of a “Research Sprint” that I conducted in August 2016. I wrote a fairly detailed account of the sprint in my last post, but the gist is that I read three books and 15 references within those books for a single element of the Non-Freaked Out Framework […]
How to Use the Non-Freaked Out Framework for Personal PD: A Case Study
The array of professional development resources available to teachers today is as overwhelming as it is incoherent. Every month, dozens of books and hundreds of articles and thousands of tweets are published. Yet for most of us, this overabundance is more a source of stress or apathy than it is a source of professional growth. This […]
It’s Not the Work, It’s the Re-Work: Version 4.0 of the Non-Freaked Out Framework
I’ve been writing about and teaching from the Non-Freaked Out (NFO) Framework for years now, and as a result it’s gone through several iterations, some that have stuck and some that haven’t (see Figure 1). James Clear writes that “it’s not the work, it’s the re-work.” I have certainly found that to be true with this idea, which […]
Reader Response: What’s the Toughest Thing about Teaching, and How Do You Deal with It?
There were so many wonderful responses to my previous reader response question that I’m throwing another one at you: What’s the toughest thing about teaching, and how do you deal with it? Feel free to remain anonymous if that helps. My hope for this community-created post is that it helps fellow readers see that they […]
