Four years ago, at the very outset of this blog, I was starting to blog through the Common Core State Standards. Providentially, at about the same time I had decided to re-read Mike Schmoker’s Focus. That re-read bit was new for me. I was at a point in my career where I sensed it was high time I […]
The Non-Freaked Out Framework: Five Things We’ve Got to Keep Getting Better At
The Non-Freaked Out Framework (Figure 1) is really just a set of five imperatives. One goal governs them all: let’s do increase the quantity and quality of these things, across the content areas. “Framework” is probably a bad word for what it actually is. Maybe I should call them “The Non-Freaked Out List of Important Things […]
Your Attitude About X
For years, I’ve had these words hanging on a wall that faces my desk: Your attitude about X says nothing about X and everything about your heart. I’m not telling you to believe them, but I’m saying there may be a strategic advantage to taking them seriously. When I approach Problem In the Classroom X with an […]
A Conversation with Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein
In today’s installment of the interviews I conducted while creating Teaching with Articles, we get to sit down with a powerful pair of minds that long-time readers will be very familiar with. I’ve written about Gerald Graff and/or Cathy Birkenstein in some of this blog’s most popular posts: A Simple, Two-Paragraph Template that Helps Kids to Really […]
Babies, Bathwater, and Grit
I was sitting in an evening meeting some months ago, one of those situations where a sampling of K-12 teachers are brought in to share their two cents about where they’d like the district to go. We were in table groups, and the facilitator had just asked us to brainstorm a list of adjectives to […]