If learning is a feast, then noncognitive factors are the table. This is reflected in the Foundations Framework that I use in my own classroom and in the professional development workshops I’ve led around the country. (See Figure 1, below.) The literature on noncognitive factors can be pretty overwhelming. Having read a fair amount of it, I […]
“You Don’t Need More Time…
…you just need to decide.” — Seth Godin I’ve asked 11,683 people who subscribe to the newsletter a simple question: What’s the most frustrating thing about your job? In these responses, the word “time” appears 2,437 times. Here are some examples: Not enough time and too many expectations placed on teachers that are not in […]
Things I Believe about Grading Systems
There are a million debates about how or whether we should grade, and many people smarter than me have spent thousands of words explaining and advocating and rhetoricizing for all kinds of philosophies and systems. No matter what system you use — standards-based, traditional, 3P, no grades at all — I’ll just put out a […]
Are We Measuring the Wrong Things?
It is entirely possible that your school or state or country is making dangerous assumptions about what should be measured (and therefore improved) and what shouldn’t. Kirabo Jackson is an economist at Northwestern University. He used a database of North Carolina students — 464,502 students, according to Paul Tough’s Helping Children Succeed — to examine the long-term impact […]
Better and Saner Grading Tip: Start with the End
Grading is not fun. I do not like grading. Therefore, my goal in grading is always this: do it as efficiently as possible. For the sake of really zeroing in here, let’s be clear on the meaning of efficient — see Figure 1. I like a lot of things about this “define efficient” Google result. When […]