Charles Duhigg is a champion writer. Through years of deliberate practice, he’s attained a level of excellence that makes the Pulitzer Prize and the New York Times bestseller list possible. In his book The Power of Habit, you begin to see how Duhigg reached this level of success. Yet, more importantly, you see how we can teach our […]
Autopsy of a Dud Project; Analysis of a Teacher’s Heart
During the past couple of weeks, I envisioned, planned, initiated, and carried out a project with students. I thought it was a good idea; it was founded on great intentions. Yet, with the project nearing completion, I am clearly seeing something: the project is a dud. This leaves me with two options: Ignore the failure. Run […]
Why I #LoveTeaching
I recently met an award-winning educator named Gary Abud on Twitter, and he told me about the #loveteaching campaign he’s promoting this week. He made a cool explainer video about it (click here), but here’s the skinny if you’re short on time: this week, Gary is trying to get as many folks as possible to share why […]
Moving Forward in the Midst of Survival Mode: A Retrospective
First of all, thank you. I am grateful for so much from January 2015, and I owe a heckuva lot to this Teaching the Core community. Specifically: You’ve commented on this past month’s blog posts like never before. Hearing your stories, your encouragement, your descriptions of what this blog does for you — I can honestly […]
A Simple, Powerful Tweak on the First Day of School Index Card Activity
If you’ve been around for a bit, you know I’m pretty old school in a lot of ways. When it comes to deciding which instructional strategies to use, my thinking goes like this: If multiple strategies do what I want them to do, then the simplest, quickest strategy is the best one. This is why I use index […]