I get really stressed about perfection sometimes. In my own life, I find this happens in several areas again and again: When I’m prepping for a speaking or professional development engagement When I’m prepping for the first day of school (which, for me, is today) When I mess up as a parent Conversely, there are other […]
These 5 Things, All Year Long: An Overview of The Non-Freaked Out Framework for Literacy Instruction
Note from Dave: This post eventually became These 6 Things: How to Focus Your Teaching on What Matters Most. Please note that all of the strategies, frameworks, and research referenced below are updated (and, in some cases, significantly changed, and, in all cases, significantly improved for that back. Mike Schmoker calls it “among the most helpful, […]
This Year, Make Better Choices with Warren Buffett’s 25-5 List Technique
Like many educators, I have Yes-itis: the tendency to say Yes to good things, which often disables me from doing great things. So let me ask you some questions: When you get that email about a new opportunity — how do you decide whether or not to take it? When your boss says, “Hey, great news: there’s an […]
An Exemplary Exercise for Building Goal-Keeping Kids (includes Downloadable Document)
In “The Kind of Science that Teaching Needs,” I shared an “experiment” I whipped up last year to help my students set and stay committed to their goals. If you read that article, you’ll know that I have to put “experiment” in quotation marks because it was missing a few important pieces of experimentation (like, you know, […]
Simple Interventions: Preventing Symptoms of Depression by Teaching Kids that People Can Change
I want to share with you the most exciting thing I read all summer: it’s a study by David Yeager and Adriana Miu. In less than 1,000 words, I’ll lay it out briefly and then explain why I think it basically proves that our most idealistic conceptions of teaching — that it is magical, that […]