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 […]
The Kind of Science that Teaching Needs
I’ve written elsewhere that, of the 3,500 people who have answered the subscriber survey I put out a year or so ago, a strong majority are educators wearied from years of high-stakes accountability and the over-sciencing of teaching. But with that latter descriptor — the “over-sciencing” of teaching — I want to be clearer because, as […]
“Marly Attacks” and The Power of Expectations
Our third daughter, Marlena Grace, is a miniature tank with the face of an angel. Of our three girls, she’s been by far the quickest to upgrade her mobility skills, learning to crawl by six months and walk by nine months. (We aren’t the Parents Who Want Our Kids to Be First, either — Marly just […]