Dear colleague, A fellow teacher wrote in to me some time ago with the following dilemma: My strongest suit is connecting with my students, on an academic level as well as a personal level. My students trust me and come to me with personal problems regularly as they sense that I care about them. I’ve […]
The MGC Inflection Point
Dear colleague, This year I’ve worked with several partner schools to help The Will to Learn take root in their schools. In each one, there’s this inflection point that happens where folks have tried Moments of Genuine Connection (MGCs) for a bit — printed their rosters, started keeping track, grappled with the exhaustion — and […]
Every Student Known
Dear colleague, For the past year and a half, folks on my building leadership team have been giving us faculty members a chance to think about, experiment with, and get consistent with tracking attempted moments of genuine connection (MGCs). That might seem crazy — I mean, how do you spend 1.5 years exploring a strategy […]
How to Woodenize Working Memory (Woodenization Example)
Dear colleague, As I unpack in the first module of the Principles of Learning Course (and a bit in this YouTube video), one of the reasons learning is hard is because working memory is a limited resource. Working memory is whatever we’re thinking about at the moment. It’s what we think with. Hopefully, your working […]
Are Worksheets Bad?
Dear colleague, It’s common enough to hear a well-meaning teacher use language like this: In one sense, I get it. When a class period becomes nothing more than a teacher distributing worksheet after worksheet to keep kids busy, that class is falling short of its potential. Our job is to teach, not to chuck worksheets […]