Beau Larimer is a high school teacher in Bakersfield who also teaches teacher prep at college. I had the privilege of meeting Beau and his colleagues during a professional development workshop on a Saturday in January 2020. Beau created conversations like the one below for his teacher prep students during the covid closures of Spring […]
Livestream Recording: A Conversation with Nancy Frey and Doug Fisher re: Motivation Amidst the Closures
Hi there! I did a bad job mentioning this on the blog beforehand, but recently I had the pleasure of sitting down for a Zoom “coffee chat” with two of our profession’s most prolific authors: Nancy Frey and Doug Fisher. In the recorded conversation below, you can see Doug, Nancy, and I discussing things like […]
What If We Took an Hour?
Sometimes, things pile up. A messy desk with layers of paper strewn across it A pile of books waiting to be re-shelved An inbox left unprocessed for a couple days (or weeks) That one counter where the random bits of life’s non-urgent action items collect: a shirt needing a button, a child’s toy requiring superglue […]
On Internal Pendulums, Tsunamis of Urgency, and Two Life-Giving Disciplines for Educators
We like to talk about pendulum swings in education, but of all of them I’ve seen in my career, none rivals the motion of my internal pendulum during the final months of this 2019-2020 school year. Just as I think I’m getting the hang of the external and internal work of this emergency remote teaching […]
Which Is the Better Lesson? An Illustration of What an Equity-Producing, Knowledge-Rich Curriculum Looks Like
Below are two lesson anchor charts from a pair of elementary classrooms. In one classroom, the students are having a lesson on finding the main idea. In the other, they are listening to the teacher read the myth of Daedalus and Icarus. Here are my questions. Knowing that we lack all kinds of context, answer […]