Dear colleague, Today on the first day of August 2022, I’m excited to share with you what the 11th year of this blog will offer to earnest, hard-working educators like you and me. I think the purpose of DaveStuartJr.com is to act as a lighthouse in the oft-stormy seas of being a teacher in the […]
Closing Out the School Year: A Letter to My Colleagues
Dear Colleague, I was reading C. S. Lewis this morning and I came across this line: “Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out […]
A Time to Weep and a Time to Love
The other morning before school, I found myself looking at the faces and reading the stories of the people who were killed in Texas last week. I typically try to not to dwell on tragedies like this; a soul handles only so much sorrow before it numbs, and ours is a time awash in cause […]
School Year Shut Down: Dedicate the Year Behind
A few months back during the Five Key Beliefs for Leaders experience, I reconnected with our colleague Martee Lopez-Schmidt, and she shared her experience using Henry Seton’s daily class period dedication strategy. It is a lovely idea for cultivating the five key beliefs (especially Credibility, Value, and Belonging), but alas — I did not have […]
Reframing the End of School Countdown
Over the past year, I’ve been delighted to partner with Alfred G. Waters Middle School in Middletown, DE. We’ve worked on student motivation, teacher motivation, and early career teacher support. Recently, Dr. John Tanner (AGW’s principal) wrote the following message to his faculty that ties in well to the end-of-year thread we’ve been pursuing on […]