Recently at a professional development in California, we were doing a session on workload simplification and a colleague raised her hand and asked the following: I get what you’re saying about satisficing our email inboxes. But what happens to me at least once a week is a student or family member emailing me for a […]
The Teacher’s First Test of the Day, Part 2 (Or How to Boost Your Credibility and Sanity with a Clear and Reinforced Start-of-Class Procedure)
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been sharing quick, common sense ways to impact teacher credibility as a classroom teacher. The master list of tactics (with updated links out to the most recent articles) is here. Through it all, we’ve been saying that Credibility is influenced by CCP: the signals we send of Care, Competence, […]
The Teacher’s First Test of the Day, Part 1
In Extreme Ownership, former Navy SEAL/super successful internet guy/best-selling author/super yoked dude Jocko Willink talks about waking up at your alarm’s first sound as the first test of the day. Here’s Willink: I have three [alarm clocks], as I was taught by one of the most feared and respected instructors in SEAL training: one electric, […]
What I Learned Watching a High School Math Teacher Talk Numbers with a Four-Year-Old
In a recent article listing twenty simple ideas for signaling Credibility to our students, one of the ideas was pretty indirect — watching someone else teach. How does this boost our credibility signal to students? Let’s begin handling that question by actually doing what it suggests — let’s watch someone who is good at teaching. […]
Credibility Booster: Count Down
I was thinking the other day about how a simple little line on my whiteboard does a little credibility signal-sending for me on a regular basis. It’s this — a countdown to the AP exam that some of my ninth graders will be taking come May. But, it could also be… …a countdown to the […]