Dear colleague, On any given week, teaching can be a tough gig. But during certain segments of the year, the toughness is especially concentrated. The formerly anonymous teacher blogger Kelly Treleaven had a term for one of these concentrated periods of school year difficulty: the Dark Evil Vortex of Late September-October-November (DEVOLSON). This is what […]
An Old Dog Learning From an Old Trick: Lessons Learned from the September Invitation
Dear colleague, About a month ago, I invited teachers to spend a month experimenting with tracking attempted MGCs. The goal was to keep track of what we did and see what we noticed. Here’s what I learned from this work during September of 2024-2025. What I Did My Favorite Glimpses of Impact One day in […]
An Experiment in Curiosity and Well-Being
Dear colleague, My goodness — ya’ll have curiosities that run the gamut. Whether it’s restorative justice, reducing achievement gaps, competency/mastery instruction, or deep education versus cheap schooling…us professionals are pondering a lot of things. So here’s why I asked that question in my previous post. About nine months ago, I got curious about whether my […]
What are you curious about right now?
Dear colleague, I just finished recording an interview that I’m excited to share with you later this week. It’s a long-form conversation with a dear friend, and its core themes are curiosity, experimentation, and progress. It got me thinking. At a time of the school year when it can start to be hard to remember […]
Tips for Starting Pop-Up Debates Well
Dear colleague, One of our amazing colleagues wrote a comment on my YouTube channel recently that perfectly describes how to approach your first Pop-Up Debates of the school year. (For more on Pop-Up Debates, see the index of your copy of These 6 Things or this guide.) Here’s what Connie Fletcher said: One of my […]