In The Will to Learn: How to Cultivate Student Motivation Without Losing Your Own, I lay out an approach to student motivation in which Five Key Beliefs can be influenced using just 10 basic strategies. The fourth of those strategies is Mini-Sermons from an Apologist Winsome and Sure. What is it? The Most Important Thinking […]
The Robots Have Won…Sort Of.
Dear colleague, I was recently disturbed by a new AI tool that popped up in two of the handful of news sources I read on a regular basis. Basically, you give the tool a link to an article, a PDF, or a Google document, and with the click of a button, the tool creates a […]
Let’s Zoom It Out
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 […]