This past Tuesday, I ended “Truths about Student Motivation” with a question: what are the tools and strategies that can equip our students to muster up the motivation required to get them from where they are to where they aspire to be? This is constantly in my mind during these first weeks of school; I’ve […]
Character Strengths
Truths about Student Motivation
It’s still early in the school year, but I can already sense some of the self-driven kids in my classes. I’ve learned about all of my kids a little bit through the first day of school index card activity (which is partially aimed at teaching purpose); and I’ve learned about a growing number of them through follow-up, one-on-one, […]
An Exemplary Exercise for Building Goal-Keeping Kids (includes Downloadable Document)
In “The Kind of Science that Teaching Needs,” I shared an “experiment” I whipped up last year to help my students set and stay committed to their goals. If you read that article, you’ll know that I have to put “experiment” in quotation marks because it was missing a few important pieces of experimentation (like, you know, […]
The Kind of Science that Teaching Needs
I’ve written elsewhere that, of the 3,500 people who have answered the subscriber survey I put out a year or so ago, a strong majority are educators wearied from years of high-stakes accountability and the over-sciencing of teaching. But with that latter descriptor — the “over-sciencing” of teaching — I want to be clearer because, as […]
An Example of Deliberate Practice from my Actual Life
One of the best reasons for infusing character strengths into our instruction is totally selfish: even if we completely fail to help our students grow character, our lives become richer as we grow the strengths in ourselves. And yet, this personal character growth is not truly selfish, either — not if our aim is to help our […]