If we’re going to improve the quality of writing our students are capable of — an absolutely critical endeavor — then we first need to ensure that our kids have a large amount of writing that they do. Quantity precedes quality. In improving the amount of writing students do across the school day, we need […]
Instruction
The Write Structure: A Simple, Effective Method for Teaching Writing Across the Content Areas
Note from Dave: When I began my career in 2006, it was as a sixth grade English Language Arts teacher in Baltimore, MD. I can still remember the scripted curriculum they handed me, complete with workbooks, student consumables, and the expectation that all of my students would be working on decoding phonemes in my double-period, sixth […]
Latin Word Chunks: A Case Study in Smart, Low-Stress Knowledge-Building
If you’ve bought into the idea that knowledge matters — that people can’t really think critically or read well or even learn things without knowing stuff — then you’re where I am. The whole skills vs. knowledge debate is a distraction built on a false premise. So now what? I’ve been wrestling with the Now what? for a lot of the summer. Knowledge-building has a chapter in […]
The Best Place to Start
If you’d like to start cultivating those five key beliefs in your students, then may I suggest that the best place to start is not with expectancy-value interventions or growth mindset experiments. Nope. Instead, start with the most influential person in your classroom: you. The effort belief: Do you believe that, through your effort, you can get better at teaching any […]
Belief Drives Behavior
The most significant thing I’ve learned about teaching in the past year is this: belief drives behavior. It sounds hokey, but it’s actually the distillation of what I’ve come to find as the most actionable, robust takeaways from the vast research around noncognitive factors (or social-emotional skills or SEL or character or soft skills or […]