Laughter is not just laughter. It’s the most fundamental sign of safety and connection. — Daniel Coyle, The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups Have you ever had one of those awkward moments where you tell your students a joke or share with them something that you think is funny, only to have […]
Instruction
Trust, but Verify
In his fascinating and quick Anything You Want, thinker Derek Sivers tells a story to explain a lesson he learned about delegation. (And yes, I understand that you and I are teachers, and that most of us lack assistants to delegate to. But there are key parallels. More after the story.) The story goes like […]
Common Teacher Hang-up: What Do I Do When Debates Get Heated?
With midterm elections upon the United States and Americans demonstrating a penchant for argumentation heavy on earnestness and light on amicability, I thought this might be a helpful bit to share. Sometimes teachers write in with questions like this: “Okay, I’m doing pop-up debates, but sometimes they get really intense. What do I do?” Before […]
Why the Best Teaching Strategies Are Like Boxes of Building Blocks
A lot of my favorite teaching strategies are like the box of building blocks that my children have. When the box gets dumped out, it’s amazing how many things my kids can make. The blocks provide a set of very basic constraints — how many there are, their shapes, their colors — but mostly there’s […]
Improving Student Motivation via Micro-Commenting on Papers
I’ve written and spoken passionately about the need for us to think better about grading and feedback. When feedback isn’t fast, it’s a triple loss. Our quality of life decreases as we drag papers around with us for weeks. The usefulness of the feedback decreases because our kids, when they get the work back a week or […]