As some of you know, last year I started a ninth grade Advanced Placement World History course at our school. (Read my rationale and why I ultimately found the age level of my students to be one of our chief advantages here: How to View Teaching Situations Where the Odds are Against You: A Personal Case […]
Instruction
Unicorns and Growth Mindset
Last spring, a student said to me, “Well, I’m just not a map person. I’m not good at maps.” And I responded, “Well, Adam, flying unicorns are real.” To which Adam replied, “Um… what?” Growth mindset isn’t just a cute idea The preponderance of evidence supporting the brain’s malleability and the human ability to learn […]
Lessons Learned from my Character Lab Teacher Innovation Grant Research Project
In May 2015, I was given what I felt was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity: conducting action research about the intersection of public speaking and character growth with the support of the bright minds at Character Lab. Character Lab is an edu-research startup founded in part by Angela Duckworth; their website is my first recommendation for people […]
One Teacher’s Experiment with a Choice-Based Articles of the Week Assignment
Have you ever toyed with the idea of letting your students select the articles for Kelly Gallagher’s article of the week assignment? Stephanie Roederer, a teacher from Kentucky, has done a lot more than ponder it! Below, you’ll read an email Stephanie sent me a month or so ago. Her thought process, strategies, and results are so […]
Knowing Stuff is Inseparable from Literacy
The point of the Non-Freaked Out Approach to Producing Literate Humans (still working on that title; see Figure 1) is to make it easy for teachers to remember what we ought to become very, very good at. It helps us ask at the end of a hard day, “Did I help my students grow in […]