Good professional development doesn’t come in a single kind of package. It kills me when I hear people say things like, “Everyone knows that one-and-done PD doesn’t work.” Find a dozen master teachers and ask them to list the five best professional development experiences they’ve ever had, and you’ll find that they’s list every kind of […]
School Level
A Dangerous Assumption
When we assume a person understands us, has learned something, or has otherwise changed just because we told them something, taught them something, covered something in a meeting — that’s First Degree Assumicide. Teachers, administrators, parents, and students all fall prey to this dangerous assumption. Example 1: “Class, stop with the lower-cased first person pronoun! We’ve […]
Writing: The Most Underrated Twenty-First Century Skill
I struggle to imagine putting together a solid argument for why we wouldn’t want all of our students to be capable writers when they graduate. Writing well is an obvious good. While much fuss was made about newfangled twenty-first-century skills, one very old skill that seems to be only increasing in importance is writing. Here we have the importance from an […]
Things I Believe about Grading Systems
There are a million debates about how or whether we should grade, and many people smarter than me have spent thousands of words explaining and advocating and rhetoricizing for all kinds of philosophies and systems. No matter what system you use — standards-based, traditional, 3P, no grades at all — I’ll just put out a […]
Are We Measuring the Wrong Things?
It is entirely possible that your school or state or country is making dangerous assumptions about what should be measured (and therefore improved) and what shouldn’t. Kirabo Jackson is an economist at Northwestern University. He used a database of North Carolina students — 464,502 students, according to Paul Tough’s Helping Children Succeed — to examine the long-term impact […]