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Dear colleague, For today’s Valued Within example, let’s look at an idea that’s not mine at all. This one comes from Adam Craig in Massachusetts. Each weekend, Adam’s students have a simple homework assignment: find a mathy moment in real life. On Monday, Adam asks his students to report out what they found. Within a […]

Dear colleague, As I’ve been saying, the Value Puzzle can be solved from two angles: teacher-generated Mini-Sermons and student-generated Valued Within exercises. The Utility-Value “T-Chart” Intervention that we looked at last time is a prime example of a “Valued Within” exercise. Today we’ll look at another. Some years ago, I was engaged in a PD […]

Dear colleague, Mini-sermons are a key move for Value cultivation in the classroom. When a credible teacher takes 30-120 seconds to explain to students in an authentic, creative, and gentle way why the work at hand is valuable AND when the teacher does this on a regular basis, do not underestimate the inner changes produced […]

Dear colleague, Today was one of those days: full schedule yesterday, full evening last night, busy morning this morning. As I was driving to school, a wave of anxiety and guilt washed over me: My first hour lesson wasn’t in place! And class was set to start in under thirty minutes. Noooooooot good. Thankfully, I […]

Dear colleague, I don’t think it’s melodramatic to state the following: The vast majority of students today have a deeply impoverished view of the value of an education. It’s way more popular today to decry the pointlessness of learning school subjects than it is to Value them. And on top of this, a pre-COVID national […]