In These 6 Things, I lay out an inside-out approach to student motivation that I think the research suggests. This approach hinges on five key beliefs, and I’ve written about them all over the blog, such as here, here, and here. If you’re already familiar with them, go ahead and look away from the screen […]
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Ptolemy v. Copernicus
About twenty-two centuries ago, Greco-Roman philosopher Ptolemy argued in Almagest that the sun and the moon and the other heavenly bodies rotated around the Earth. This geocentric view remained predominant for 1,700 years until the Renaissance’s Nicolaus Copernicus argued for a sun-centered system. In the decades that followed, new-fangled “scientists” like Johannes Kepler and Galileo […]
The Magic Wand Experiment: Learning to Explicitly Teach What We Want Our Students to Do Well
If I came into your school or classroom with a magic wand and said, “Hey, when I wave this thing, every one of your students will do three things with perfect consistency,” what three things would you pick? What three thing do you wish all students would do — for their own good and for […]
How to Write a Great, Kind Email (That Is, How to Write All Emails)
In a caustic age of casually scathing public rhetoric, great organizational cultures are built one edifying communication at a time. It is the case that good emails accrue their cultural benefits slowly and incrementally, but bad emails can extract their cultural deficits rapidly and semi-permanently. So the skill of writing good, kind emails is an […]
Staying Checked In
Last month, I had a chance to travel to New Orleans, LA, and Gillett, WI, to learn with teachers about focusing our work on what matters most. As usual, we used These 6 Things as a diving board into focused, professional learning. As is often the case these days, our learning cohered around the fundamental […]