Dear colleague, Recently, I wrote about the MGC inflection point. I’ve been able to study and work through this thanks to a few Will to Learn partnerships* I’ve made with schools this school year. Another fruit of those partnerships is clarity on what I call the Three Levels of MGCs. As you progress through the […]
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What If Students Get Too Personal?
Dear colleague, A fellow teacher wrote in to me some time ago with the following dilemma: My strongest suit is connecting with my students, on an academic level as well as a personal level. My students trust me and come to me with personal problems regularly as they sense that I care about them. I’ve […]
The MGC Inflection Point
Dear colleague, This year I’ve worked with several partner schools to help The Will to Learn take root in their schools. In each one, there’s this inflection point that happens where folks have tried Moments of Genuine Connection (MGCs) for a bit — printed their rosters, started keeping track, grappled with the exhaustion — and […]
Every Student Known
Dear colleague, For the past year and a half, folks on my building leadership team have been giving us faculty members a chance to think about, experiment with, and get consistent with tracking attempted moments of genuine connection (MGCs). That might seem crazy — I mean, how do you spend 1.5 years exploring a strategy […]
How to Woodenize Working Memory (Woodenization Example)
Dear colleague, As I unpack in the first module of the Principles of Learning Course (and a bit in this YouTube video), one of the reasons learning is hard is because working memory is a limited resource. Working memory is whatever we’re thinking about at the moment. It’s what we think with. Hopefully, your working […]