Whether we like it or not, you and I are signal senders. We are constantly sending signals about what kind of a place our classroom and our school is. If you’re in a work-smarter-not-harder kind of vein this year, then you want to be intentional about sending these certain kinds of signals to your students: […]
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Should You Tell Students You Like Them?
I was talking with one of our colleagues the other day, Mr. Adam Craig, who teaches mathematics in Amarillo, TX. He brought up a phenomenon that many of us can likely relate to: hearing a student bemoan the fact that one of their teachers doesn’t like them. I’m talking about things like this: “Oh, Mr. […]
Youthful Purpose Guru Bill Damon’s “Golden Opportunity”
In today’s article, we’re going to focus on a simple, research-backed method for developing a sense of purpose in young people. As you might remember, purpose is one of the colors on the Rainbow of Why palette we’ve looked at lately here on the blog. There’s this researcher out of Stanford who basically dedicated his […]
Waiting on Stars (Or You’ve Never Met a Student that Wants to be Demotivated in School)
Here’s a thing I don’t think we think about enough: Your students WANT to be motivated. This is something fundamental to human beings. So, this is what I contend: you’ve never met a student who set out to become demotivated in school. Every. One. Of your students, down in the roots of their will, desires […]
Diving Deeper into Caroline Ong’s “Math is Beautiful” High Horse — In Her Own Words
Today’s a good time to let our colleague Caroline Ong, of “Math is Beautiful High Horse” renown (article about that here), to give us a bit more context on what she’s doing when she takes these opportunities to micro-rant to her students about how lovely and important and useful and beautiful her discipline is. Howdy […]