What it is: For the last 2-3 minutes of class, high school ELA teacher Brian Sztabnik takes a crack at explaining the lasting significance of today’s lesson: how a centuries-old poem speaks to today; how a mechanically-sound sentence is a thing of simple beauty; how essay-writing teaches us to explore ideas. That’s it. What it […]
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Dave’s Favorite Books on Aging for Educators 🥳
On the occasion of our birthday this year, my birthday buddies Justin Bieber and Lupita Nyong’o and I would like to offer you a list of our favorite books on getting older.* *All right, all right — so far, Lupita and Justin and I haven’t been able to actually meet, but that’s mostly a nationality […]
What I Do When a Parent, Guardian, or Student Emails Me Re: Make-Up Work or “How to Get My Grade Up”
Recently at a professional development in California, we were doing a session on workload simplification and a colleague raised her hand and asked the following: I get what you’re saying about satisficing our email inboxes. But what happens to me at least once a week is a student or family member emailing me for a […]
The Teacher’s First Test of the Day, Part 2 (Or How to Boost Your Credibility and Sanity with a Clear and Reinforced Start-of-Class Procedure)
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been sharing quick, common sense ways to impact teacher credibility as a classroom teacher. The master list of tactics (with updated links out to the most recent articles) is here. Through it all, we’ve been saying that Credibility is influenced by CCP: the signals we send of Care, Competence, […]
The Teacher’s First Test of the Day, Part 1
In Extreme Ownership, former Navy SEAL/super successful internet guy/best-selling author/super yoked dude Jocko Willink talks about waking up at your alarm’s first sound as the first test of the day. Here’s Willink: I have three [alarm clocks], as I was taught by one of the most feared and respected instructors in SEAL training: one electric, […]