Teaching is one of the best jobs in the world because of its large impact potential in two areas: Externally, teaching affords us the unmatched privilege of contributing to the education of human beings. Few endeavors are as wrought with possibility as the teaching of people. And each day, we’re paid to participate in this […]
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Things That Help: Taking a Walk When I’m Stuck, or the Five-Out-Five-In
Most afternoons, I find myself stuck at least once: in a lesson plan, a stack of (digitally submitted) essays, a writer’s puzzle, a problem of practice I can’t solve. Now there are rare times when I find it best to push through when I’m stuck. But more frequently, I find that it’s better to take […]
“Cameras On… Please?” Ideas for Turning Empty Squares into Faces
This isn’t going to be me wading into the Great Camera Debate of 2020 but is instead me processing strategies for getting more students to turn their cameras on during whole-class, synchronous instruction. But Dave, why? Way back in the day, I wrote a post describing how humanization is only possible in spaces where we […]
Sandcastles v. the Himalayas: On Weak and Strong Boundaries
In a world of remote and hybrid instruction, there’s lots of talk about boundaries. It comes up in professional development, during staff meetings, on blogs and Twitter: boundaries, boundaries, boundaries. And the topic is a worthy one. As I’ve said, constraints make us better. The path to freeing ourselves up to doing our best work is marked by self-imposed […]
The Workload-Pressure Paradox
Workload and pressure work together deviously to demoralize and demotivate even the best teachers. Here’s how it works. First, workload. The default circumstance of teaching in the twenty-first century is that as time goes on, the teacher’s workload increases. Each year there is more of all the things we’re tasked with doing: More email to […]