Dear colleague, One year I made an off-handed comment to my students about the importance of retrieval practice: RP so you don’t RIP. I didn’t think much of it until the end of the school year when my student Ellie said it was the most important thing she learned in my class. I even made […]
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Something New for You (& Maybe Your Principal, Too)
Dear colleague, I’m writing a new book called The Will to Teach. It’s built on a simple idea: the same Five Key Beliefs that drive student motivation — Credibility, Value, Effort, Efficacy, Belonging — also drive teacher motivation. And when those beliefs erode in the adults, everything else in a school starts to unravel. The […]
Simple Ideas to Be Credible in an AI-Addled World
Dear colleague, I’ve got just a few thoughts for you today regarding how to be more Credible with students when treating matters related to AI. Just like you, my thinking on this area of our work is in development. As such, what follows is very much working draft thinking. First, be real about the temptation. […]
The Tacky Ten
Dear colleague, In my last article, I warned against using the evil eye and recommended the steady eye instead. That recommendation is just one of many that I gleaned from Kearney et al.’s 1991 study on Credibility-harming teacher behaviors. You can read the study here (or my treatment of the study on pp. 37-39 of […]
Don’t Use the Evil Eye! Try the Steady Eye Instead
Dear colleague, Few teacher moves are as classic and universal as the evil eye. That glare, meant to scare or intimidate or shame a misbehaving student back toward right behavior, is older than blackboards. (Heck, it’s probably older than folks drawing stuff on cave walls.) But just because it’s classic doesn’t mean it’s a good […]