In my book These 6 Things: How to Focus Your Teaching on What Matters Most (2018), I introduced the Five Key Beliefs as a methodology for analyzing and doing something about student motivation problems. Due to the need to treat more than just the Five Key Beliefs in the book (after all, they are just […]
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This School Year, Try the Minimalist Approach to Student Motivation
Since The Will to Learn came out, I’ve worked with dozens of faculties and teacher groups on the material and continued to practice its ideas and strategies in my own classroom. What I’ve found is that even the short list of 10 strategies I write about can be pretty overwhelming. It’s too much to focus […]
The Complete Guide to Pop-Up Debates – a DSJR Guide
In the speaking and listening chapter of These 6 Things: How to Focus Your Teaching on What Matters Most, I argue that great classrooms can be built on just three speaking/listening structures: When a teacher uses just three methods for speaking/listening in class, both teacher and students are able to rapidly acquire proficiency in the […]
How to Get Through Your Curriculum This Year (Credibility Booster)
Toward the end of last school year, I published a video for teachers who found themselves in a common teacher predicament: they didn’t have time to finish their curriculum. If this has never happened to you, congratulations: you are part of a prized minority. Schedules get disrupted, tangents get taken, rants get ranted, projects go […]
The (Few but Purposeful) Classroom Posters I Use
Over the years of my career so far, I’ve found a small number of posters that deserve space on my classroom walls. Like any tool, these posters act as multipliers of the skill and understanding I bring to bear in using them. If I don’t deeply understand what they mean and how to develop that […]