In a caustic age of casually scathing public rhetoric, great organizational cultures are built one edifying communication at a time. It is the case that good emails accrue their cultural benefits slowly and incrementally, but bad emails can extract their cultural deficits rapidly and semi-permanently. So the skill of writing good, kind emails is an […]
Uncategorized
Staying Checked In
Last month, I had a chance to travel to New Orleans, LA, and Gillett, WI, to learn with teachers about focusing our work on what matters most. As usual, we used These 6 Things as a diving board into focused, professional learning. As is often the case these days, our learning cohered around the fundamental […]
Why Every English Teacher Should Consider “Reading Reconsidered”
Note from Dave: This guest post is from Lynsay Fabio, the New Orleans educator behind The Classroom Management Course. Enjoy! If you’ve been following Dave’s blog recently, you know that he’s having a bit of a head explosion, in large part because of the super-important role that knowledge-building plays in…well, just about Everything Education, and […]
Obscurity of Purpose Leads to the Wasting of Time
In his classic Essentialism, Greg McKeown observes: Clarity of purpose…consistently predicts how people do their jobs… The fact is, motivation and cooperation deteriorate when there is a lack of purpose. You can train leaders on communication and teamwork and conduct 360 feedback reports until you are blue in the face, but if a team does […]
On Sunk Costs (and Whether You Should Change Your Curriculum Even When You Recently Spent a Lot of Money on the Current One)
If the curriculum your district spent X dollars on two years ago is bad,* then sticking with it because you spent X dollars on it two years ago doesn’t make sense. The X dollars is a sunk cost — money you can’t recover, whether you stick with the curriculum for ten more years or you […]