A few weeks ago, I had an epiphany: what if, instead of rushing bedtime with my kids, I pretended that I had enough time to give them the love they each desired? It’s a silly question, really. Many of you are likely the kind of superstar parents that would never need to ask this. But […]
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Faculty and Staff Door Signs: A Simple Schoolwide Credibility Signal
A month or so ago, I visited a school in Middletown, DE: Alfred G Waters Middle School, known to my heart as Shark Nation. My first time there was half a decade ago for a These 6 Things workshop, and since then we’ve done a fair bit of remote work on student motivation. As I […]
Satisficing ≠ Quiet Quitting
The other day I fiddled up the end of a talk on the Will to Teach by making it seem like satisficing is something that you do for every single task on your plate as a teacher. Astute listeners unfamiliar with my work were left thinking, “Huh — it sounds like he’s telling me to […]
Competence ≠ Perfection
Something a lot of us teachers need reminding of is that becoming Credible in the eyes of a student has little to do with becoming a perfect teacher or doing everything at the level of total excellence. Instead, our students’ hearts are much more gracious than this; they long not for our perfection but for […]
The Gift of Many Teachers
One thing I like to repeat often to my students is that they have many more teachers for my class than just me. First and last, they have themselves. No one else in the world is more able to see the things they’re thinking, the things they’re wondering, the things they’re confident or unsure about. […]