Dave Stuart Jr.

Dear colleague, Today, let’s look at a Valued Within exercise that we can do via one of my favorite instructional activities: Pop-Up Debates. As you’ll recall, Valued Within exercises are any activity that has students figuring out why the work of learning is valuable to them. Unlike Mini-Sermons, in which creating and communicating Value messages […]

Dear colleague, For today’s Valued Within example, let’s look at an idea that’s not mine at all. This one comes from Adam Craig in Massachusetts. Each weekend, Adam’s students have a simple homework assignment: find a mathy moment in real life. On Monday, Adam asks his students to report out what they found. Within a […]

Dear colleague, As I’ve been saying, the Value Puzzle can be solved from two angles: teacher-generated Mini-Sermons and student-generated Valued Within exercises. The Utility-Value “T-Chart” Intervention that we looked at last time is a prime example of a “Valued Within” exercise. Today we’ll look at another. Some years ago, I was engaged in a PD […]

Dear colleague, Mini-sermons are a key move for Value cultivation in the classroom. When a credible teacher takes 30-120 seconds to explain to students in an authentic, creative, and gentle way why the work at hand is valuable AND when the teacher does this on a regular basis, do not underestimate the inner changes produced […]

Dear colleague, Today was one of those days: full schedule yesterday, full evening last night, busy morning this morning. As I was driving to school, a wave of anxiety and guilt washed over me: My first hour lesson wasn’t in place! And class was set to start in under thirty minutes. Noooooooot good. Thankfully, I […]

Dear colleague, I don’t think it’s melodramatic to state the following: The vast majority of students today have a deeply impoverished view of the value of an education. It’s way more popular today to decry the pointlessness of learning school subjects than it is to Value them. And on top of this, a pre-COVID national […]

Dear colleague, Someone asked me at a PD recently, “What’s the most important teacher book you ever read?” At the time they asked me, there just happened to be a copy of Jim Collins’ Good to Great sitting on a table nearby. I picked up the volume and I said, “Let’s go with this one.” […]

Dear colleague, I run this blog like I run my classroom: I assume nothing about your political leanings and keep private my own. Education, I’ve long said, is all about promoting the long-term flourishing of young people by teaching them to master things that, apart from school, they’d be unlikely to master. This is a […]

Dear colleague, “Here at Musora, we believe that everyone would be better off if they played a musical instrument.” When I heard this line in the middle of ​a jazz band improv video​ I came across the other day, I immediately heard what the creator was doing: cultivating the Value belief in his listeners. It […]

Dear colleague, To make a really good Everest Statement (see Ch 1 of These 6 Things or this article), you want to describe a mountain that has no real top to it. Let me show you some examples of what I mean and then explain why it’s important. Here’s the statement I use for my […]

Dear colleague, I’ve spent this month riffing on the idea of the Value of an education. Even in a world where robots make podcasts, bad arguments abound, “anything I need to know is on my phone,” and writing is way more work than prompting ChatGPT, I’m more confident than ever that classes filled with knowledge-building, […]

Dear colleague, Not sure if you’ve heard, but there’s an election coming up in the United States. (For more on how I’ve been teaching this election, you can read this article written by our local School News Network in which my work is featured a bit, or check out this video.) But today, we’re not […]

Dear colleague, In Kelly Gallagher’s new book, To Read Stuff You Have to Know Stuff: Helping Students Build and Use Prior Knowledge, he offers an abundance of mini-sermon material for the Value of building knowledge. As the title proclaims, Gallagher’s apologetics for knowledge-building focus especially on the role that knowledge plays in reading comprehension. But […]

Dear colleague, In a world where AI can produce “better” and faster and clearer writing than you and I can, does writing still matter? Is this something we should have our students do, all across the school day? And if so, why? In this article, I want to share the earnest, robust approach I’m taking […]

Dear colleague, Last time, I shared rough draft thoughts on how I’m doing in the Age of AI. This time, I’d like to begin a series of essays on the Value of the different modes of learning I describe in These 6 Things. If you’ve got a copy of that book, get it handy for […]