He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how. Friedrich Nietzsche, Maxims and Arrows Teaching in a perfect world would be difficult enough. But teaching when bad things happen — the students aren’t motivated, the parents are angry, the administrator is out of touch, the colleagues aren’t kind, the policies are […]
Search Results for: professional development
Three Prescriptions for Thinking More Clearly about Teaching, Part 3: Write More
All right, here’s the ground we’ve covered so far: Clear thinking yields better teaching and better living and wiser choices. We want to be clear thinkers. But it doesn’t come automatically. It’s not the kind of thing that a degree confers. It’s won through practice, and we can always improve it. To start, we can […]
How to Improve School Cultures, Part 2: Collins’ Level 5 Leadership
When school cultures get toxic, everyone suffers: kids, staffs, communities. Long-term flourishing falls from view, obscured by angst and turmoil and distraction. One method for improving school cultures is to develop Dan Coyle’s three essential skills of great cultures: psychological safety, mutual vulnerability, and shared purpose. (See this blog post, or see Coyle’s book The Culture Code.) These […]
How to Improve School Cultures, Part 2: Collins' Level 5 Leadership
When school cultures get toxic, everyone suffers: kids, staffs, communities. Long-term flourishing falls from view, obscured by angst and turmoil and distraction. One method for improving school cultures is to develop Dan Coyle’s three essential skills of great cultures: psychological safety, mutual vulnerability, and shared purpose. (See this blog post, or see Coyle’s book The Culture Code.) These […]
Setting a Summer Reading Project
In my last post, I suggested that there’s a time to take on no new reading at all, instead setting one’s course for the full exploration of a single book. I did this five years ago or so with Mike Schmoker’s Focus, and much of the subsequent blogging and teaching I’ve done (including the development of […]