Dear colleague,

Today on the first day of August 2022, I'm excited to share with you what the 11th year of this blog will offer to earnest, hard-working educators like you and me.

I think the purpose of DaveStuartJr.com is to act as a lighthouse in the oft-stormy seas of being a teacher in the twenty-first century, and this coming year, after a summer away, I feel delighted at the things I'd like to share with you.

Below, I'll lay out three timescales of what to expect in Season 11 — –

The timescale of this week.
The timescale of this month.
The timescale of this year.

The timescale of this week

This week, one thing will be happening and one thing will be starting. I'll craft both to be optimally helpful and encouraging to folks like you and me — educators about to re-enter the fray of this good and challenging work.

Thing 1 — Thursday morning workshop on a topic lots of folks are concerned about for this fall

This Thursday from 7:30 am -10:30 am PST (10:30 am – 1:30 pm EST), I'm hosting a workshop on student motivation, AKA the Will to Learn. Technically, the title is “A three-hour teacher workshop on helping young people to be motivated to learn (w/o driving yourself nuts).”

It's just $50, and you get the recording and my slides. Group discounts are available — just pitch me with a price that works for you group and we'll make it happen. POs are welcome.

All the details and registration are here. Sign up before Thursday at 8:30 am to not. miss. out. Register for this week's online workshop here.

Thing 2 — The start of a “Teaching Simplified” August blog-based tutorial series

Which brings us to the timescale of this month.

The timescale of this month

All August, each weekday I'll send you bite-sized portions of what I'm calling the Teaching Simplified series. My aim is to give helpful advice and guidance for the areas of teaching practice that are most noticed by students. That last part is important, and it prompts a question I've enjoyed researching this summer: Which parts of our practice most impact the way that students experience our classrooms and our courses?

Often times, I think, the answers to that question are pretty non-sexy:

How quickly do I get feedback?
Does the teacher have a handle on behaviors in here?
Am I safe in this place, or do I need to keep my guard up?
Does the teacher seem to have a plan each day?
Is the teacher efficient or do we waste lots of time?

And so on.

My aim this month is to send you daily thoughts on this as you enter into the school year.

Yes, you read that right — daily.

If that bothers you, two options:

Archive all of my emails this month, or
Unsubscribe using the link below.

My pledge with each email is this: every article and/or video will be brief enough to read or watch in 5-10 minutes and will help you think more clearly about the agency you have as an educator in 2022-2023.

And no — it's not some massive sales pitch up to a course I'm selling, not some prelude to an imminent book launch. (Well… maybe a distant prelude — more in a minute on that.)

Nope — it's really all just for this. The point of the posts this month is to give you things to ponder yourself, forward on to your colleagues, and share at your staff meetings.

All for the sake of getting our hearts set for what is surely a potential-laden year.

Which brings us to…

The timescale of this coming school year, 11th year of the blog — “Season 11,” if you will — which starts today and ends May 2023

I won't be sending daily emails all year — breathe a sigh of relief 😉.

It's not that I don't want to — I do! — it's that once school sets in for me I know I'll not have near enough time.

This year, I intend to shift my cadence to the following:

September through December — 1-2 posts per week, 1-2 YouTube videos per week, and an extended break from publishing around the holidays. I'm calling this Semester 1 in my head.
January through May — same as above, with another pause for summer starting in early June and extending to August (I loved that this year).

Now for longtime readers, these plans shouldn't be surprising. That's about what I've done for all the ten years (!) I've run this blog.

But do you want to know the super-amazing-exciting-thrilling thing about this year, colleague?

During that January through May time period, I'll have ~~one~~ two new books coming out!

And lemme tell you what — I am so so excited for them. They feel to me like the culmination of the last ten years of my career.

Let me explain in pictures. (Make sure your email client lets me show you pictures. Alternatively, you can click on the blog post here.)

I know, I know — nerdy start. Hang with me. For non-Marvel fans, it may all seem like randomness and chaos to you — from Captain America to Moon Knight to She Hulk to Dr. Strange. Just chaos.

But for the nerds out there, you know that there's actually a clockmaker-like crazy genius behind it all. Each of the Marvel projects contributes to the overarching narrative of the “phase” that it's in. And for the first three phases of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the culminating work was an Avengers movie that wove all the story threads together.

The other day, I realized: the first decade of my blog has been a way-way-way-nerdier teacher version of that kind of a thing.

First there was Phase 1 👆 — how do we boil the Common Core literacy standards down into something intelligible, something a normal teacher can use?

Then we had Phase 2 — what is the essential work of teaching? I narrowed it down to six things.

And since 2018, I've been working on…

Which will culminate in…

Yes — two books this spring, both of which take and deepen things begun in These 6 Things.

In closing

All of that's pretty grandiose, so here's the deal:

I'm just a guy with a blog.
I promise to do my best by you without selling out my students or my family on the altar of success.
We'll see how it goes.

Your prayers and thoughts and well-wishes have made the past ten years unspeakably rewarding. I'll take as much of that as I can in the year to come.

Teaching right beside you,

DSJR