service

To be good at teaching, you need to do a few things well, getting better at them as your career progresses. And then you need to do all the rest of the things just well enough. (The “well enough” things get satisficed — one of the most useful terms I’ve come across in my research.) To be great at teaching, you need to keep on doing […]

On the first day of my teaching career, I gave my students a rehearsed, hooyah speech. I’m pretty sure it involved standing on a desk, and I know I was decked out in the only suit I owned. I can still picture that classroom in Baltimore, filled with terrified sixth graders. You could almost see […]

Some time ago, I met a pair of teachers who happened to be married. Each of them had been teaching for several decades, and both seemed thoroughly unhappy. Every time that either of them contributed to the conversation that we were sharing, they complained, making known another thing they found unsatisfactory or unacceptable. I’m not talking about […]

In the New Year, new semester, new school year, the impulse to believe that things can be perfect is real but invisible. Of course I don’t think I can be perfect, the savvy person says. That would be naive. But our reaction to the inevitable setbacks — the abandoned resolutions, the failed lessons, the kids we can’t […]

The way we conceptualize teaching is important. The Technician is always in search of the next practical strategy, the next product, the next formal observation where a complex rubric will be completed and discussed. Before we dismiss it, let’s realize that there is some truth here — we do need practical strategies, we do need functional lessons and […]