If you’d like to start cultivating those five key beliefs in your students, then may I suggest that the best place to start is not with expectancy-value interventions or growth mindset experiments. Nope. Instead, start with the most influential person in your classroom: you. The effort belief: Do you believe that, through your effort, you can get better at teaching any […]
student motivation
Belief Drives Behavior
The most significant thing I’ve learned about teaching in the past year is this: belief drives behavior. It sounds hokey, but it’s actually the distillation of what I’ve come to find as the most actionable, robust takeaways from the vast research around noncognitive factors (or social-emotional skills or SEL or character or soft skills or […]
Beware the Belabored Anecdote
When we share a story to illustrate a point or a concept, and that story becomes longer than it needs to be to bring home the point, that’s a belabored anecdote. When you’re someone who started a rocket company that now does delivery work for NASA, then you can get away with this — go […]
Relationships: Not a Separate Goal, but a Fruit of and a Means to *the* Goal
If you’re trying to decide whether you should spend class time developing relationships with and amongst your students or working on the curriculum toward the longest-term objectives, I think you’re asking the wrong question. When people set off on a Mount Everest trek (says the guy who has, of course, done this many times), they […]
Productive Curiosity: The Billion Dollar Character Strength?
In January of this year, “billionaire buddies” Warren Buffett and Bill Gates held a Q&A session at Columbia University. At the 5:08 mark, the moderator asks, “What quality has been most important for you?” They both answered with the same thing: curiosity. Here is how Gates defines curiosity in the interview: “You try and predict […]