Last year I got PADI certified as an open-water scuba diver. Despite a lifelong love of the ocean and a stint as a lifeguard, I was surprised by how challenging I found the course. First of all, I was far more scared of being underwater than I had ever imagined. The first time I went […]
How often should you give feedback? This is a question I’ve wrestled with for a decade. As a high-school English teacher, I try my best to write thoughtful comments on all my students’ summative assessments, but the volume in my particular field is soul-crushing. It’s not uncommon for me to have 50 three-page essays to […]
A lot has been written about the Millenials and how self-oriented they are. But I’m going to raise an uncomfortable truth about us educators, because I think it needs to be addressed head on if we are serious about improving education: we educators are often self-oriented, too, sometimes willfully blind to how much this could […]
A big mistake many of us in education make is to equate “feedback” on our work with judgment of our work. There’s good reason for why we do this: most of the feedback we get as educators comes in the form of performance evaluation — there is a prescribed set of criteria against which we […]
As promised in my previous post, “Be Better,” I’m going to highlight a handful of the ways we individual educators can take our own initiative to improve our craft. This week, that way is by feedback. There are two kinds of feedback that I think are valuable to every educator: feedback from students, and feedback […]
A brief thought on the cusp of a new year: Our job as educators is to actively work at getting better. If you are a classroom teacher, like me, and your job is to cause learning, but you aren’t actively searching for ways to better cause that learning, then you aren’t really doing your job. […]
Here are ten “resolutions” I wrote for myself to try to stick to for the coming year. Feel free to share yours below in the comments sections. Ten New Year’s Resolutions for Teachers 1. Don’t be boring. If they looked bored, they are. Learning should be engaging. 2. Stop talking so much. You really aren’t that interesting. […]
When I came across this New York Times article a couple weeks ago, titled “Technology Changing How Students Learn, Teachers Say”, I was immediately intrigued. I wanted to know more about the way our technology use is affecting learning, or even how it affects brain development. But I read the article and found little that […]
I’m currently in Paris, presenting at the UbD by the Seine conference at the American School of Paris, and am really enjoying the school, the learning and sharing, and, of course, the food. I gave a three-hour session today on Models by Design work I’ve been doing, specifically how to use models by the teacher and […]
Gearing up for the UbD conference in Paris next weekend and putting the finishing touches on my presentations. Here’s a teaser from my session Models by Design: Transfer and Meaning-Making through Models: When I first teach annotation skills and require students to take notes as they read, I often hear them complain: “But I […]