Here’s a tale about teacher feedback on assessments: Based on my new streamlined approach to grading (more on this in the next blog entry), I nixed my plan to grade every grade 11 dialectical journal and instead asked the students to identify their top journal entry in four of the five dialectical journal criteria (1. […]

Part of the MbD philosophy that I’m developing  is one of my favorite examples of PD ever — taking advantage of your colleagues. I don’t mean anything bad; I mean we should be taking full advantage of some of the best models of teaching and learning going on right next door to us. My dad […]

I’m going to begin field testing one of the branches of the Models by Design approach to teaching, using colleagues as models of good (and — let’s be honest — not-so-good) teachers and classroom managers, in the coming months. I’ve reached out to all faculty, elementary – high, in my school and asked if any […]

I have an article in the most recent issue of Kappan Magazine (September 2011) on how best to teach ethics. My response? It’s best to model ethical behavior through Harkness Method (a unique form of Socratic seminar) rather than “teach” it. Enjoy. Not Teaching Ethics

I’ve been introducing the Dialectical Journals to both my IB 11s and my grade 9s this week. I’ve never done the journals with grade 9s before, so it’s a learning curve for both me and the kids, and we’re starting off really slowly. This week I gave them a handout with the basic requirements of […]

I introduced my IB class, English Literature in their first year of the IB program (11th grade), to Dialectical Journals, something a colleague at a former school taught me about. They are similar to double-entry journals, where the page is split in two down the middle and students choose a quote, put it in the […]

One sleepless summer night a few weeks ago, I tortured myself for hours trying to figure out what the seminal purpose of the study of English was. My overactive brain would not let me fall asleep until I’d figured it out. I wanted to design my 9th- and 11th-grade courses from that point (backwards design!) […]

Let me offer you an anecdote about models and learning from my own experience: In my late twenties, I decided to get back into tennis, something I’d played as a child. I signed up for a year of lessons in my neighborhood, group lessons for beginners with a grumpy Frenchman named Xavier. My youth tennis […]

Models by Design is a method of using models of student work that I devised based on my work as a middle and high school English teacher. It all started from a conversation I had with my dad, an old hand in education. I was describing to him a perennial problem I had: I provided […]