So I’ve been putting some things together for my sessions at an upcoming UbD workshop in Paris and took a closer look at the new Common Core standards for ELA and how Spider Web Discussion supports them. It turns out Spider does a decent job of hitting core standards in both “Reading” and “Speaking and Listening” […]

I’m going to be presenting at Authentic Education’s UbD conference in October at the American School of Paris (full disclosure: Grant Wiggins, AE’s founder and president, is my dad and a big inspiration to my work as teacher, writer, and consultant). I pitched AE my Harkness workshop and they liked it; they wanted me to […]

My pre-K – 12 school’s ELA/English departments are up for curriculum review this year, which means we’ll get to revise, add to, and better align the ELA curriculum for our school. During our first meeting yesterday, we were discussing the goal of teaching vocabulary, particularly at the high-school level. A colleague questioned what our goal […]

I have never used Essential Questions as consciously in my teaching as I have in the past year, and I can’t believe what I have been missing all these years. The way I used them this past year was to design year-long, overarching EQs that spanned the whole course and most of the texts; perhaps […]

Just got back from five absolutely amazing days in the Perhentian Islands (off the Northeast coast of peninsular Malaysia), where I did two more dives — my first “fun dives,” when I get to just enjoy the dives instead of practicing and being tested on skills. These were dives #5 and #6 for me, and […]

This important distinction just came up in a conversation I had with a few dynamic teachers at the Athenian School in CA, a school that seems like a place I would love to send my children to (always a good measure of a school): Assessment is not synonymous with grading. Assessment means to assess against […]

My fellow faculty and I have been assigned some professional development reading from Schmoker’s Focus (highly readable, common-sense, and recommended for any educator interested in instruction and assessment). One of the issues it raises is formative vs. summative assessment, which is a hot trend in education right now. Formative assessment is the kind that assesses […]

One quick thought, as I am positively buried under end-of-the-year grading, exam writing, comments, awards, etc. Well, truth be told, another reason I am buried right now is because I went away for a long weekend to get my PADI open-water diver certification and am now trying to catch up. But it was worth it, and […]

Just a follow-up to my last post: one of my biggest challenges this year has been one ninth-grade class (“E block”) that really resists Harkness. They are quite shy and loathe to say much of anything at all, and they all joke about how they “hate” Harkness. In five years of teaching using Harkness, I […]

I had a great trip to Bangkok for Earcos 2012 and a wonderful time presenting there on Harkness method. My Earcos school rep told me to plan for twenty attendees, and 80+ showed up — I ran out of packets quite fast. I met some wonderful teachers doing really cool things, like Evan Weinberg — […]