Quit Complaining About “These Kids.” Seriously, stop it. We spend a lot of our days visiting districts, observing classrooms, and talking with teachers, and I’m starting to hear something more often than I should. I keep hearing teachers say things a long the lines of: “This would work, but ‘these kids’ can’t do it…next year will be better.” I’ve had … Read More
3 Things I learned from Teaching in A Fishbowl.
In case you don’t know what the term means (you probably do) teaching in a fishbowl is when your classroom is being observed by other professionals, administrators, colleagues, and stakeholders constantly. Essentially it means that your teaching is always on display. Now, I know you are thinking, “I would hate that!” but I assure you it has its benefits. When I … Read More
“Hey Teacher!” Why you should never hear that again.
“Hey Teacher!” You’ve probably been there before. A student, frustrated with their hand in the air decides it’s all of a sudden ok to yell across the room “Hey Teacher!” (they might use your name, but you get the point). There’s a good chance this isn’t a rare occurrence in your classroom. You’re awesome, so you probably manage your classroom well … Read More
Let Your Students FAIL
The Cycle of Failure: We’ve all been in the situation with that “difficult” student in our classroom, where they shut down, let out a sigh of discontent, and throw an assignment aside while saying something like “I’m not doing this!” I know this can be frustrating as an educator, but I want you to think about something other than trying
Why PBL’s Fail, And What You Can Do About It.
The Power and Pitfalls of PBL’s Alright, lets just get this part out of the way first: I realize there are drastic differences between project based learning and problem based learning experiences, but for the purpose of this post I am going to hybridize the two concepts because the content of what you are about to read is relevant for … Read More