One of the biggest challenges of teaching Never Let Me Go isn’t helping students understand the plot. The plot is fairly straightforward. Students tend to have more difficulty understanding how to read the novel. Many students approach the book as if it were a mystery. They spend the first half asking, “What’s really going on?”…
In June I successfully defended my dissertation at Northeastern University. My research focused on grading and assessment, which will likely not surprise anyone who has been reading this blog for a while, as I have written about grading and assessment frequently. My dissertation was qualitative action research, a dissertation in practice grounded in the Carnegie…
I want to discuss an article my friend Robert tweeted about yesterday. Student shaming: Check. Only way to teach is lecture: Check. Only thing missing here is a laptop ban. https://t.co/Ciz97126RK — Robert Talbert (@RobertTalbert) December 8, 2017 This paragraph in particular: First and foremost: From kindergarten on, students spend thousands of hours studying subjects irrelevant…
This picture shows three special groups of students. In the frame in the upper left is my last group of advisees at the Weber School before I moved away from Georgia to Massachusetts. They took this picture of themselves at the Winter Formal and framed it for me as a going-away gift. These students graduated…
I had weekend duty at my school on Labor Day. For those of you who might teach in other settings, weekend duty is fairly common in boarding schools. When we have students living on campus, making sure their needs are taken care of takes many hands, and the faculty living on campus cannot always…
Today’s post is inspired by a tweet from Science Leadership Academy Principal Chris Lehmann: https://twitter.com/chrislehmann/status/711978968027635712 Another good question: do you tell the students how much you enjoy having them in your school? Students at my school are polite. They often hold doors, offer to help, and greet people politely when they meet others campus. One…
Teaching was the first career I ever considered, and I actually do remember making that decision. I was in first grade. My experience with education was not that expansive at that point. I couldn’t possibly have had any idea exactly what age group or which subjects I would teach when I grew up. I don’t…
I have an American lit class that meets after a half hour period we’ve designated for collaborative learning and talking and working with peers and teachers. Many of my students came to class quite early today. Some of the students were discussing a quiz in history, sharing strategies they’d used to study and lamenting faulty memory…
I’ve been thinking quite a lot lately about how important it is to meet students where they are. I am not saying we should not have standards, but we are going to have students in our classes, and they are going to be all over the map when it comes to backgrounds, experiences, interests, and…
Right about this time of year, teachers everywhere (particularly secondary school teachers) are looking at the calendar and freaking out about what they haven’t covered. I, like many teachers, have fallen into the trap of thinking that certain content has to be covered, even at the expense of engaging in deeper learning, because of time…
