9 Principles for Working Better with Fellow Educators
This is my hallway’s teaching staff. Thank you to MBH and AKim for making this photo happen :) Welcome to the penultimate portion of the awesomest series on Teaching the Core (here’s Part 1, Part 2,...
View ArticleHow Gratitude Makes Us, and Our Students, Better
Gratitude has been on my mind a lot this week. In some ways, gratitude has been easy; in other ways, it’s been hard. And all along the way, it’s been interesting to examine how the character strength...
View ArticlePsst…
You know what would crank my thinking up a few notches? Having the brilliant minds over at Character Lab guide me in proving whether pop-up debate, one of my go-to strategies for getting students...
View ArticleSimple Questions On the First Day of School that Teach Purpose
By the end of the first day of school, I need index cards with each of my students’ names on them. I’ll use these to randomly call on students throughout the year during Think-Pair-Shares, doing all in...
View ArticleThe Kind of Science that Teaching Needs
I’ve written elsewhere that, of the 3,500 hundred people who have answered the subscriber survey I put out a year or so ago, a strong majority are educators wearied from years of high-stakes...
View Article4 Jedi Mind Tricks for Avoiding Burnout
This is a “garden” behind our house. We’ve been in our house for two years now, and the most cultivating I’ve done on this beast is to apply the weed-whipper to it once or twice a summer. As a result,...
View ArticleHelping Students Understand Motivation: The Character Strengths Angle
This past Tuesday, I ended “Truths about Student Motivation” with a question: what are the tools and strategies that can equip our students to muster up the motivation required to get them from where...
View Article21 Ideas for Developing the Motivational Character Strengths
In “The Character Strengths and Motivation,” I laid out the 4.5 character strengths that I consider motivational in nature, and, at the end of the post, I laid out an example of the kind of...
View ArticleTwo Kinds of Curiosity and the One that Science Supports
I've mentioned before that there are two kinds of curiosity: fruitful and fruitless. Fruitful curiosity Fruitful curiosity is that which we efficiently act upon as we're studying a subject. In my...
View ArticleCharacter Strengths, Integrity, and My Three-Year-Old
Figure 1: The Stuarts on Halloween. Laura is on my leg. And Crystal, for the record, is a girl troll. And I am Sven the reindeer. And the kids got to pick the parents' costumes. As I was brushing...
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