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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,...
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How 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...
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Psst…
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...
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Simple 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...
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The 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...
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4 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,...
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Helping 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...
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21 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...
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Two 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...
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Character 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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