A school shooting in Uvalde, ways to help, parents impacted, and some deep thoughts on the shallowness of “mindsets.”
Teaching
Deep Belief, Shallow Mindsets, and Surface Behavior – An Instructional Coach Ponders the Usefulness of Talking about Mindsets
It’s afternoon, the end of the school day, and faculty are getting ready for a weekly workshop while students scurry out the building. The session that day focused on un-grading—specifically as it relates to formative assessments for learning.
ROOTED Newsletter: April 2022
Campbell's Law and assessment. Teacher shortages. The value of silence. A lot going on in this month's ROOTED Newsletter.
Avoid Busy-ness
Activities that are meaningful don’t keep us busy. They require time. Deep teaching asks us to value quality over quantity, to understand that less is more.
ROOTED Newsletter: March 2022
Thoughts on Critical Race Theory (CRT), responsibility & culpability, and a mess of links. The latest ROOTED newsletter is here.
Grading for Learning in Rochester and Teaching without Homework
Schools in Rochester are grading for learning, and I'm teaching without homework. Read on!
Ballooning Responsibilities & Identifying What Matters
To be a teacher in 2022 feels like a graceless situation…what to do about it?
Don’t Like the Result? Do It Again.
I’ve tried just about every grading system under the sun: traditional systems, standards-based, no grades, etc. But starting with these three key principles, I really think I’m hitting my stride.
What Can Human-Focused Design Teach Us About Feedback
How might we provide feedback that is powerful, purposeful, and motivating as opposed to feedback that demotivates or disempowers the student because it lacks purpose or clarity?Motivation is to learning as oxygen is to breathing.Not too long ago,
Time and the Art of Kindness in Communication: What has happened to me?
What did it feel like to teach in the early days of the pandemic, back when you thought it was temporary or short-lived, back when you thought it would all be over by August or September?
ROOTED Weekly: 31 October 2020
Statistics without context. The bane of email. Antiracism. Teaching reading. Stone carving. Building student agency. The ROOTED Weekly is here!
Statistics Without Context: On the Opacity of Grade Reports and the Value of Parent Conferences
Grade reports, usually, are statistics without context. I open a grade report and see a series of letters and numbers, but what do they actually mean?