Blog

If you haven’t listened to Malcolm Gladwell’s podcast, Revisionist History, I highly recommend it. In each episode, Gladwell explores an event or idea that historians have misunderstood. Through interviews, data, and uncovered information, he retells a historical story that popular history got wrong. In a recent episode, Gladwell explored an overlooked feature of school desegregation through the court case Brown...

Many teachers will tell you that there are two phases of reading instruction. Learning to read and reading to learn. While our early years of schooling are spent learning to decode words and make sense of what’s on the page, the rest of our reading life is spent using the skill of reading to access information. I’d venture to say...

I studied French for years in school, but don't remember a word of it. In my thirties, though, I moved to Puerto Rico, and without even trying or taking a class I was able to pick up a basic level of Spanish. Speaking with others who have lived abroad, I know I’m not alone in my experience. THE most effective way...

If you ask most people what is the purpose of K-12 education, you’ll get a variety of answers. One of the most common answers is that we want to prepare students for college, the workplace, and to be successful adults. While this is definitely true, I’ve always hated this answer for one reason. I feel like it sells kids short...

What’s the all-time best career advice I've ever received? Don’t reinvent the wheel. As much as we all want to be unique, innovation doesn't necessarily mean coming up with an idea from scratch. It means taking ideas and creations that are out there and combining them or building on them to create something even better. Once I'd cemented that idea...

How do you get people to like you? This seems like an elusive question that has likely perplexed mankind for millennia. After all, there’s a common human tendency to want to be liked. Scientists have drawn on a body of research to answer this question and what they found might surprise you... ask people questions! This discovery plays on human...

Picture the most painfully shy student in your class. This is the kid who hasn’t raised his hand to participate all year. The one who brings a book with him to recess where he reads alone instead of playing with other students. The one who squirms uncomfortably when you announce a new group project. As teachers we might jump to...

What is open source? The term "open source" refers to something people can modify and share because its design is publicly accessible. The term is most commonly used in programming in which the original source code is made freely available so that other users can modify and build on the initial product. The genius of open source is that no...

Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team, before going on to be one of the world’s most famous players. Henry Ford declared bankruptcy twice before finally getting Ford Motors off the ground. Walt Disney was fired from an early job for "not being creative enough” and his first studio went bankrupt before he hit on success with...

“The first team to finish will get extra recess time on Friday.” “Any student who gets less than a 70% on tomorrow’s quiz will have to attend tutoring after school.” There are a number of ways teachers motivate students to do what we want them to do. From grades, to rewards, and even punishments, we use these tools to motivate...