Students who are more self-determined, who feel more of a sense of agency in their lives, do better on many measures in the long run– so how do we start supporting self-determination in our classrooms?
We all know horror stories of parent teacher conferences gone wrong– but what does it look like when they go right? How do teachers pull it off? This post looks at some of the research on what goes right in conferences.
As anyone who has endured and then promptly forgotten a PD knows, most PDs don’t accomplish much. So what does it take for a PD to work and change how people teach?
This is a back to the basics post. Teachers are woefully underprepared to engage with families, which is freaking hard and complicated (D’Haem & Griswold, 2017; De Bruine et al., 2014; Epstein, 2018). One area where teachers are unprepared is pretty basic– just understanding why we bother with family engagement and what it even means. I mean there is a moral argument for family engagement and a legal argument– but there is also a rock bottom, fundamental evidence for family engagement. You do it because you want your students to learn.
Over the past decades, the courts have begun to walk away from integration. This post focuses on what we know about integration– and how it benefits students.
Study skills are often framed as the secret sauce in academic excellent– but is that true? And if it is, how do you teach them? This post dives into what the research says on these questions!
A disproportionate number of students receiving special education services are Black and Latinx. What does it look like to teach special education in a way that is responsive to both students’ disabilities and their cultural and linguistic heritages?
Teachers are change makers. This post tells the story of one teacher and how she changed her school to make it better for her students.
The depressing reality is that discipline in our schools is not fair– Black and Indigenous students are massively overdisciplined. The good news is that there are many, many different research-based solutions out there. This post goes into a few!
This post is on the secret sauce of student learning– motivation– and what the research says on how to increase students’ motivation. The bottom line on motivation is that students don’t, for the most part, roll out of bed and think “Gee whiz, I really want to learn fractions today!” And if students aren’t motivated, if they just don’t care about what you are teaching, they have all sorts of fun ways to check out or subvert it (Levin, 2000). I mean, they are almost as bad as teachers at a PD they wish they could have skipped… So how do you get there?
