Better Teaching

Helping you to hone your craft, improving the art and science of teaching.

Guide Students, Don’t Let Them Wander

I so often let my most advanced students pick their own paths. What I thought was empowering, actually led to stagnation. Students need guides!

Three Jobs of Teaching

Which of the three jobs brings you joy? And which one sucks the life from you?

Climbing Blooms With A Science Lesson

How I’d push a mere science demonstration to higher level of Bloom’s Taxonomy.

Plan Around Thinking, Not Just Content

Teachers who are most successful at differentiation plan for thinking, not merely for content.

How Do We Make On-Level Writers Into Advanced Writers?

I knew how to help my below-level writers become on-level. But how the heck do you make the next step?

Ask Sequences, Never One-Off Questions

Beware one-off questions. Any question that we prepare should have a natural follow-up question. And those follow-ups should push students up Bloom’s Taxonomy.

Differentiate Like A Playground

Here’s why I never approach a lesson as being “for a grade.” Instead, I think of a lesson as I’d think of baseball, chess, or the piano.

Using Art to Practice Reading

When you’re teaching a reading skill, can you replace some of those dull sample texts with glorious artwork?

Improve Objectives By Asking “Then What?”

How to push your learning objective beyond the bottom of Bloom’s and get kids thinking in interesting ways.

Help Students to Memorize Anything

If we want students to remember the material we teach, we have to set them up for success. Use techniques like chunking, mnemonics, and spaced repetition to slowly move information into your students’ long-term memory.

How to Help Students Remember their Notes

There’s no special note-taking system to solve your students’ memorization needs. Instead, we have to teach them how (and when) to review their notes.

Find The Controversy in Any Topic

By leveraging a point of contention, we can get students interested in just about any topic. Yes, even boring old spelling has controversy we can exploit!

The Frayer Model – A Tool To Explain Concepts

I love Dorothy Frayer’s 1969 model for developing a deep understanding of a concept: The Frayer Model! It really illustrates how insufficient a mere definition is when trying to explain an idea.

Is it a Lesson or Just a Topic?

Early in my career, I mixed up “topics” with “lesson.” Here’s how I learned to plan real lesson objectives, not merely list my topic.

Fluency: Asking For (Way) More Than One Answer

Being able to generate many possible answers is key to high-level thinking. So why don’t we ask students to do it more often?

Creating Your Philosophy On Homework

I had a reader ask a question about homework and gifted kids and I figured this was a pretty common question. My thought: you need a philosophy about this.

Getting to the Root of Problems with “The Five Whys”

Often, the problems we try to solve are not the root problems. The Five Whys is a thinking tool to help you sift through the superficial to find the real issue.

The Inert Knowledge Problem

90 years ago, Alfred North Whitehead used the term “the inert knowledge problem” to describe an issue he faced while teaching. I’ll bet you’ve seen the same thing…

The Curse of Knowledge in an Infant Safety Class

My recent experience as a learner and what it’s like when your teacher falls into the trap of Curse of Knowledge.

Thinking or Remembering: Abstract and Concrete

One way to emphasizing Thinking over mere Remembering is to consider the level of abstraction we’re asking students to use. You might think of abstraction as a spectrum from highly specific, concrete details to really big (but vague) ideas.

Are Students Thinking or Merely Remembering?

The more I started looking, the more I realized that most of my questions asked students to remember, not actually think.

Why Non-Examples Are As Important As Examples

Providing high-quality exemplars is only half the battle. Serve up a nice and terrible non-example, and you’ll highlight just what makes that great version so great.

Narcissistic Teaching (and how to change it)

I’ve been reading my friends’ dissertations and writing up my discoveries. In this episode, I encounter the term “narcissistic pedagogy” and it rocks my world.

Brain Friendly Puzzlements

I’m reading Teaching With the Brain in Mind and realized how my weekly Puzzlements mailer has some great connections to a brain-friendly classroom! The author, Eric Jensen, writes about creating a safe classroom in which the brain can learn. Here are a few notes I’ve made. Novelty Jensen explains how the brain loves new things. […]

What We Can Learn From Super Mario’s Levels

If the designers have done their jobs, the player should always feel slightly challenged, but never overwhelmed. As teachers, we should aim for the same goal: students who are stimulated but not frustrated.

Abundance or Deficit Thinking?

It’s easy to be miserly and hold onto every resource, thinking it might be the last. But I’ve learned that what I have can grow – when I use it well. The same is true of our classroom resources.

Expectations and Scaffolds

When I see successful lessons, I’m almost always most impressed with how the teacher has set the stage for success. When I look back on my biggest failures, it was almost always a lack scaffolding that caused the problem. Expectations and scaffolds are vital to classroom success.

The Curse Of Knowledge

The Curse of Knowledge: once you know something, it’s hard to think from the perspective of someone who doesn’t know it. And the more you know, the harder it gets.

Talking Less: Two Discussion Tics

Leading discussions is hard work. To grease the wheels, I developed two weird tics: re-stating and repeating louder. Both increase dependency on me, and enable students to become passive listeners.

Non-Examples are as Important as Examples

As teachers, we use tons of examples to illustrate concepts. But an example becomes even more powerful when paired with its opposite: the non-example.

Talking Less: Making Better Class Announcements

Many of our words are wasted not on teaching, but on announcements, directions, and updates. Imagine yourself waiting at an airport. Think of the constant stream of “important announcements” broadcast over the speakers. There are so many, that you simply stop hearing them.

Talking Less: Shocking Stats On What Students Can Hear

When you’re up speaking in front of a group, it’s so easy to assume that they’re hanging on your every word. The reality is we are incapable of hearing as fast as people speak. We can’t hear everything someone says, let alone remember, let alone understand.