Quit Teaching Basics

If you search the internet for “copycat recipes” you will discover dozens of sites that basically take all our favorite things we eat or drink at national restaurant chains and supply the user with the copycat recipe verison of the item.  I mean, who doesn’t want to sit at home and eat some hot Red […]

So, below is an email I received from my editor at Taylor and Francis Press from Routledge. A minor change in the title, “Let’s Stop Teaching and Start Designing Learning: A Practical Guide.” (Changed the “quit” since we didn’t really want to give the wrong impressions when readers searched for book on Amazon.”) Looking forward

As my summer ends and I am back in the building, the focus of the new school year starts to emerge. We meet and discuss and plan on the typical “school” stuff, making sure everything is scheduled, in place, covered, planned for, etc. All that is important, don’t get me wrong. But now is also

In order to understand this reason, we have to think more along the lines of the process of teaching itself is not preparing students for the future rather than the content knowledge. No one will argue that in order to learn 4th grade math content, students must have been prepared by content from 3rd grade

My journey as a teacher is much like most out there. We all went to college, we learned content and strategies, we student taught. After that, we were turned loose in a classroom of our very own, responsible for the education of anywhere from 20-120 students. And what did we do when we had our

We talk about what learning looks like in the classroom for students, about targets and what qualities define successful mastery of a concept. We pour these qualities into our instructional designs and lessons to maximize learning and ensure acceleration, equity and most of all learning is taking place. We know it works. We know students

For this week’s thoughts on quitting teaching to start designing learning, bear with the following metaphor with me. Right now, students line up outside of classroom doors in a vertical line, one behind the other. Those in the front are much closer to the classroom door, much closer to the learning about to take place

Just a brief visual overview of what typical teaching and learning look like side-by-side. Write to me for tools and assistance in how to transform your classroom or school.

The featured picture was from a recent tweet that seemed to get a lot of conversations started about what school leadership is about or could be about. In my mind, these two questions take all the things we do as administrators and boil it all down to the two most essential elements of the job.

If I had to choose one of the ten mindframes of Visible Learning that is most often underused or altogether flat out neglected, it is this one. “I use the language of learning with students and staff.” A HUGE amount of tapped potential lies inside of this seemingly simple concept. So, why don’t we make