Quit Teaching Basics

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

If you are familiar with the work of John Hattie and Visible Learning, you may know of the 10 Mindsets he identified for educators who wish to transform the classroom and promote learning over teaching. As an instructional coach, I had these posted in my room and used them in my discussions with fellow teachers.

Do you remember the most coveted job there was when you were in elementary school? I do. It was being chosen as the LINE LEADER. What a power rush for a 6 year old! Being chosen to lead the line of your classmates out to recess and back or to some other special place in

I realize my first two reasons for teachers to quit teaching were student-centered in nature. Teaching is passive and it is not engaging. So for this next reason I felt I should give a reason with the classroom educator as the focus by discussing how quitting teaching and designing learning will improve positive student behavior

Before anyone gets offended, let’s reflect on the nature of teaching in the traditional sense. It often involves the delivery of information by a single individual. Only ONE person, whether it’s the teacher or even a chosen student in class to read aloud, work a problem or model a skill, is fully engaged. What is

The most important reason why we need to quit teaching and start designing learning is that teaching, in general and traditionally, is passive. Students come to class, get information or have skills modeled for them, then they complete work. Repeat for next class. Basically, we could replace this same process with Youtube videos and save

We want our students to improve. We want scores to rise. We want to see a turnaround in achievement, but what most do not realize is most of that happens when you overhaul what Tier 1 instruction is in the classroom. I read a great quote today, “Districts and schools cannot buy or intervene their

So before we decide to work together and make teaching into something that offers effective and meaningful learning opportunities like never before, we have to talk about our attitude towards change. We don’t like it. We think we have things all figured out. We know that what we are doing is working just fine the

For this first blog post, I want to apologize to all of the students I “taught” over the years. You may have enjoyed my classes, you may have learned some things, you may have even stopped me later at the grocery store or at the movies and told me how much you loved my class