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As a new school year begins, educators are doing what we always do. We’re organizing classrooms, reviewing standards, updating lessons, attending professional learning, and promising ourselves that this will be the year we stay caught up on grading. Good luck with that last one. We enter each year looking for ways to improve. We revise […]

Summer has a way of tricking us, doesn’t it? At the end of the school year, summer looks huge. It feels wide open, almost endless, as if there will be plenty of time for everything we have been putting off since sometime around February. Time to rest. Time to read. Time to sit outside and

The final bell has rung. Desks are cleared, halls echo empty, and the quiet feels almost foreign after months of constant noise and motion. You’re probably standing in your classroom right now looking at the year that just ended. Some days felt like a sprint. Others felt like a marathon in quicksand. But here you

Most of the time when I write here, I write about learning. I write about instruction, design, tasks, scaffolds, feedback, and all the things we can build with intention so learners do more than sit, comply, and complete work. That conversation matters. I believe it matters deeply. Learning is the job, after all, and if

Walk into enough classrooms and you can feel it before anyone says a word. Heads down. Screens up. Silence everywhere. And because the room is quiet, because everyone looks busy, because the task is moving, we convince ourselves that learning must be happening. But quiet is not proof. Busy is not proof. A screen full

Mission statements on the wall. Posters in the hallway. Buzzwords in the slide deck. None of that means the adults in the building actually know who they are. That’s the reason why many schools start in the wrong place. They start with standards, pacing guides, curriculum maps, and assessments. They start with what has to

We say we want comprehension. We say we want critical thinking. We say we want learners to go deeper. But too often, we skip the part that makes all of that possible in the first place. Knowledge. And one of the clearest pathways into knowledge is vocabulary. That is why the way we have handled

Education has a habit of creating terms that sound important but mean different things depending on who you ask. One of the most common examples is Tier 1 instruction. Walk into ten schools and ask ten educators to define it and you will likely get ten different answers. Some will say it is the core

There’s a moment that shows up in every classroom if you’re paying attention. It’s not loud. It’s not dramatic. It’s the moment after the directions, after the materials are out, after the room settles into motion. Everyone is doing something. Pens moving. Screens glowing. Pages turning. And for a second it feels like success because

This is a follow up to my recent post on Let’s Quit Teaching entitled, When the Glow Impedes the Grow, where I described the familiar illusion: a quiet room, screens up, everyone “on task,” and almost no one able to say what they learned, why it matters, or how they know. When device use becomes