I have three kids ranging from older elementary to high school. Each one of them is handling distance learning differently. My daughter, who is also the youngest, initially felt overwhelmed at the list of assignments that popped up each Monday and the scheduled meetings twice…
Student engagement can be a real challenge in this sudden shift toward distance learning. But one way to improve engagement is by empowering students. In this article, we explore how to improve equity and access and how to shift toward student ownership. Listen to the…
I have a friend who is a phenomenal teacher. She has been making a positive impact on middle schoolers’ lives for 20 years. I used to go into her classroom during my prep period and take detailed notes so I could refine my class. She…
If you think about your most powerful learning experiences, there’s a good chance at least one of these experiences involved a project. This is where you learned how to research, how to ideate, how to work with others, how to engage in productive struggle, and…
The last week has proven to society something that we, in education, already know. Teachers care deeply about their students. I’ve seen so many examples of teachers making phone calls to families, having class Zoom meetings to just do a pulse check on each child,…
In education, we often use a metaphor of content delivery. We use terms like “deliver a lesson.” We ask, “did the students get it?” But the last week and a half has proven that teachers are not merely content delivery machines. In my last post,…
Before getting started, I just want to point out that teachers have been amazing over the last few weeks. I’ve watched entire districts mobilize to provide online and long-distance instruction while also providing a safe way for kids to get breakfast and lunch. Someone tweeted…
I spent hours on Saturday putting together a 3,500 word blog post, an eBook, and a toolkit. Given the stress of the previous days, I knew that sitting down for six hours and doing creative work would allow me to do something I loved while…
A quick confession. I love birthdays. I am not great at wishing folks a happy birthday online. This is mostly because I don’t know what part of it is supposed to be capitalized (Happy Birthday, Happy birthday, happy birthday). However, I love birthdays because they…
I haven’t written a new article in nearly month. After getting back my data, I plugged away at writing Chapters 4 and 5 of my dissertation, followed by a few revisions. I will likely defend it next week or the week after. One of the…