Professor McGonagall isn’t very nice. But that’s actually what makes her so great. Confused? Let me explain. Being nice is about being pleasant and agreeable. Minerva McGonagall isn’t like that. She’s firm to a fault — like the way she refuses to let Harry go…
At first glance, it would seem that Hagrid has all the makings of a great teacher. He is willing to take creative risks. He has a deep and passionate knowledge of his content area. And most importantly, he cares about his students. But unfortunately, content…
Warning: this post may contain spoilers. If you haven’t read the books, go do that now and then come back to this post later. Let’s just put it out there. Hogwarts is probably a terrible place to send your kids. It’s dangerous, and I’m not…
Every Tuesday and Wednesday night, I teach a 4-hour pedagogy class. I use the design thinking cycle to plan the course (a topic for another blog post) and so as I teach, I am in the Highlight and Fix phase. I thought I would give…
William Chamberlain is one of my favorite teachers on Twitter. He is bold, humble, relentless, and unabashedly curious. The other day he tweeted this out, so, as a joke, Philip Cummings and I both turned these into “inspirational” quote images for tweets. As I think…
This morning, I logged into Twitter and noticed a stream of education articles. Several described how homework is ruining childhood. A few mentioned why schools are crushing creativity. I noticed my own blog post describing how “kids aren’t tired of learning but they’re tired of…
Note: I’m sure my thoughts on this topic have been heavily influenced by Dean Shareski. If you don’t read his blog, go check it out. For the last four days, I have been back at home with my family. We have had deep conversations….
When I was a kid, I thought the epic life was the big life. You know, hit the game-winning home run. Slay a dragon. Conquer a distant land. When I got older, I still believed that the epic life meant doing big things. Make…
There are days when I am working that I don’t feel like I’m working. I sit down for three hours and plan out the anatomy of a course. I chip away at a new syllabus. I hop over to a Google Document and leave feedback…
Over the last three years, I have realized that there were key things I want to learn more about. The first topic was business. Although I didn’t see it this way at first, I quickly realized that as we launched a blogging platform, we were…