What can you do with a student who resists your efforts to engage him, scoffs at your thoughtfully planned assignments and slyly undermines you in class, without ever doing anything overt enough to warrant discipline? I’ve been working on that puzzle for years, with varying degrees of success. Sometimes, the best you can do is…
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Don’t be boring
How often do you find yourself stuck listening to a boring presentation? What do you do when that happens? For a graduate class this fall, I had to watch a video of Drexel Prof. Gerry Stahl lecturing on his research into “Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning.” (You can watch it here.) This was a keynote speech at…
Read MoreWhat we can learn from a great speaker
A few minutes into Meredith Cochie’s presentation at the national student journalism conference in Orlando Saturday, a high school student behind me whispered to her friend: “I just want to bottle her up and bring her home.” Me too. I want to bottle her up and use her to train teachers. Cochie, a journalism professor…
Read MoreGrades: Not the motivation we want
If the question is “Do rewards motivate students?” the answer is, “Absolutely, they motivate students to get rewards.” – Alfie Kohn Last week, after several days spent learning about operant conditioning and behaviorism, my AP Psych students read Alfie Kohn’s 1994 article, “The Risks of Rewards.” In this article, Kohn argues that rewards are as…
Read MoreWhy choose teaching?
Earlier this week, I got an e-mail from Maddy, a 2015 graduate. “I was wondering if I could ask you a few questions about how you got interested in teaching?” she asked. “I’m starting to realize teaching is something I think I would truly be interested in.” I responded with a short e-mail recounting my…
Read MoreThe technology that could replace us
Most of the claims that new technology will make teachers obsolete are patently false. TED Talks, MOOCs (Massive Online Open Courses), educational videos, vast online databases and typical educational apps and games simply cannot replace an effective teacher in a classroom. But that doesn’t mean that nothing can. The technology tools with the greatest potential…
Read MoreWould you give out all As?
What would happen this year if I tossed out all of my rubrics, test scores and grading scales and just granted As to all of my students? Would my classroom become a utopia, where students — free from the rat-race of chasing grades — would engage in learning for the pure love of it? Or…
Read MoreParenting by pain avoidance
In 20 years of teaching, I have seen all kinds of parenting. I’ve seen tragic situations, of course. Parents who kick out their teenagers in anger. Parents who abuse or manipulate their children or make them pawns in divorces. I’ve also seen parents who have just plain given up on their kids. But this post…
Read MoreYes, there are dumb questions
Teachers often tell students there is “no such thing as a dumb question,” but that’s not true. There are plenty of dumb questions, and we ask them as often as we answer them. Here are some dumb questions teachers ask: Do you understand? Students say yes, not knowing what they don’t know. Why didn’t you…
Read MoreIf Econ can change…
Economics is not an easy discipline, and it’s not a subject teenagers are itching to learn. Most college-educated adults look back on Econ 101 as a boring series of lectures, with too many graphs about “widgets” and “utils.” One of the best parts of teaching high school econ, though, is that so many professional economists…
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MARTHA RUSH 