Thanks to Carol Dweck’s work on the Growth Mindset, we know it matters how we react to student performance. Compliments for “being smart” help foster a fixed mindset and a reluctance to embrace challenge, while shout-outs for “working hard” foster a growth mindset and a desire for challenge. That’s all well and good, but what…
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Overwhelmed by exceptions
Cartoon from http://theprocessconsultant.com/ If you’re not a teacher, it’s easy to think a teacher’s job is three things: Design and deliver effective lessons Check students’ understanding through daily work, and Evaluate tests and various sort of papers, like essays and lab reports. But that’s just the easy part. Our job is really about managing ambiguity, trying…
Read MoreKids can learn online, but they often don’t
Is Khan Academy or Crash Course (or something like it) going to drive public schools out of business? Online competition has already dominated our traditional ways of doing almost everything –planning vacations, looking for jobs, watching TV, playing games, meeting dates, talking to friends, consuming news. Just ask my former colleagues in the newspaper business.…
Read MoreWhy do we let kids give up?
I hate it when a student drops my class. At my high school, the beginning of the year is a revolving door of adds and drops, as students try out different classes and re-evaluate the schedules they selected six months earlier, when they were feeling ambitious. This system has a lot of drawbacks — class…
Read MoreLate work IS still a problem
A good friend recently returned to teaching high school, after a long hiatus. Now she’s kind of like Rip Van Winkle, waking up to see how the world around her has changed. The biggest shock so far, she told me, is the idea that due dates don’t matter much anymore. She can’t wrap her head…
Read MoreNot your normal school project
Picture a room packed with 35-40 high school students eager to start working on a project, except you, the teacher, have no idea what the project will be. Will they create pencil cases? T-shirts for school teams? Will they design an app or a bot or an e-book? Or will they make jewelry? Car safety…
Read MoreWhat makes teams work? Ask Google
Google has spent 1000s of hours trying to figure out how to make people work better in teams. The answer? Teams are most effective when there is “psychological safety” — in other words, everyone feels safe contributing ideas, questioning others (even the boss), and sharing problems. In the best teams, people feel free to offer…
Read MoreDo SMART goals limit teachers’ vision?
Writing SMART goals — “Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timebound” — is now a fall rite of passage for public school teachers, right up there with crafting a syllabus, assigning seats and putting up bulletin boards. This process always strikes me as perfunctory. Do SMART goals really get us anywhere? Or is this just another…
Read MoreLet’s get serious about stereotype threat
It’s been 20 years since Steele and Aronson first published their work on “stereotype threat,” demonstrating that we are profoundly influenced by internalized cultural stereotypes about ourselves. Since then, more than 300 peer-reviewed experiments have found similar results. Time and time again, we find that individuals perform worse in school, limit their career options and…
Read MoreAre we ready for student speech?
“Do you think high school students have the same right to free speech as adults?” This warmup question, which I used for years as an introduction to teaching Tinker v. Des Moines to my Civil Liberties classes, sparked a heated discussion among teachers at a workshop I led earlier this week. No issue is more…
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MARTHA RUSH 