Global Educator, Curriculum Developer, and Trainer
Does your school have a shared sense of what “educational gold” looks like? I came across this term in Jal Mehta and Sarah Fine’s excellent new book, In Search of Deeper Learning. These two did the research I’d always dreamed of doing — they went out and found schools that are succeeding with challenging…
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I finally finished reading What We Know About Grading, a 2019 ASCD book summarizing a century of research on grading. Probably doesn’t sound compelling to most people — it’s not going to top the New York Times bestseller list — but I wanted to know what the research says, since we spend so much of…
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Does “flipping” your classroom really work? I’ve written about this a few times since I first flipped my AP Macro class two years ago. In my (anecdotal) experience, it’s been extremely effective. But a new study from West Point (reported in this EdWeek blog) says not so fast. Is it time for me to reconsider?…
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I’m reading Tim Brown’s book Change by Design, part of my prep work for my job as Chief Educator-in-Residence at Quarter Zero, and I keep wondering: What if we used design thinking to tackle everyday problems in schools? For example, tardies. Tardies drive high school teachers and administrators crazy for so many reasons, but here…
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Few issues spark more disagreement among teachers than late work. On one side: The real world has real deadlines. High school students need to learn this lesson now. On the other: Grades should reflect what students know — not their ability to meet arbitrary deadlines. Both sides have good points. The real world does have…
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How much of your class time is teacher talk? How much is student talk? I noted in my book, Beat Boredom, that less than 2 minutes of a typical 60-minute English class is spent in genuine student-to-student discussion. That’s deeply concerning because students are better engaged and learning more when they are talking. Did you…
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This year, my school district pushed back the high school start time from 7:25 a.m. to 8:35 a.m. in response to community pressure and research showing positive results from later starts — such as fewer tardies/truancies, higher grades, fewer car accidents and better mental health. The underlying goal, of course, was to get teenage students…
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One of my sons gave me a book called 50 Great Myths of Popular Psychology for Christmas. It was a perfect gift — he knows how much I love reading about flaws in “common sense” and popular opinion. This is one of those books you can flip through and read in any order, so I…
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“When you start talking about authentic instruction and assessment, the math teachers in the room stop listening.” Not true for all math teachers, I know. But one math teacher pulled me aside after a recent workshop to share this observation. Math teachers — especially those teaching higher level courses like trigonometry and calculus — know their…
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Presenting in front of the class makes me uncomfortable. If the teacher calls on me, I tense up and can’t speak. Running in phy ed makes me self-conscious and ashamed. There are a lot of things we ask of students that they don’t want to do. Does that mean we should stop asking? Earlier this…
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MARTHA RUSH 