4 Shifts That Lead to Better Staff Meetings
We’ve all been there, sitting in yet another meeting where we feign interest. Many of us resign ourselves to the routine of these “time suck” meetings, but we should demand more. So, facilitators, no matter the meeting you are designing,…
A Guide to Psychological Safety for Educators
As a teacher, when you consider your workplace within your school system, how does it make you feel, and what people and experiences have shaped that response? Do you find yourself avoiding certain activities, locations, or colleagues because of what…
Preparing Students With Disabilities for Life Beyond School
Family and school partnership is an important component of school success and student achievement. Engaging families of youth with disabilities is especially crucial. When students with disabilities enter middle and high school, schools and families need to begin to ensure that…
How School Leaders Can Pave the Way for Productive Use of AI
Leading in an era of rapidly advancing artificial intelligence (AI) requires that leaders articulate a clear vision, build consensus around it, communicate effectively with the school community, and allocate support and resources for their policies. This is no small challenge: As school…
Assessing Your School’s Mission and Vision
It’s no secret that when a principal takes a long look at the myriad of things and tasks to check off daily, weekly, and monthly, there are competing priorities that vie for their attention. In my experience as a school…
Emphasizing Growth, Not Grades, in Parent-Teacher Conferences
Conferences are a special time to connect with parents and guardians. However, too often, parents and students are more concerned about grades than about the learning that takes place to earn them. Unfortunately, by making the report card the star…
Using Student Data to Inspire Goal-Setting
Imagine sitting in your sixth-grade classroom at the beginning of the school year. Your teacher tells you that you are about to take a very important test and to try your best. You sit for over 45 minutes, answering many…
What Role Does Empathy Play In Learning?
So much talk about empathy in education recently. Why? What’s the big idea? The role of empathy in learning has to do with the flow of both information and creativity. A dialogic interaction with the world around us requires us…
Crafting Fair Assessments for Flexible Assignments
Teachers are called to create deeper, more flexible learning opportunities for students to learn at high levels. This often raises questions about how to assess student work, given that student products may range from podcasts to digital storybooks, virtual reality…
Using Discussion as a Summative Assessment
Throughout my two decades in education, I have experimented with a variety of approaches to assessment, including projects, models, debates, and traditional assessments. In the past two years I’ve been teaching high school online, and I’ve abandoned traditional tests in…