July 3, 2017 2 86%: The Problem with Grades The end of the school year has finally arrived, which means it’s time for grades and report cards. [...]
June 29, 2017 2 Reflecting on the 2016-17 School Year Each June, as the school year wraps up, I like to take a minute to look back on what went well and what [...]
April 15, 2017 26 The “No Grades” Experiment Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson Last year, Jean Erickson, our Language Arts teacher extraordinaire, gave [...]
March 13, 2017 4 Lowering Test Anxiety: How to Nip Test-Taking Fears in the Bud As educators, it’s a scenario we see frequently: all too often, students will come into my office [...]
February 25, 2017 6 Scaffolding Literary Analysis: Step-by-Step to Reach Success Let’s face it — for most students, literary analysis is just plain hard. And teaching it is even [...]
January 21, 2017 0 Creating Independent Learners with Ongoing Self-Assessment Teaching students the meta-cognitive skill of self-assessment empowers them and puts them in charge of their [...]
January 9, 2017 2 Performance Assessment in Math: Teaching Others Testing: we all know assessment is important, but oh, the anxiety it causes! In the best of all possible [...]
November 13, 2016 8 Teaching Students Life and Career Skills Last year, I had an aha! moment while on a Twitter chat (by the way, if you’re an educator, Twitter [...]
October 31, 2016 3 No Rewards: Why We Shouldn’t Reward Students The other day, during a #HackLearning chat on Twitter, we talked about praise and intrinsic motivation. [...]
September 19, 2016 8 Surviving Group Projects Teachers seem to love assigning group projects, while all too often, both students and parents dread [...]