How real classrooms work, lesson by lesson. We write about instructional design, classroom practice, and the small craft decisions that shape what students actually learn, separating durable pedagogy from passing fashion.
20 posts
The two-minute end-of-class check is the cheapest, most consequential teaching tool most teachers under-use. What makes exit tickets effective and what makes them performative.
Most differentiation advice fails the prep-time test. The teachers who do it sustainably differentiate at narrow points and accept the middle of the lesson is the same for everyone.
Most of how the year goes is decided in the first ten days. New teachers should front-load routines, names, and tone, not lesson plans for September.
Every few years a new framework arrives that promises to fix lesson planning. SOLO taxonomy, Understanding by Design, project-based learning, the flipped classroom, then…
The biggest learning news in our house last week came from our 13-year-old daughter Tess, whose experiences with high jump and a trip to Washington DC raised powerful questions about what we really mean by "learning" and how rarely "productive learning" happens in schools.
We’re wondering what a “Basketball Math” curriculum might look like for our son Tucker, combining his love of the sport and his interest in math, and we’re asking for ideas on how to build a K-? curriculum around basketball that could also tap into online social learning spaces.
Yesterday, Alec Couros went “Back to School” to meet his first grade daughter’s teacher, sparking a Twitter conversation that captured the frustration many teacher-parents feel at traditional classroom expectations. We reflect on similar experiences with our own kids and share the strategies we use to navigate the gap between the schooling they get and the learning we want for them.
Many of us are calling for big changes in schools—new literacies, connected classrooms, and modern learning—but the conversations on front porches and in small-town coffee shops rarely touch any of that. Leading in education today means doing the work almost no one is asking for yet, while still meeting traditional expectations, and helping communities see why both matter for our kids’ futures.
We explore Erica McWilliam's vision of teaching as co-creating value in learning networks and Charles Leadbeater's idea of "useful ignorance," asking what it means for us, our students, and our children to unlearn traditional notions of teaching in a script-less, fluid world.
From the “Shameless Self-Promotion Dept” comes this new book 21st Century Skills: Rethinking How Students Learn, featuring our chapter “Navigating Social Networks as Learning Tools,” and some interesting thinking about how networked learning is reshaping literacies, pedagogy, and the future of classrooms.