Month: August 2018
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The Magic That Happens When Students Set Their Own Learning Goals
“We have to do this work with the students, and not for the students.” -Patty McGee I’m not proud of it, but I have seen all eight of the Fast and Furious movies. I have no defense except that I have a soft spot for absurdist early 2000s bubble-gum action movies that involve Vin Diesel…
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Wise Interventions: The Most Important Educational Concept You’ve Probably Never Heard Of (And How to Use It to Help Your Most Vulnerable Students)
Wise Intervention: a brief, timely action that significantly improves student achievement and/or closes performance gaps based on race and gender. In Helping Children Succeed (the link has an annotated pdf of the whole wonderful book!), Paul Tough tells the story of a group of Stanford researchers–Geoffrey Cohen, Gregory Walton, and David Yeager–who decided to investigate how we can best…
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What Should We Do With the Five Paragraph Essay?
“What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure.” -Samuel Johnson As a writing teacher, one of the most common questions I’m asked is how do I handle the five-paragraph essay. If I’m being honest, until relatively recently, I tried my best to avoid this question, as discussion of the five-paragraph essay is…
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That One Big Thing I Got From These Six Things
A month ago I identified six books that I simply have to read this summer. Since that point I’ve read 5 of 6 (Circe; There, There, These Six Things, Grit, andThey Say, I Say, ), and I’m happy to report that all five have absolutely lived up to my expectations. Out of the five though, Dave…
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Why I Don’t Grade Anything Until October
While they feel inextricably linked with school, grades are actually a relatively new invention, with the first known grades appearing at Yale in 1785 and widespread grade usage (and the current A through F system) only beginning a little over 100 years ago. While it is hard to imagine a time before report cards, that was…
Matthew M. Johnson 