Month: July 2019

My most popular posts have been the ones on grammar. This is not surprising, as grammar remains one of the most maddeningly frustrating problems of the writing classroom. We know from over 60 years of research that teaching grammar out of the context of student writing (aka, in stand-alone worksheets, diagramming, term memorization) doesn’t work and can at times make students worse at grammar.

At the same time, teaching it in the context of student writing is tricky because students tend to have wildly different understanding of grammar. In any given class, I will inevitably have some students who will use a term like subordinate conjunction without hesitation sitting right next to others don’t use periods or capitalization regularly.

And, just to make it even trickier, the stakes concerning grammar also tend to be really high. While much of writing is so subjective that it is difficult to assess on standardized tests, basic grammar is quite concrete, meaning that it is often disproportionately represented on the exams that our students (and often us) are often disproportionately judged by.

Continue reading “The Key to Teaching Grammar? Make It About Opportunities, Not Errors” →

Teachers tend to be both helpers and problem solvers. In fact, if a random group of teachers were polled, my guess is that those might be the two most common traits found, as to be called to the classroom generally means you like to both help others and tackle major problems.

And being helpful and a problem-solver are generally positive traits for educators to have, but there is one moment where these mostly positive traits can become liabilities: when we sit down with students to give them feedback, either in person or on the page.

As I’ve discussed before, I’ve observed that when teachers give students feedback, they almost instantly enter let’s-fix-it! mode. Considering the sheer number of students we often have, this doesn’t seem like such a bad thing, but as Daniel Coyle shares in his book The Culture Code, there is a simple experiment out of the Harvard Business School that shows that maybe there is a slightly better mode to enter first, if only for four or five seconds, before entering fix-it mode. Here is how he introduces it:

Continue reading “I’m So Sorry About the Rain: How to Significantly Improve Relationships With Students in Four Seconds” →

“Before I know what to teach, I need to know whom I teach.” -Cornelius Minor

Last week I finished We Got This., Cornelius Minor’s relentlessly positive and ridiculously quotable book (which is a highly recommended read), and while it has me thinking about a lot of things, what I keep coming back to is the line above. Minor has a number of eloquent and flashy lines, but it’s this simple line–which acts as a thesis statement of sorts for the book–that has sat with me, as I feel that it hits upon something important and rare.

Continue reading “Feedback Should Be a Two-Way Street” →

Blogger George Evans recently wrote a blog post called “In Defense of Slow” where he states that “many things in education are simply too fast…in this rush to cover content, to get through standards…we lose the heart and soul of what we should be there for.”

I connected with this instantly, as I’ve written about how cramming too much feedback into a single paper or cramming too much content into a single lesson or unit paradoxically often leads to less learning. Sure, the amount covered by the teacher is more, but the amount ultimately retained by the students tends to be far less.

It is worth remembering though that the same is true in our own education as well. For most summers of my teaching life, I tried to blast through twenty, thirty, or forty books in a vain effort to chop my always massive to-read list down to a more manageable size, but at the end of each summer this left me feeling less recharged and a bit fuzzier on the details of many of the books than I’d like.

So last summer I decided to focus on reading six books and read them well and deep. The result was a far more enjoyable and fulfilling experience, so I am going to do the same thing again this summer. People seemed to really enjoy the list last year (I mean who doesn’t love book lists? They are among my favorite things in this world), so I wanted to share my summer 2019 list. Here it goes:

Continue reading “The Six Books I’m Reading Before School Starts” →