Last week I posted a clip of a positive outlier, 3rd grade teacher Nicole Willey from Leadership Prep Ocean Hill Elementary Academy in Brooklyn. It showed, among other things, how she used Check for Understanding to ensure that she knew how all of her students were doing, and how she built her Ratio so the kids did…
Yesterday I wrote briefly about a question some colleagues and I once asked teachers during the interview process: We’d all like to do everything we can for all of our kids, but sometimes we have to choose. If you had to choose between a) increasing your students’ skills and knowledge and b) increasing their self-esteem,…
Over the next week or so I’ll be sharing a series of four blog posts about Nicole Willey, a third grade teacher at Leadership Prep Ocean Hill Elementary Academy in Brooklyn. Each post features a short video of Nicole at work- three of her teaching and a fourth a clip of a development meeting with her…
I am reading Eric Kalenze‘s Education is Upside Down. He observes: “It’s a vast overstatement to say that a single… institutional mission exists to guide [the] practices of American education.” Reading that reminded me of a question we asked when hiring teachers for a school some years ago. We asked: “We’d all like to do everything…
Got this note today from my colleague Rob Richard who’s a big baseball fan. That said, even if you are not a baseball fan, this article on Paul Goldschmidt and how his focus on technique led to his incredible rate of growth is definitely worth reading… and maybe even passing along to students. Doug- …