About a week ago I posted a clip of Bradi Bair Cold Calling with her math students at Memphis Rise Academy in Memphis, TN. I wrote about how she observed which students had the best answers and used that to make her Cold Call an honor. This was a great way to build a positive culture…
This is an odd post… more personal and covering not what I usually write about. I’m not sure how useful or interesting it will be to readers. But here goes. When I first started writing about teaching my own kids were tiny, but time flies and I now have two college/university age students. They were good…
I’ve spent much of this week watching the first batch of video from school year 2021-22 classrooms. Watching classrooms with everyone masked is a bit disconcerting at first but it’s remarkable how quickly things feel closer to normal. Familiar interactions and relationships don’t take long to seem… well… familiar. And already there’s so much to learn….
Over the past year or two I’ve had the pleasure of working occasionally with Joe Mazzulla. Joe is an assistant coach with the Boston Celtics and this summer was the head coach of their NBA Summer League Team. He also wrote two really great side bars in The Coach’s Guide to Teaching. The NBA’s summer…
A few days ago I came across the above outstanding illustration created by Luke Tayler, a geography teacher in Bahrain. It captures in graphic form the power of timing the name during Cold Call. The basic idea is that when students know you might Cold Call and you use a structure of question-pause-name for your question,…