To make up for the delay in the publication of TLAC 3.0, I’m trying to post excerpts that readers will find useful. Here’s part of the discussion of the technique Warm/Strict: In Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain, Zaretta Hammond describes the critical importance of teachers who are what she calls “warm demanders”: those who…
My daughter is memorizing Pi. Apparently it started on a car ride over the weekend and for no particular reason. By the time I sat down next to her on the couch this morning she was up to 42 digits. When I left for work she was at 50. We chatted about it a bit as…
Joy Factor is the last, but certainly not the least, technique in Teach Like a Champion. Like everything else in the book, I’ve rewritten it in the latest version and tried to make connections to what research tells us clearer and more direct. Here’s a snippet: We often feel the greatest joy when we feel belonging….
On the reading front, I’m currently finishing Leo Damrosch’s The Club: Johnson, Boswell and the Friends Who Shaped and Age. It’s a group biography of Samuel Johnson, James Boswell and their circle, which included Adam Smith, Edward Gibbon, Joshua Reynolds, Hester Thrale and David Garrick. Damrosch’s description of Johnson’s death is both poignant and interesting. Johnson…
As many readers know, the release of TLAC 3.0 has been delayed by a few weeks. As a result I’m going to spend much of August sharing useful pieces of the manuscript on line. This section is from the discussion of the purposes of Cold Calling, the first of which may surprise you. In the previous…