I love Carol Dweck’s work and think Mindset should be required reading for educators, particularly as a guide to giving positive reinforcement to students. To summarize briefly, she describes how important a growth rather than fixed mindset is to children in determining how much they learn. If they love difficulty and challenge, if they say not,…
I was grateful to get to spend some time recently talking about Reading Reconsidered with Liana Heitin of EdWeek, but I found myself feeling like I didn’t capture the book in talking about it–bits and pieces maybe but no sense of the whole. One reason–other than my own failure to describe–is that it’s a big sprawling…
[This post is updated w additional comments added at the end on 1.22]. This week NPR ran a piece on “no-nonsense classrooms” and described a program that advised teachers not to use ‘please’ and ‘thank you.’ Some people might think I would agree with this advice. A few have even suggested that this guidance ultimately derives…
Today being Martin Luther King day, I spent the morning re-reading passages from Taylor Branch’s Pulitzer Prize winning biography of King, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, particularly the hundred or so pages of his treatment of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. To some degree the boycott has, in Branch’s words, “dissolved in memory to a…
Got a note from Tim Daly this morning. He used to help run TNTP. Now he’s at Ednavigator, a nonprofit with the mission of helping “parents and caregivers choose the best school, understand and track their children’s progress, support learning at home, and advocate for their children’s educational needs.” He was asking me about math. I’d…