Jay Mathews has a great column out this week called: Why national superintendent searches miss the best people for the job. He uses Montgomery County MD’s superintendent search as a case study. The district is paying a search consultant to comb the nation to find the best candidate. Jay wisely observes: School boards as smart as…
If you’ve read Teach Like a Champion 2.0 you know how strongly my team and I feel about building a Culture of Error in the classroom: Over and over again, as [we] examined videos of top teachers, we noticed that they made CFU a shared endeavor between themselves and their students. From the moment students arrived,…
My friend Linda Brown, who if you don’t know her is one of the world’s true heroes, was pestering me the other day to describe how Teach Like a Champion 2.0 is different from the original. I’m speaking at her organization, in April and of course, being Browny, she needs it described really clearly and in…
A week or so ago my wife reminded me how much our older two kids had loved some of the challenging books I’d read aloud to them when they were little: Island of the Blue Dolphins and Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH. It was the really complex and engaging stories that they loved most….
Posting on embedding non-fiction earlier today made me realize I ought to post something defining the idea more clearly. Here’s a very early draft of (part of) how Colleen, Erica and I discuss it in Reading Reconsidered. Embedding non-fiction is the process of pairing secondary non-fiction texts (usually non-narrative non-fiction) alongside a primary text in an…