In TLAC 2.0 I tried to describe some of the tiny little things that top teachers do that create a ton of learning value in their classrooms. One of them is the ‘self-interrupt‘… a tool for making sure you aren’t trying to talk over students when it matters, and for gently setting the expectation that you…
We love the technique Art of the Sentence. By asking students to write a single sentence- ideally by asking them to write that sentence about some rich and engaging area of content- we teach them to master the art of syntactic control- the ability to use diverse tools to express complex ideas and this is extremely…
Brittany Rumph is a lead Kindergarten teacher at Rochester Prep West Elementary School in Rochester, NY, and we love her work. There are about a thousand reasons why, but two of them are especially important to building positive classroom culture. We call them Warm/Strict (Technique #60 in Teach Like a Champion) and Firm, Calm, Finesse (Technique #54 in…
At a recent workshop, I asked participants: “How many people in the room have given a consequence and had it make the behavior you were trying to stop get worse?” Then I asked: “How many people in the room have given a consequence and had it have no effect on the behavior you were trying to…