Happy Holidays, friends. I give you the gift of outstanding video to send you off into your winter break. This clip is of Sadie McCleary’s class. She’s a Chemistry teacher at Western Guilford High School in Greensboro, North Carolina. Generally this clip will inspire you- it’s such a beautiful example of how careful attention to building…
A couple of weeks ago I wrote a series of posts about my visit to London’s Michaela School. I wrote about: their marking policy and how it could in some cases reduce teacher workload; the power of the school’s emphasis on gratitude; and the decisions we all get to make on whether to judge or ‘steal’ from…
Here’s a rundown of that video of Amarillo Texas Caprock High’s Beth Brannon that I promised in my recent post about unexpectedness. Beth uses, by my count, 11 techniques from Teach Like a Champion 2.0 in the clip (!), though you might never know it unless you watched carefully. Her productive class seems like a happy…
Yesterday I was watching an outstanding kindergarten teacher teaching her little ones to read bar graphs. She used Call and Response to help reinforce the definition of data. “Another word for data is?” she would ask, with the class calling “information” in response. Her execution was pretty outstanding. The kids responded on-cue, crisply and with great…
If you use Call and Response in your classroom to keep students engaged, here are some tiny tools to ratchet things up a bit: a stretch and a reverse: Let’s say you’re a third grade science teacher doing a lesson on states of matter. You want your kids to remember key concepts such as “a solid…