One of the things that people tell us they value most in our workshops is practice—the chance to rehearse and refine elements of your teaching technique in the safety and camaraderie of colleagues rather than in front of your third period math class. However, not everyone has the opportunity to practice with peers as often as…
I’m on my way back from New Zealand today. In the course of doing some training down there for NZ Rugby coaches, I met a music teacher from the South Island named Sam Hadfield. He’d been experimenting with a few carefully chosen techniques—Cold Call, No Opt Out, Right is Right—in his classroom with generally positive…
One of our most useful clips of the Cold Call technique is this short-but-super clip of Alex Timoll at Excellence Boys Charter School in Bed Stuy Brooklyn. There are a ton of things you could take away from it, and from Alex’s teaching generally, but there are three especially useful lessons i think that every teacher…
We spent some of last week watching footage of teachers from Partnership for Inner City Education– a group of Catholic schools in NYC whose mission is to develop outstanding schools that serve low-income students. We love their work generally- what’s not to love about insightful, mission-driven people making every school a little better every day- so we…
A topic I’ve been thinking about as I’ve watched coaches over the past couple of months is something I call ‘means of participation.’ It’s relevant during questioning. I’ve written about if for classroom teachers here. But it’s relevant for coaches too- questioning is important in building decision-making and reinforcing knowledge through recall practice…