When you think about the Toyota brand, what comes to mind? For a lot of people, reliability is what they think of. There are many Toyotas running today that are 10+ years old and still going strong. What’s interesting is that this was not how people always viewed Toyota. It used to be that Toyotas…
Have you ever been frustrated because you were expected to implement something you learned in a training, even if you didn’t feel like you were ready? How much professional development do you think a teacher needs to effectively implement what she learned? A week of sustained professional development? A month? A year? How about 4…
It’s worth clarifying what I mean by “word problems” as when I wrote this blog post, I naively thought educators shared a common definition. So, check out the poll below. Which of these are word problems: A) How many pizzas do you need to buy? B) You and your seven friends want to have pizza…
If you’ve been reading my blog posts for a while, you know how much I love metaphors and analogies. I find them so helpful for sorting out my understandings, and I have another one to share with you today. The question I want to ponder with you is whether a leader should be more like…
Imagine a group of people who all want to go to Las Vegas. They’re all happy and excited… until they get there. Once they get there, they realize that they wanted to go there for different reasons. One person wanted to gamble. One person wanted to see some shows. One wanted to hang out at…
If you’re a leader who’s responsible for creating initiatives and getting people to buy into them, then you’ll appreciate this blog post. Let me begin with a story. Imagine a group of colleagues stating that they need you to address a problem that they are all facing. You spend significant time coming up with a…
Sometimes we do something just because that’s the way it’s always been done. This happens in sports just like in education. For example, consider the high jump. You’re probably familiar with the basic idea of seeing how high someone can jump over a bar. What you may not know though is that athletes have…
If you present at conferences or train other people, you’ll appreciate this short post. To begin, I want you to consider your expectations for musicians and stand-up comedians when you go see them perform. What are you hoping the experience will be like? When you go to a music concert, you generally want to hear…
Have you ever heard someone say that teachers need to lecture more to students in middle or high school so they are prepared for being lectured to in college? I have and I’m guessing that you have too. While I think that people who say this mean well, I think that this belief is misguided…
UPDATE (OCTOBER 7, 2022) – I co-created a presentation called 5 Struggles Your Foster Students Wished You Knew and it’s now available to watch and share. It goes much deeper into the foster care experience and includes the perspective of two women of color. Please check it out too. I’m writing this blog post…
For as long as I can remember, people have been fascinated by robots that can think for themselves and be “intelligent.” This has amazing potential but also comes with some concern that robots will think for themselves and no longer be controllable. In extreme cases, we imagine possibilities like you find in Terminator 2. Part…
When I look back at my first years of teaching, I’m shocked that I wasn’t fired. I don’t mean that figuratively. I mean it literally. Times were a bit different in 2003. When I was hired, I was the third teacher of the year for those students. The first teacher quit and the second was…
I want to share another lesson (here was the first) I learned from Stephen R. Covey’s book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Dr. Covey defines effectiveness as a balance of production and production capacity (“P/PC balance”). To explain what he means by that phrase, he shares Aesop’s fable of the goose that laid…
Raise your hand if you’ve got an #ObserveMe sign up but haven’t had as many visitors as you’d like? You’re not alone. Others like Michelle Labuski have had similar results. Yes, I did #ObserveMe but no one came in all year. Very disappointing— Mrs. Michelle Labusk (@MrsLabuski) August 14, 2017 Let’s take a step back…
If you are totally happy with the state of professional development and teacher training, then you don’t need to read this post. Otherwise, allow me to step onto my soap box for a controversial post… Recently I was watering my plants and was thinking about how each of them needs a different amount of water.…
It’s common practice for educators to create their own assessments including selecting and/or creating the individual questions. This may be fine in many cases, but there are huge issues you need to be aware of when making this choice. To illustrate this potential problem, consider what happens when office buildings need to perform maintenance on…
I’m going to begin with a bold statement. I think that many schools and districts have mission/vision statements that are essentially useless. I believe that the same goes for many calls to action that you see in presentations… and I am not immune either. So, if you’re not sure where yours stands or want to…
I want you to imagine that you need to move out of the home where you currently live and into a home that is significantly smaller. Now, think about all the things you own. There’s no way everything you currently own is going to fit in this new place. What would you do? Maybe you’d…
Earlier this year I received an email from a first year math teacher who told me that he was teaching a class for 6th graders that covered three years of mathematics standards (6th, 7th, and 8th grade) in one year! The teacher was stressed out because he didn’t know how to teach three years of…
When working with teachers, I frequently tell them that there are no teachers who feel like they have enough time to teach all of their grade level Common Core math standards. I state it like it is fact, but then one day I realized that I was just making a big assumption. So, I created…