In the race to complete reports that prove the immediate value-added measures of our teaching, we've lost sight of one of the most powerful teaching tools we have: patience. Teacher patience is the heart of students'...

If we’re not careful, we may lose our intellectual selves. We can grow numb with repeated exposure to ideology and structures built to maintain the school’s status quo. With each passing year, our...

These are the messages in action or in word that students want to hear daily from teachers. To promote these themes, we give students positions of responsibility and the know-how to do them: running the daily...

In every country in the world, we elevate those who endure, especially against overwhelming odds. We exalt politician William Wilberforce, who led a challenging campaign to end all slavery in the British empire. We...

It was bright orange and boxy. I had used it repeatedly to "catch air," plowing over snow piles at high speed in school parking lots during the winter. Doing these stunts was safe, I reasoned: It was the family...

You are required to attend an inservice training about teaching in the block-length class even though your school is not moving to a block schedule this year or in the near future. How attentive will you be to all...

I look at the 16 students in my classroom. On any other day, 35 students would be looking back at me, but today the other 19 are eating cake and being honored at the morning's honor roll assembly. What am I supposed...

"Beuller? Beuller?" Look in on class discussions today and what you'll see (I hope) is a far cry from the classroom of gaping-mouthed, drooling, blank-faced students in the John Hughes 1986 film Ferris Beuller's Day...

You’ve always averaged grades. Your teachers averaged grades when you were in school and it worked fine. It works fine for your students. Does it? Just as we teach our students, we don’t want to fall for...

In her Click Here column, Brenda Dyck does a beautiful job of helping us incorporate and navigate technology, but I want to add my voice to hers in support of a particularly powerful tool: Twitter. To be honest,...