Note: Student Agency is a HUGE part of middle school identity and success. For this issue’s column, I’ve asked education expert, LeAnn Nickelsen, to join me in presenting the case for elevating its...

"You can't use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have." --Maya Angelou Blank stares fill the conference room, frustration palpable. "There's no way to do this. Some students are just not going to learn...

In her 1994 book of poetry, Something Permanent, writer/poet Cynthia Rylant gets inspiration from the photographs of Walker Evans, a photojournalist who documented rural America during the Great Depression in the...

As a white, privileged, cisgender, heterosexual male, I can walk into most situations with people of my own race, or with mixed race, gender, sexual orientation, or socio-economic status groups, and not have to be on...

One of the highest forms of respect around the world is to prove to someone that we really know them, and that we see them as worth knowing. We can connect with the grumpiest of individuals when we prove such things,...

A few years ago, a colleague of mine at a local middle school lamented that he had to stop being a volunteer leader for his church's youth group. When I asked him why, he said he had heard someone on talk radio say...

"Laughter is the shortest distance between two people." – Victor Borge In my first year of teaching, I taught kindergarten. There are moments from that year that parallel later moments teaching middle...

Most studies in education are observational studies. This means that investigators pore over data previously collected by others. They seek correlations between different variables. This approach is far less expensive...

As with most things in education, context can be everything. A skill taught in isolation from meaningful context, for example, is rarely learned, and often becomes grist for blaming the student for his lack of...

The faculty lounge crackles with disagreements about the new grading policies suggested by the standards-based grading committee. The English department debates whether or not grammar proficiency is a requisite for...