Last night I saw the play Dear Edward Hansen with my 14-year-old eighth grader, Zoey. It's amazing, of course, but one thing that really struck me was the audible sobbing during the show. This is a play about a...

By the time Catie, 14, stormed out of her last class of the day, she felt disconnected from her emotions. She had no idea how deeply she'd been impacted by a minor fight with her mother on the way to school. In...

Much of the writing we assign our students is public writing—writing to communicate with others. Writing-to-learn is personal writing, writing that helps students increase comprehension of texts—fiction...

I walked into a local business yesterday and stood in line waiting my turn. As I stood there, I knew that I recognized the face and the voice of the customer service representative eagerly assisting others. As I...

Welcome to another epic year. I figured it out, and I want you to figure it out, too. Happy people outperform unhappy people. How do I get to that happy place? Climate and culture have a profound impact on student and...

Recently, I offered a workshop in my district to teachers interested in creating digital portfolios of student work. My initial focus for the presentation was the digital concept of portfolios, but as I made my way...

Reading about the teenage brain is one thing, crawling inside the mind of an adolescent is quite another. As a veteran of adolescence and a current scholar of teenage education, I can now look back at my own...

No need for a bull horn, the students could hear me shouting just fine. My voice was so hoarse after my first year, it sounded like I was constantly coming down with whooping cough. Expectations? Oh, my students were...

Classroom management is essential in structuring an environment conducive to learning. Sprick (2009) explains that educators need to understand how to shape behavior so they "can make effective decisions and take...

Introduction You can be the greatest teacher of English language arts content but never be able to teach it if classroom management issues plague your classroom. The fact of the matter is that good classroom...