Teachers sometimes get quite attached to what they teach. They work hard to develop or find curriculum and use it with children, and if they use ideas that work, they tend to want to be able to keep using those ideas. That’s pretty normal; why mess with success? If something turns out to be effective…
If a child hears an adult say great things about something the child has done, it can have a great effect on her/him. True, some children are cautious about accepting such praise. Some even have a policy of refusing to accept praise, believing that it’s fake – that it’s something adults use to build self-esteem,…
One year when I was in high school, we had to read “Romeo and Juliet.” A few of us suggested to our English teacher that we could take a class field trip to see “West Side Story,” which we knew was based on “Romeo and Juliet.” Our English teacher was a nice guy in some…
When some things are going wrong enough, it’s easy to forget that some other things are going right. But there usually are things going right, even if they’re hard to notice in the middle of a crisis. Ignoring what’s going wrong can make things worse; problems shouldn’t just be swept under the rug. But what’s…
People don’t always do what they would have done if they’d only known better. They often have reasons to wish they’d done things differently. And that can be exactly how they get to know better next time. Foolishness, reviewed intelligently, can be a great way to get wise. College, for example, can be a great…
Almost immediately after I wrote “Grievances,” I got feedback from several parents and teachers on my e-mailing list. Some thought that Ellen, the teacher, had done the right thing – listened to children’s thoughts and feelings. Others thought that she should not have allowed that discussion to take place the way it did – that…
Twenty angry children came in from gym class one day and began telling their teacher, Ellen, how unfair the gym teacher was. The gym teacher had stopped a soccer game because of the behavior of some of the children. Some of the children had gotten a little carried away, and had said some things that…
Most teachers I know have times when they have to “wing it” – times when either they have no plans or they have plans that don’t work, and they have to come up with other ideas on the spot. These times are more frequent among some teachers than among others, and most teachers have more…
Over the years, I’ve spoken with a few teachers who seemed, to me, to hold their pupils totally accountable for what they learned. As I’ve seen it, these teachers did what they considered teaching, and left it entirely up to the pupils to take advantage of that teaching, and learn. If some pupils didn’t learn…
About twenty minutes after I e-mailed my essay on lecture to the people on my e-mailing list, I got quite a bit of feedback from one of my friends, Bruce Pollack-Johnson, a teacher who works with older learners. He has strong feelings about lecturing. He had two important things to say: that lecture is not…