I have a Microsoft Surface Book (one of the originals) that I bought a couple of years ago, and the keyboard was starting to act up. Over the course of a couple of days, several keys became difficult to type, and then a few stopped working altogether. I borrowed an external keyboard from my son, which worked fine as a temporary fix, but I use my Surface Book a lot when I travel and the external keyboard wasn’t going to work long term. A nearby computer repair shop told me that they could fix the keyboard, but that it would require taking it apart to identify the circuit board part number, find ..read more

The bees left last week. It was a rare warm winter day on the mountain, a day when they might have been inclined to emerge briefly from their warm hives to buzz around a bit and answer the call of nature so to speak. So my wife and I decided to go check on them. We’d learned a lot more about beekeeping since our first bee colonies last year. All of our last year’s bees froze to death during a particularly harsh winter, and we’d put in place some safeguards to make that less likely this year. But when we got to the hives we couldn’t hear any of the telltale buzzing, and when we opened up the hi ..read more

One of the teachers I work with, Ms. C, recently gave her students a test and was disappointed in the results. Too many of her students had missed too many of the test questions, and she felt like they needed to master that material before she moved one. She felt like she needed to teach it again, but she didn’t want to cover it exactly as she’d done before and she wasn’t sure what to do differently. We talked a little, and here’s what we came up with: She took the 8 questions the class had done the most poorly on, wrote each one on a piece of poster paper, and taped the poster paper up on th ..read more

When I was 5 years old, I decided I wanted to take swimming lessons. I had been to the swimming pool many times with my family, and while I played around in the shallow end I had seen the older kids and adults actually swimming in the deeper water. I thought it was some kind of magic to be able to float and move around in water that was over your head without drowning, and I wanted to learn this mysterious and magical power. My mom made the arrangements and we went to the pool for the first day of swimming lessons. There were a bunch of other kids of all ages, and the pool was enormous, a ..read more

A few weeks ago an English teacher I work with was telling me about a problem she used to have with her senior English students. They had to complete a fairly extensive research paper over the course of several weeks, and during those several weeks she would schedule certain days to take them all down to the school library to “do research.” Which was fine, except she discovered that often her students would not make very good use of their library time; she’d find them sleeping, or goofing off on the computers, and she ended up spending a lot of her time with them in the library chewing them ou ..read more

The theme for all of these examples of Great Classroom Action seems to be: simple, but highly effective. All of the following are learning activities that are relatively simple to implement, yet dramatically increase student engagement and rigor, and also take what is often a relatively passive activity and turn it into one that is much more student-active. Video clips: from passive to active Like many teachers, Todd C occasionally shows video clips on different topics in his high school history classes, but rather than simply having his students sit passively and watch the video, he uses a va ..read more

Ms. C is a first year lateral entry teacher that I had been working with for a few months, and I was scheduled to visit her second period Marketing class and give her some feedback. It was one of the first few days of the semester and she had divided her students into small groups to do the Marshmallow Challenge, an activity in which teams have eighteen minutes to build the tallest structure they can using only raw spaghetti, string, tape, and a marshmallow. I was familiar with the activity as I’d seen different variations in other teachers’ classes. It’s a fun and engaging way ..read more

Another teacher and I were recently trying to come up with a list of the top five best teaching strategies or activities that we had ever seen. I remember thinking, “Man, it’s really tough trying to narrow it down to just five,” and then I remember thinking, “Hey, this reminds me of Dan Meyer’s Great Classroom Action posts.” I’m still not sure what my all-time top five would be, but I figured I’d start with a few and then post more later. So with a hat tip to Dan, here’s some great classroom action I’ve seen recently. Forced questions This is an activity I first heard about ..read more

This past summer a conversation almost didn’t take place. The two main reasons why it almost didn’t take place were 1) it was on Facebook, and 2) it was going to be about police officers shooting and killing black people. I’m not generally a fan of talking about politics on Facebook. It’s not a great medium for exploring subtlety and nuance, and many people are really more interested in ranting than engaging in anything like a conversation. So when one of my Facebook friends posted this, I was tempted to ignore it, like I ignore a lot of things that are posted on Facebook. I told mys ..read more

Wilt Chamberlain taught me how to be a better teacher. Malcolm Gladwell’s Revisionist History podcast recently featured an episode called The Big Man Can’t Shoot. It’s about why good ideas are often not adopted, even when it’s clear to everyone that they’re good ideas. The episode focused on Hall of Fame basketball player Wilt Chamberlain, and the fact that he was historically a horrible free throw shooter. Chamberlain had a 51% career free throw shooting percentage. That’s the third lowest in NBA history. But Gladwell focused on a relatively brief period of Chamberlain’s career duri ..read more