I’ll never forget the time I was working with a cohort of five teachers in a humanities program. We were getting ready to break for the summer and I suggested we read something academic to improve our craft as teachers. I envisioned coming back in the fall to a rich discussion whose lessons we would be able to weave into our practice to make us better teachers. I was surprised when one of my colleagues was very hesitant. Her reasoning: Summer was her time and she didn’t want to read anything having to do with school. She wanted to read the newest James Patterson book. I was shocked at this pushback. Especially for a program that required students to engage in summer reading, here was one of the instructors not wanting to do so. The group went back and forth and eventually the compromise was we would read a book, but it had to be a short one. Here we were judging the worth of the book by the number of pages. We were worse than the students.

Teachers by their chosen profession are the ultimate life-long learners. If you go into the teacher business you are essentially signing up for 30-35 more years of school. No matter how knowledgeable you become on the subject you teach...

The school systems in the United States have spent a lot of time and energy making sure things are equal. In today’s day and age of “everyone gets a trophy and don’t single any one out because it makes others feel bad,” what has happened is we are not treating students fairly. This is especially true with gifted students.

A lot of people equate equality and fairness as one and the same, but they could not be further from one another. Equality is all about treating everyone the same. In certain aspects of education, equality is valuable. For instance, discipline should be equal. If two students violate the same school rule, you cannot punish them differently. When you are grading two students, if they both put the same answer you have to reward them with an equal number of points even if one of the students guessed.

However, if you apply that same equality of consistency and sameness to a child’s education, what ends up happening is you try to lift up the one end while at the same time bringing down the other. In essence this is what teaching to the middle is, and it is something many teachers do in order to create equality in their classroom. Everyone gets the same assignment, and everyone has the same amount of time to work on it. This certainly seems equal but it is most definitely not fair.

The reason why this is not fair is because as much as we would love to think of all children starting in the same place (being equal in other words) they are not. A student with a school ability index (SAI) of 80, one who is at 100, and one who scored a 130, are going to be able to tackle an assignment at different levels of understanding with some being able to take it to a higher level of thinking than others. There is a wide discrepancy in the intelligence, abilities, and effort of children. This wide range is very difficult for a teacher...

The problem with writing about technology is that by the time I pick some specific form of technology, tell you how to implement it with students in your classroom, and ways it will make your students better 21st century learners, that technology might already be obsolete. That is how fast technology is moving in our world. We have come a long way from using cassette tapes and floppy disks but it has been in such a short time. If you have a computer or a cell phone that is more than five years old, the manufacturers  probably don’t make accessories or have support for it anymore. The point is, technology is constantly changing and thus as a result, you must constantly be changing how you use it in your classroom to keep up with it.

The top ten jobs in the world right now according to CareerCast, October 2016, are:

1. Data scientist
2. Statistician
3. Information security analyst
4. Audiologist
5. Diagnostic medical sonographer
6. Mathematician
7. Software engineer
8. Computer systems analyst
9. Speech pathologist
10. Actuary

How many of these jobs require technology? Probably all of them. More importantly, how many of these jobs existed ten years ago? Five years ago? The problem with learning a specific technology is...

The main premise of John Hattie’s Visible Learning: A Synthesis of Over 800 Meta-Analyses Relating to Achievement (2013) is that the most effective way for children to learn is for the teacher to guide students to become their own teachers.  “If you give someone a fish, you feed him for a day; teach someone to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.” The same principle applies in the classroom. If you turn your students into teachers, they will be able to teach themselves anything, not just what you have to give them. This involves making students responsible for their learning rather than seeing the teacher as the disseminator of knowledge. It involves having students perform self-evaluations, teach the class, lead discussions, and problem solve.

The same premise is behind my book, Creating Life-Long Learners: Using Project Management to Teach 21st Century Skills (2015). By giving students long-term projects, teachers put the responsibly of learning on the students, with the teacher acting as a facilitator, nudging students if they get off track, providing resources, and most importantly, getting out of their way...

Like myself, many people hear the term brain-based learning and think, “Isn’t all learning brain-based since that is what we use when we are learning?” Brain-based learning means that the brain responds and grows when presented with certain skills and activities. It is sort of like exercising your muscles. If you want to develop large biceps, there are certain exercises that will target that muscle group. You have to wisely choose what exercises you use if increasing your bicep muscle is your goal. Similarly, the brain is like a muscle. Certain skills and activities help it to grow more than others. And then there are others, many of which we employ in the traditional classroom, that do not.

So the question a teacher has to ask is, how do I avoid being the elliptical machine? Anyone who has ever been to a gym knows what this exercise machine is. It is the one that looks like a cross between a treadmill and an exercise bike. People are effortlessly pumping their legs and thinking they are burning fat. Although these machines are easy to use, make you look like you are exercising a lot, and are very popular, you are not burning the fat you think you are. There are many other exercises that would stimulate the body and burn fat far better, but of course they require a little more effort. The same goes with teaching techniques associated with brain-based learning. They require a little more effort than the traditional methods, but they are so much more effective at growing the muscle we want to grow in the classroom: the brain.

Here are three of the most effective instructional techniques for brain-based learning:

1. Orchestrated immersion–Creating learning environments that fully immerse students in an educational experience
2. Relaxed alertness–Trying to eliminate fear in learners, while maintaining a highly challenging environment
3. Active processing–Allowing the learner to consolidate and internalize information by actively processing it

All three of these techniques are the basic concepts I discuss in my book Creating Life-Long Learners: Using Project Management to Teach 21st Century Skills. By using projects...

I remember the first time I was placed in a classroom with students all on my own. I had been hired as a 7th grade teacher and it was the first day of school. A student came up and tried to give me a tissue box. My initial reaction was, “What sort of trick is this?” I nearly had a panic attack. What was I supposed to do with these tissues? Why was this child trying to pawn them off on me? (Turns out the kid was just trying to turn in the tissues his mom had sent in with him.) What this showed me almost immediately was that as much as my student-teaching experience prepared me for creating lessons plans, writing assessments, understanding curriculum, and other such teacher things, it did not really prepare me for how to manage my classroom. My cooperating teacher had done the work of setting the classroom expectations and management aspects. I had merely been there to maintain it. Now I had my own classroom and the question was how did I set this up for myself? And there was no easy fix, no book I could read or video I could watch. This was something I needed to learn...