In Braiding Sweetgrass (2020), author and professor Robin Wall Kimmerer describes one of her students’ graduate thesis projects. The student was familiar with a disagreement in traditional knowledge about the most sustainable way to harvest sweetgrass. This student designed her…
An off-the-cuff math question, “How much do you suppose they’re making off this ridiculous spectacle?” turned an excruciatingly dull evening into a creative endeavor. Yep, a math question. The other chaperones and I were hostages to a truly ghastly theatrical performance.…
The ideas I penned in this blog back in 2017 are now part of my book Doable Differentiation. Yes, I finished that novel, and yes the same strategies work to motivate students of all ages! Imagine giving a homework assignment that your…
“She made me do the green packet. No teacher should make a student do the green packet if she wants to do the yellow one. I don’t care if it means working harder.” So said a sixth grader in a…
I just learned that there are still a few tickets left for my workshop Holistic Leadership: Everyone Leading From Their Strengths on October 5, just outside of Chicago. Why attend? You receive a copy of my Gold-Medal-winning book on the…
Have you noticed there’s a Women in Education: Leading Perspectives Institute in July? In San Antonio? Are you thinking, "Why an event just for women? Isn’t ‘cross-pollination’ among genders a better way to improve the lives of children?” If you’re…
Okay, if Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Trilogy can have five volumes, my top five can have seven this year. So many great titles to choose from that I’ve categorized them for any of you who for whatever reasons avoid some genres.…
If I’ve learned one thing in 25 years of workshop facilitation, it’s the importance of experiential exercises. You almost have to wonder whether John Dewey, an American philosopher whose ideas still shape education, had been to a boring, lecture-only type…
“Morning meeting time to build relationships? When they’re already asking us to teach more content than students can master? What a joke,” the middle school math teacher told me. Content and relationships do seem like competing priorities, don’t they? After…
Every January, I page back through my Goodreads.com lists to celebrate the books I found most meaningful during the past twelve months. I prefer to call myself a bibliophile, not a reading addict, but squeezing in 120 books last year…