Readers of my novel, Adequate Yearly Progress, may notice a pattern when it comes to educators talking about their jobs in public. In the book, there are several scenes in which a teacher or principal tries to explain an educator’s point of view in the media, and it goes terribly wrong. Sometimes, the educator is… Read more »
Category: Resources
Should You Give Your Students a Survey to Gather Feedback About Your Teaching? Maybe. But Read this First.
I should start by saying I’ve always been a fan of giving an anonymous survey to students at the end of the year. The last chapter of See Me After Class includes a long list of survey questions that teachers may want to ask, and I’ve asked all of them with my own students at… Read more »
Rescuing Your Ideas from the Good-Intentions Abyss
Early in my teaching career, a colleague told me about her plan to give every one of her students a personalized card on their birthday. What a wonderful way to show students she cared! I decided that I, too, would be the type of teacher who gave out birthday cards to students. I bought the… Read more »
Adjusting Your Teaching Dials
Is this the right moment to show compassion by allowing a student to turn in that late assignment? Or would a tough-love approach teach them to be responsible about deadlines? Should you follow that interesting topic that came up organically or stick to your lesson plan? How much of your class time should be devoted… Read more »
The Personal Lives of Teachers (Or: The Personal Lives? Of Teachers?)
When I wrote my most recent novel, Adequate Yearly Progress, I wanted it to be different from most of the stories I had read or seen about teachers before. Probably none of us is ever our whole self at work—we want to seem like Competent Professionals, after all—but in the same way we can be… Read more »
