One Boy, 17 Official Incident Reports and a Better Kind of Discipline

Schools are struggling to become schools of this century, making sense of whether this important work is the result of mandates or whether they are really left to discover what lies beneath those surface fixes. Behaviors required for learning include attention, focus, interest, motivation and, yes, readiness. Those behaviors are difficult to engender, simultaneously, for all students in a classroom. To create that space requires the highest art and the science of teaching and the open…

The Best Websites For Learning About Halloween

October 5, 2008 by Larry Ferlazzo…

Are We Spending Too Much Time Teaching Reading Comprehension?

In this Teachers College Record article, Daniel Willingham and Gail Lovette make a startling assertion: the most important reading comprehension skills can be learned quite quickly, and continuing to spend a lot of time teaching them is not a good use of precious classroom time. Here’s their argument.

After students learn to decode, there are three reasons they…

Turn Your Princess-Obsessed Toddler Into a Feminist in Eight Easy Steps

What kind do you want? Many reformers deal with bureaucratic, financial, theoretical, and window-dressing stuff that  probably won’t change very much. Bill Gates thought that making all the schools small would save the system. It made no difference. See what I mean?

My theory is that we can improve the schools ONLY by dealing with the rot at the heart of the system. That would be the dysfunctional theories and methods that govern how all of…

The different use of the time has merit, and there are barriers that need to be addressed first.  There are required minutes of instruction in different areas from K through 12.  Those requirements vary from state to state. But often schedules are built based upon past practice without realizing that there may exist an opportunity for change that is not being used. And there are barriers because of state requirements.      …