Ignition for Education

  • How to Become [not “be”] Good at Teaching

    In previous posts, I’ve considered aspects of good teaching, including the importance of interactive pedagogies, teaching as the organization of guided practice, classroom management, and curriculum planning. I’ve also recommended an important article on what research tells us about effective teaching. Those posts give thoughts on how to BE a good teacher, but how does…

  • Classroom Management when You’re Not a Natural

    What’s the scariest part of teaching? Lesson planning? Direct instruction? Guided practice? Grading? Parent communication? Evaluations? Standardized tests? For a lot of us, it’s classroom management. Students bring their own immaturity, and then they feed off each other’s, squaring or cubing the immaturity level. Often, they see teachers not as people who are trying to…

  • The Logistics of Teaching

    The phrase “amateurs talk strategy, professionals talk logistics” has been attributed to various military leaders. I suspect it’s apocryphal, and that, if a serious soldier did ever say it, they meant that serious soldiers don’t discuss strategy without discussing logistics at the same time, because the strategy won’t succeed unless the logistics are made to…

  • The Quantitative Tyranny in Education

    How can we find out how well our students are learning? Or how well a teacher or a school is teaching? I’m sure most teachers will tell you to look at the results: the students’ writing, discussions, lab reports, equation resolving, translation, and so on. Go to the concert. Watch the play. Attend the games.…

  • How Learning Begins, and Why Children Do the Maddening Things They Do

    In Plato’s dialogue Meno, Socrates proves, to the satisfaction of Meno, that learning would be impossible without innate knowledge. We would not recognize truth when we encounter it unless the knowledge of it was already in us. In other words, what we think of as learning is actually recollection of what we already, in some…

  • How to Become a More Effective Teacher in May

    May is not the month in which teachers evaluate their craft. It’s when we finish the curriculum, not rewrite it. It’s the time by which we hope to have tried out new teaching techniques, not a time when we think of more. It’s when we’re tired and longing for the summer break. It’s not when…