39 Things I have Learned in my 39 Years in Education Tomorrow starts year 39 in education. Who would have thought? I will greet new students to my new room tomorrow. As I contemplate meeting my students, I am in a reflective mood and below are 39 thin...

I'll never forget the moment when I realized that some of my students hadn’t really understood much of anything in my chemistry class. Students had just completed an open-ended experiential lab-based project at the end of the course, and I decided to i...

The pandemic has been hard on schools, students, and, yes us teachers. One of the most devastating and demoralizing results of the pandemic has been that so many of our students are significantly behind. The Brookings Institute did a study and found th...

Mastery Learning is hard work - really hard work! I believe that the most important part of having a successful Mastery Learning class is how it is structured and communicated to students. Students need to be bought into the idea, and they need to take...

If you are following the script on Mastery Learning, one of the key principles is that if a student doesn’t master the material, they need to re-test until they achieve mastery. One of the biggest challenges of Mastery Learning is that you have to give...

Have you ever been in a class where you had to work in a group and you did all of the work? Have you assigned group work and seen students letting others do the work for them? Collaborative groups sound like a good idea, but we all know that things can...

One important way to get students ready for Mastery Learning is actually getting their parents on board. To that end, I create a video for parents to watch that walks them through why Mastery Learning is best for their students.  The purpose of the vi...

It's hard to believe that school starts in six days. If you are like me, you wonder where the summer went. The past eighteen months have been like no other. Yet the more I think about education and the more I chat with educators from around the world, ...

This week I have been preparing my classes for Mastery Learning (I see students in about a week).  Part of that preparation is creating some videos that teach students how to operate in a Mastery Learning setting.  Below are four videos I have created ...

Do you struggle with making sure every teacher-student interaction has a purpose? Do you feel like you have enough interactions with your students each day? Do you want more meaningful conversations with your students?  Do you want to make your school ...