As far as I can tell, it is widely agreed that critical thinking is an educational good, a key academic outcome, and even a core academic skill. What is less widely agreed upon is what critical thinking is. This isn’t so much because there is a fierce debate raging in academia about the definition of …
My debate teacher in high school was one of three or four teachers who had a big impact on me that has extended well beyond the classroom. I learned so much and grew so much in that class, it really feels like it changed the trajectory of my life. Not just because I’ve ended up …
An interesting bit of research published by the Learning Policy Institute indicates that, while teachers continue to progress in their skill level throughout the entirety of their career, there is a particularly large jump in teacher ability in the first four years of teaching. As I think back on my own teaching career, I see …
In her viral essay in 2014, Pippa Biddle tells a story from her time on a humanitarian trip to Tanzania as a teenager. In the story, she and other girls from her private school are building a library for an orphanage. They would spend six hours each day laying bricks for the library. Apparently they …
It’s curriculum time! Just about now teachers all over, including in the homeschooling community, are creating, updating, tweaking, and generally getting their curriculum ready for next year. In that vein, I have a suggestion that I hope will be helpful to those working on their curriculum. In college I learned a theory of interpersonal communication …
There is this very interesting dichotomy one can find in the research on education. That dichotomy becomes clear if one looks at the items that have the biggest positive impact on student outcomes and then looks at the items that have the biggest negative impacts on student outcomes. The dichotomy is that the issues that …
**I begin with the caveat that the following concepts are not equally important or applicable to every subject taught. But they are relevant in some ways for all, and particularly relevant in the humanities.** I pretty frequently have something like the following scenario play out in my classroom. Perhaps in this particular case we are …
A particular activity I did in school has always stuck with me. I was a teenager and we were learning about the effects of alcohol consumption. The teacher had a set of goggles that simulated the impairment to vision, balance, processing, etc. that one might expect for different blood alcohol levels. As you might expect, …
What would you give to ensure that a child’s brain is prepared to operate in the adult world? What would you sacrifice to ensure that it has all the knowledge and skills necessary for the child to live a happy and productive life? For the homeschooling community the answer to that question is “an awful …
It’s funny what students will tell you about their families. They often have less of a filter than their parents. I’ll bet that’s comforting to all the parents reading this article 🙂 As a debate teacher, one of the messages that I sometimes get through the teen grapevine is that one or both parents in …