Teachers: a strategy for getting students to calm down.
A simple method for getting students to calm down and reflect on their behavior. A few weeks back I was observing a third grade teacher’s reading mini-lesson. Despite this teacher’s faculty in managing her large class, the little boy in front of me was on a mission to...
Legendary Coach and Mentor
This past holiday break, I visited my hometown of Grand Forks, North Dakota and got a chance to sit down with an incredible coach and human being, Mike Berg, who spent 38 years coaching football and teaching young men and women not just X’s and O’s on the field but...
Over or Under Prepared? It doesn’t matter. It takes time.
Like most teachers, I struggled my first year. My mentor, a veteran teacher, told me before my first day of classes to not show too much emotion, be overzealous, or do too much on the first day. As I walked away from his classroom door, he shouted, “Don’t smile until...
Stop with the yes’s and no’s: how restating every response can buy teacher think time
“Okay, so how can we describe Kenny’s brother Byron?” the teacher asked. The class had just started reading Christopher Paul Curtis’s amazing novel "The Watsons Go To Birmingham--1963." They were in the middle of the first chapter, and the teacher paused to probe...
Sibme 2.0
We are pleased to announce that today we have launched version 2 of the Sibme application. Our goal since day one has been to create a useful application that allows teachers and instructional leaders to collaborate around instruction more frequently. We have spent...
