Teaching Teaching

Send us Fan Mail In this episode I talk about how we make our teacher brains through our attention to our teaching.  Hope you find it interesting.   From the episode: If we understand that our teaching is the medium and the medium is the message, what might our teaching tell us about what is good, what is worthwhile in ourselves, in ourselves as teachers?  How might we embrace a kind of teaching t...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode, I talk about what it means when kids are totally focused on their grades- where that comes from and what we might do about it. Let’s start with the core problems with grading systems.  Grading systems can make the teacher/student relationship ugly.  As I have shared before, the teacher/student relationship should be about something important- something to be taugh...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode, I ask us to consider what is at the heart of our teaching. What is it that you hold onto that you must make happen in your teaching? From this episode: Our primary work is building a relationship with students.  A relationship about something worth learning. What does it mean when the school curriculum asks you to compromise what you believe matters?  Asks you to...

Send us Fan Mail For the moment, this is may be my last take on Differences.  Prior episodes were about Difference as a Problem and Difference as a Challenge.  This episode is about Difference as Opportunity.   Enjoy Excerpt:  I have given attention to differences in the context of schools.  Step out of school. We live with our differences every day. We live with the differences of others every da...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode I talk about differences as challenges-  both for student and for us in our teaching.  This is part 2.  In the next episode I will talk about differences as opportunities for our kids and for our teaching. From this episode:  Many of us might shy away from making our teaching about something personal, something that matters a lot to us.  Think about the teachers th...

Send us Fan Mail I take on differences kids bring to with them to our classrooms and how we struggle with them.  Later episodes will turn this on its head and be about what we can learn from giving good attention to kids differences and how learning might flourish for all when giving the right kind of attention to difference.     In this episode, I talk about retention, grouping, and kids who blow...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode, I challenge us to think about AI, kids learning and authorship.  I set out the challenges that teachers are finding with kids and their use of AI. I also challenge us to rethink how AI might matter to kids' learning. From the episode-   I know a couple very smart people who use AI as a thought-partner.  Instead of simply asking an AI agent for a full and comp...

Send us Fan Mail We all carry an inner voice that tells us how to learn. In this episode, I reflect on the teacher-self — how it is shaped by school, family, and culture, and how it influences whether we comply, resist, or truly engage. What might change if we began to consciously author our own relationship to learning? Excerpt: Teacher-selves are formed through purposeful attention to learning a...

Send us Fan Mail I set out the idea of Teacher-Self.    The teacher- self being the governor of how one approaches the learner.    From the podcast-  I want you to consider your students as teachers.  Not in the way we might already- with students teaching each other at times.  I want us, instead, to realize that within every learner there is a teacher-self; this teacher-self as the governor of on...