How “Talent-Friendly” is your School?

Over time, some schools attract and retain more than their fair share of talented teachers while other schools loose talent. Talented teachers have options and they are relatively mobile. They are not necessarily like athletic free agents, willing to go anywhere to...

Design Lessons for Active Engagement

One of the most consistent predictors of student learning is the degree to which students are actively engaged in the teacher’s lesson. It makes sense, even to the non-educator, that an inspired lesson never produces the intended result without an inspired response....

What Type of Talent are You Seeing?

All human beings have talents… and weaknesses. In their best-selling book, Now Discover Your Strengths, Marcus Buckingham and Donald O. Clifton define talent as “a recurring pattern of thought, feeling, or behavior that can be productively applied”....

Pause to Practice at the Cusp of Mastery

When is the best time to practice something? Should a teacher build in practice time at the beginning of the instructional period or would it be better to wait until later? Practice is appropriate and beneficial at many points in the school day, but it is particularly...

12 Good Questions…

School leaders are often asked to select teachers based on little more than an application and an interview. Interview responses are often poor predictors of future job performance. These 12 questions, however, can shed light on a dependable predictor of job success...
The Case for Coaching

The Case for Coaching

Skillful instruction drives student achievement. Simply stated, a teacher’s pedagogy (skill in the art and science of teaching) clearly and directly affects the rate and degree of student learning. Since pedagogy is a skill-set, not merely a knowledge base, it is best...