My daughter has a significant reading disability.  As a parent I found it difficult to imagine how hard school was for her since it had...

The year my daughter, Frankie, turned 12 she discovered cheesecake.   Frankie’s first 15 attempts at baking cheesecake were dismal...

Which day of the year will you have all eyes on you?  The keenest students? The least amount of student misbehaviour?  The first day of...

I’ve been going to a lot of conferences lately, and watching a lot of video clips, about how leaders can influence change in teacher...

I do not like parallel parking and I avoid it at all costs.  However, when my kids were learning to drive, I taught them all how to...

I was looking at some of the EQAO (Ontario’s standardized test in grades 3, 6, 9 and 10) questions in an attempt to understand why many...

Change is cultural.  We’d like to think that school change was about adding a new program, or providing new resources, or even hiring the...

I have posted this, or something similar, at the end of June before, but I always think it is a good time to think about it.  Or at...

I recently gave a TEDx talk about this topic but for those of you who like to read…. Tradition and intuition play a big role in how we...

Failure is NOT an option.  I think that our collective vision would be a school in which that was true.  We all aspire to have classrooms...

While we know that we are responsible for the 3Rs and other curriculum stuff, we also know that teachers have a role to play in shaping...

I have always said that assessment is one of the hardest things a teacher does, and I still think that.  But a conversation with one of...

Sometimes when we adopt new ideas in education, it takes a while during the implementation stage to figure out where the balance is. ...

Today I had to really think about why we integrate technology so well into our program at our school as  I had a visitor who came to...

In the olden days, determining the report card grade was easy.  A teacher’s mark book had a collection of grades which were added...

Last week I wrote about effective feedback and the different ways students might get feedback during the learning process.  This feedback...

A teacher said, “I just keep thinking that feedback is always me talking to the students about their work.”  As teachers, when we hear...

Believe it or not, grade one teachers do teach students when to use periods and capitals.  So do grade two teachers, grade three...

Here are just a few things that I have seen lately that use drama or movement to help kids understand tricky concepts.  Students like to...

I must admit that I don’t love rubrics.  They take a long time to write and sometimes it is hard to know what they actually say, even...