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

A colleague, Jason,  has been experimenting with teaching grade 9 applied and academic math in a combined class*.  It has been going well...

When I am in a meeting (and I go to lots and lots of meetings) and there are challenges to solve, or the speaker is entertaining and has...

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 love data – I’m a little geeky that way.  And for many years, as a school administrator, I believed that if teachers could just look at...

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...

A group of teachers was talking the other day about the pros and cons of prep periods at the end of the day.  There was talk about having...

At our last staff meeting we were looking at some of John Hattie’s work from Visible Learning. Of course some of the rankings surprised...

One of the nicest things about teaching is that you get a “do-over” every year.  And most us, come the spring, start identifying things...

In the school I work, the teachers have embraced Google Classroom.  We see lots and lots of benefits:  student engagement, integrated...

This week I participated in a webinar hosted by a principal from Toronto, Emma Nichols (http://goo.gl/VtF6ET).  A number of times...

We know that we should be using “triangulation of data” to assess and evaluate students.  We know that we can often find out more about...