I found several blogs I read recently that reminded me of the need to be continually examining teachers’ impact on student engagement and engagement’s impact on student achievement. In a post titled Active’ Student Engagement Goes Beyond Class Behavior, Study Finds, Sarah D. Sparks reports that engagement is more than behavior and includes emotion and […]

I am excited to announce that the revision of my book about Wow’s is nearing printing (available in an ebook version, too).  Several years ago Tom Peters’ book, the Pursuit of Wow, caught my attention. He described how businesses needed to Wow! their customers and how it could be done by some pretty simple purposeful things. […]

As a classroom teacher I discovered early in my career that when I met with a learning specialist regarding special needs of one of my students, the strategies shared for me to try almost always had payoff with additional students. When she told me a student needed movement between activities to increase his focus, I […]

I had the chance to return to Leander, Texas to be part of their 20th year Continuous Improvement Conference. I was there last year and I wrote about their focus on seven student learning behaviors.  This year’s two day conference offered over 300 staff development learning opportunities. Each session descriptor identified which of the seven student behaviors the […]

All of you who have been in my training sessions or coaching practices know the increase focus I have personally developed on “student behaviors”.  I believe that the real challenge in teaching is identifying what students need to do or experience that will create the learning outcomes we want. “Teaching my content” is very different […]

In an earlier blog I described the New Jersey Education Association’s (NJEA) Priority Schools program, which is placing retired teachers as coaches/facilitators in some schools. This week I spent a day with the coach and staff at School 6 in Linden, NJ. I demonstrated for the team how to use a backwards planning process to identify […]