Evidence based teaching has dominated the field of education ever since the beginning of the 21st century, when the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) included it as part of its wide-ranging education law that applied to all schools receiving federal funding (e.g. most schools).  The term itself dates back to 1991 when a Canadian...Read More

Every lesson plan begins with a beginning.  Unfortunately, in all too many classrooms this beginning sounds something like this:  ”Now class, turn to page 428 of your textbook.” There’s nothing there to grab students (quite the reverse:  many kids will disengage from the class at that point). Every teacher needs to have a kit bag...Read More

Over the past decade there’s been a lot of debate about whether Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences is valid as an approach to guide instruction.  I’m going to take up the points of this debate in a future post.  But right now, I want to argue for the most persuasive reason why every teacher...Read More

Everybody is born with a love for learning.  Look at a baby. She wants to explore everything around her, tasting, touching, smelling, feeling, hearing – learning all about the environment (including her own body).  Nature set things up that way so that we’d always be learning, growing, and adapting to an ever-changing environment. Something, however,...Read More

Curiosity is built into the human genome.  It’s really a question of life or death. If we hadn’t been curious as a species, it’s likely that we would not have survived to pass along those curiosity genes.  Curiosity endowed our ancestors with the ability to pay close attention to the environment, especially when it underwent...Read More