Our class has been doing an author study on Andrew Clements, and we’re entering the final phase. We started with a read-aloud book: the first day of school, I opened up Clements’ book Extra Credit and started reading it aloud to the class. It’s a slightly higher reading level than many in the class would be…
A couple of weeks ago, two students in my room—a boy and a girl, friends who often play as part of the same group—were on the outs. Small conflicts kept erupting. On the advice of one of our parent volunteers, who had just finished a difficult recess with them, I pulled those two students aside…
One thing I heard over and over when we began remote learning—first for a few days here and there in the fall, and then in December—was parents expressing amazement at how much more responsible and independent their children were during remote learning this year. It’s strange that we have this point of comparison. Whoever would…
One of the most compelling pedagogical concepts I’ve ever come across is very simple: Don’t teach a vocabulary word until students already know the concept it describes. Let the experience you create be not, “Okay, there’s this word, and apparently it means X,” but, “Oh! That’s the word for that!” During the fall term, In science class,…
This past week, our school had to make a brief and abrupt shift to online learning for two days, and came back to in-person school on Thursday. All of my class already had some experience of remote learning, from last spring. But we did not know this class as an online community, and we found…
I’ve been thinking a lot about trust recently. It’s a quality that suffuses our school, and it makes a difference in so many ways, both big and small. At Chicago Friends School, students move independently around the school. Yesterday, I was watching over the indoor recess, and when my group changed from the gym to…