Two of my favorite teachers, both journalism instructors, are admittedly not the typical readers. One reads only non-fiction books, newspaper and magazine articles, and online list serves while the other contends he’s “not the typical English teacher” because he only reads online articles, list serves, and blogs. Even though they ...

During my student teaching my mentor teacher asked a seemingly straight-forward and simple question: why did you give a test after reading that novel? My response, an obviously silly and meaningless one (even after some thought), was “because it ends the unit.” I thought that unit closure required a test. A test meant we are finished ...

Is it possible to create a culture of failure? My school is currently being asked to discover why the Freshman failure rate is so high. 1/3 of the Freshmen failed a class during their first semester in high school, and statistically speaking 30% of Freshmen who fail a course in their first high school year do [...]