Tips 4 teaching | Ideas for teachers, new and old… RT Handouts Teachers: 10 Tips for Slowing Down Since my last Edutopia blog post, How Slowing Down Can Lead to Great Change was published, I've received dozens of messages asking for suggestions for how to slow things down in schools. The premise behind the following suggestions is that if we slow down, we'll have more opportunities for reflection -- to think about what we've done and how it went, to consider next steps, and also to listen to each other and therefore, strengthen our connections. Here are some steps that anyone working in schools can take to slow down: #1. Prune your goals Examine the goals you've determined for yourself, your students, your school, your department, etc. #2. Most of us overschedule ourselves, not necessarily because we want to, but we feel pressured or obligated to do so. #3. If you facilitate meetings, allocate 10 to 15 minutes to the opening. #4. Similarly, participants need routines to close meetings. #5. If you plan and facilitate meetings, apply your pruning skills to your agendas. #6. #7. #8.
Can you teach grit? #grit It is obvious that we need to talk about grit. Some great conversations have been happening on the Edutopia post I wrote [“True Grit: The Best Measure of Success and How to Teach it“] about the current Grit research and how I’m bringing that research to my classroom. Students shared in one sentence something that they had learned from our conversations and activities about grit. As I wrote the article, I started flipping through research and rereading my Kindle notes from books I’ve read on this topic and one thing is clear to me – we know grit matters but we don’t really know how to capture it in a simple definition. Can you get any more clear that this? Can you teach grit if you can’t define it? So, in my own classroom, we took the grit test, watched the video, and wrote our own definitions of grit (scattered throughout this post.) But grit is not something you give. Time and failure are PART of achieving your goals. Grit is simple – it is developed by situations that require it.