Dr. Victor Sampson

A teacher put this to me recently, and the tension in the question is real. Her class spans a wide range of reading levels, some students well above grade level, some well below, several still building academic English, and she feels caught between two bad options. She can hand out grade-level science text and lose the students who cannot yet decode it, or she can simplify the material and worry she is lowering the bar for everyone. It is a fair worry. But the choice she is describing is a...

A teacher asked me a version of this question after a workshop, and it is one I hear all the time. She loves hands-on science and knows her students learn more when they are doing rather than watching. But every time she sets out the materials and turns students loose, the room gets away from her. Groups race ahead before they know what they are doing, a few students take over while others drift, materials get misused, and by the time she has put out one fire another has started somewhere...

A teacher asked me this after watching a lesson where students were supposed to give each other feedback on their explanations. What she got instead was either silence or "looks good", no one wanted to push on a classmate's thinking, and the couple of students who did push came off as harsh. She wanted genuine critique, and she wanted it to be kind, and she was not sure how to get both, especially early in the year before students trust each other. The pattern is familiar, and it is not a...