Hello, When I was a kid, my older sister Brooke and I sometimes got into physical fights. If I picked a fight with her, she almost never hit me back. Instead, she would say, "I'm going to go tell." That sentence terrified me more than anything else. I would immediately beg her, "Hit me! Hit me!" because that felt safer. If she hit me, we were even. Balanced. Settled. At peace. What mattered to me was the sense of matching her response to my action. One offense, one consequence. Tit for tat....

Hello, I’ve worked my entire career in education, so I can’t say for sure whether what I’m about to describe applies to every profession. But I know this much: in education, people love tradition — and yet the system itself  is always changing. Devices replace paper tests. Classroom routines evolve — from how we take attendance to how we facilitate discussions. What students are interested in changes, and so do the ways we communicate with families. You get the point. Years ago, when New York...

Hello, In the post, " Opportunity to Succeed ," I wrote about how teachers create learners, how John Hattie’s work reminds us that educators are the reason literacy rates rose from 14% to 86% over the past century. Teachers are the professionals who design opportunities for students every day. But what about the opportunity to learn for teachers themselves? If we believe teachers are the reason students learn, then we must also believe that teachers deserve the same opportunities to learn...