PinnedMember-onlyThe Classroom Experiment Part III: How should students be graded? Avoiding self-judgment and activating self-improvementOne of the big questions I had as a researcher turned teacher was, is it possible to use exclusively formative assessments as both feedback and grades? …Assessment5 min readAssessment5 min read
Published in Educate.·PinnedImprov-First Learning: Designing Experiences for Structured PlayLearning activities should be like jungle gyms, not lectures and not sandboxes. — A lot of the current popular wisdom about education is not new. In fact, it goes back over 100 years, almost unchanged, to Herbert Spencer, Jean Piaget, and John Dewey. The general idea can be summarized like this: Children are not passive vessels you can stuff information into; anything they…Education6 min readEducation6 min read
Jan 19Member-onlyFour Things Teachers Can Do To Avoid AI CheatingWith every great leap forward comes an initial panic followed by a slow adjustment. The latest leap forward has come from AI in the form of GPT-3, a langauge model that can understand and generate language quite convincingly, at least convincing at the level of a K-12 student. …AI8 min readAI8 min read
Jan 14Member-onlyMy #1 Classroom Management Hack: Sprinkle In SlangStudents hear teachers telling them to behave properly all day, and they don’t really internalize it. Sure, you’re telling them to be quiet, but of course you are, you’re an adult. So I figured out how to leverage their succeptibility to peer pressure to my advantage: Talk like a peer…Education3 min readEducation3 min read
Sep 29, 2022Member-onlyThe Classroom Experiment: The start of Year TwoWhen I was just about to start teaching last summer, I asked a friend and colleague whether they thought I would end up teaching for more than one year. They said, “well, at least one more year. Because at the end of the first year, you’ll have so many ideas…Teaching9 min readTeaching9 min read
Dec 20, 2021Member-onlyThe Classroom Experiment: A Progress ReportWell, it’s been three months since I gave up the life of a work-from-home education researcher and began the life of a 7th grade science teacher. This post is an update on how it’s going. The best part about being a teacher compared to being a researcher is the turnaround…Education14 min readEducation14 min read
Aug 25, 2021Member-onlyThe Classroom Experiment: pt 1I’ve been an education researcher for about a decade, studying how students learn, how to best teach them, as well as what and why we should be teaching in the first place. I have always been drawn to research, with its focus on isolating variables and getting to the bottom…Teaching5 min readTeaching5 min read
Apr 21, 2021How improv can save the worldOkay, that’s a big claim. But I think that if every person on this earth got more in touch with themselves and others, more positive, more creative, more able to deal with ambiguity, we’d have come a long way. There would still be the objective challenges of economic inequality, climate…Improv4 min readImprov4 min read
Jan 20, 2018No More “Bad Hook-Ups”: The Consent Communication ContinuumWe do not have a good way of talking about consent. Good in this case means, leading to more consensual sexual encounters, and more clear agreement about what is and isn’t okay, and who needs to take responsibility for what. A lot of think pieces in the last few days…Metoo14 min readMetoo14 min read
Dec 3, 2016Why Are Some People Oversensitive to PC Culture?So, which one is it? Is PC culture ruining discourse, or is the backlash against it a defense mechanism of oppressors who are feeling their power being taken away from them? As with most dichotomies, the answer is that it’s a lot more nuanced than a simple either-or. To explore…Psychology5 min readPsychology5 min read
