Memo Sifuentes coaches the u14s (and formerly the u12s) at Austin FC’s Youth Academy. I always find him incredibly thoughtful and intentional about the teaching part of his job. We’ve been talking a bit over the past year about game day coaching: what to do to maximize long-term learning at halftime, in pregame talks, during…
This is the second of four posts on the challenges of achieving lasting change in instructional leadership at-scale via professional development. The series is based on our work with Harmony Public Schools in Texas. In this post Dan Cotton and Dillon Fisher address an important theme: that consistency is necessary to success at-scale and, perhaps…
“Don’t take this the wrong way,” my 15 year old daughter said, pressing pause, “But I really expected this to be boring. I’m kind of pleasantly surprised.” We were in the car. “This” was an interview I’d done with Amy Forrester and Adam Boxer, two teachers from the UK whose help I’d asked comparing the…
We know that attention is central to every learning task and the quality of attention paid by learners shapes the outcome of learning endeavors. Part of attentiveness is individual. Some people are more attentive than others and have better skills/habits in terms of their attention. But is attention also partly social? Does the environment in which…
Yesterday I posted about the challenges of managing limits on Working Memory for teachers. We know we’ve got to design our teaching to respond to the challenges the classrooms presents for student’s Working Memory, but we’ve also got to be thinking about the under-acknowledge issue of our own working memory overloads. Walking around the classroom…