I observed a bilingual classroom yesterday. The teacher was in Spanish-only mode as indicated by the green scarf she was wearing at the time . I could only understand maybe one out of every five words that she said. 

Despite the language barrier though, I understood exa...

 Photo credit: Anonymous Fulcrum Employee Who Can't Cook

I’m not much of a cook - and by that I mean that I don’t cook much and I don’t cook well. So, it wasn’t surprising when I tried cooking pancakes for the first time and ended up with a charred circle in the pa...

Late last year, I was sitting in an Instructional Leadership Team meeting at one of our partner schools, EPIC Academy, talking with the coaches about how their teachers were responding to their feedback coming out of weekly coaching meetings. We had been working all ye...

The school year has undeniably begun! The weather is cooling. Weekends are consumed with football. Pumpkin-flavored everything is everywhere. And teachers’ excitement from the first few days of school is settling in for the long haul.

Much of how that excitement settles...

TNTP released a new report earlier this month titled The Mirage: Confronting the Hard Truth About Our Quest for Teacher Development. (If you haven’t done so yet, read the full report!)

Like The Widget Effect and The Irreplaceables before it, The Mirage is bound to start...

We’re nearing the end of summer break. Some schools already have teachers back and a few even have kids starting next week. A summer’s worth of intense planning and preparation are about to be forced into operation – ready or not!

At the top of many principals’ lists fo...

Michael Jordan had a coach. And not just as a young kid learning how to dribble a basketball. He had a coach throughout his entire career. Dean Smith at UNC and Phil Jackson with the Chicago Bulls didn’t teach MJ how to dribble, or shoot, or pass a basketball - they pr...