Uncategorized Archives

Classroom Design for Busy People: Make a “Tribute Wall”!

As a new teacher, I faced the same dilemma every fall: What to put on the walls of my classroom?

Exhibitions Photo Gallery

A gallery of exhibition images to inspire your next exhibition of student learning!

Three Principles that Guide my Grading as a College Professor

“Grading” for me means more than just marking mistakes and putting a number or letter on an assignment. This is because, for the last ten years, I have used specifications grading in all my classes.

A Meeting I Actually Look Forward To: The Coaching Huddle

Every two weeks, my Network for College Success (NCS) colleagues and I connect with each other to learn and grow our practice as Transformation Coaches.

Sometimes the Bias You Need to Disrupt is Your Own

I’m going to share with you how undertaking antiracist and antibias work with schools forced me to confront my own blind spots.

Ask Dr Project: Can’t I Just Let the Kids Decide What to Make?

Q: It seems restrictive to tell every kid to make the same kind of product when we’re doing a project. How should I decide what parts of the project to be flexible on and which are non-negotiable?

A Simple Way to Help Reluctant Students Start Asking Questions

All through my schooling in India, the one thing I learned was to not ask questions. Questions derail the smooth flow of a lesson’s delivery, taking it into unforeseen territories and uncharted waters.

Ask Dr. Project: What if kids just copy the model?

The answer to this question is, literally and precisely, “I’d like to see them try.”

Student Led Conference Model Agenda

Are you planning this year’s SLCs? Save time and make sure you’ve covered everything, with this SLC agenda!

How (and Why) to Start a Project with a “Model Critique”

“We critique and discuss what makes the work powerful: what makes a piece of creative writing compelling and exciting; what makes a scientific or historical research project significant and stirring; what makes a novel mathematical solution so breathtaking.”

Self-Assessment Strategies for Students

How can assessment practices be designed to best support student learning? In school, the term “assessment” is often shorthand for “grades”—or, perhaps, tests, quizzes, rubrics, and similar evaluative tools. However, thinking of “assessment” as interchangeable with “test” or “grade” limits the potential for assessment practices to lead to meaningful and deeper learning.

Reading List: What is this thing we call PBL?

Sometimes the simplest questions lead to the most complexity…

Welcome to Unboxed Issue 26

In 2009 I began an internship at the Innovation Unit in London. It being an internship, I was doing a little of everything, but my main project was Learning Futures, whose goal was to make school more engaging for students.

Remembering David Price

Charged with the challenge and the honour of trying to capture the spectacular quality of David Price’s life, an image, not words, came to mind.

Improvement from Scratch

School operation teams, the backbone of making the school day happen across the country, are often invisible. With little acknowledgement of success, it’s easy to notice when things fall apart: when buses don’t arrive on time, admission numbers are lower, computers stop working, or thousands of dollars are wasted on food ordered, but never eaten.

Energizers and Icebreakers (minimal set-up required)

These games are easy to play and require minimal setup.

The Power of Positive Phone Calls

“I am a teacher and I routinely make positive phone calls home,” said Laura. “But their power really hit home when my son’s teacher called me to tell me something great he did at school. I was worried that he was flying under the radar, but she noticed and that call brought me to tears.”

The Route To School Improvement Is Hiding In Plain Sight

“You know how you can tell you’re in a happy school within 30 seconds of walking through the front door?” This is a statement/question that I’ve experienced on countless occasions during a lifetime spent in education. It has a ring of truth to it and we’ve all felt it as visitors or (worse) inspectors.

Giving Teachers a chance to “Test Drive” their Lessons

M’s fourth graders were buzzing as they worked in pairs to solve the math problem M. had just presented to them. The other educators in the room circulated and listened in as students used academic language to discuss their answers with each other, jotting down notes about what their partner had said and the language they had used.

Exploring Internship Opportunities

Thirty potential mentors from local organizations, nonprofits and businesses were sitting across tables facing dozens of eleventh-grade students.

Your Classroom Isn’t An Island

My fourth-grade classroom was covered in cardboard boxes. The entire back wall was piled high with donated boxes. The tables were covered in glue and paint cups sat in the sink. As I began to clean up some paint splatters, I smiled to myself as I thought about how I ended up in this situation.

The Tuning Protocol

Goal: to help a teacher refine & develop the design of a project

Schools as Equitable Communities of Inquiry

We wrote this chapter several years ago, in response to a request from the Sitra Foundation in Finland that we envision the school of the future. The chapter is dated in some respects, but apart from minimal updates and revisions for clarity, it appears here as written.

Continuous Improvement In Social Impact Organizations

During a time when people feel overwhelmed by endless professional development opportunities, new technology, and new approaches to doing their work, we wanted to emphasize that the continuous improvement model is not a totally new framework for most organizations.

How We Put On A High School Music Festival

We came up with the idea of planning and putting on a music festival. We looked at each other, paused, then simultaneously said, “Naaahhh.”

Welcome to Unboxed Issue 25

The Issue 25 letter from the editor

A Handbook for Community Partnerships: Internship

This is one in a trio of articles that provide tried-and-tested, actionable advice for community partnerships in school. This article focuses on internship. You should also check out the other articles, on service learning and externship.

A Handbook for Community Partnerships: Externship

This is one in a trio of articles that provide tried-and-tested, actionable advice for community partnerships in school. This article focuses on externship. You should also check out the other articles, on internship and service learning.

Writing or Writer?

Am I teaching them to write, or am I inspiring writers?

Nurturing Student Well-Being and Engagement through Belonging

Educators have known for years that social, emotional, and cognitive processing are all neurologically intertwined and that school connectedness has long-lasting protective effects for adolescents.

A Handbook for Community Partnerships: Service Learning

This is one in a trio of articles that provide tried-and-tested, actionable advice for community partnerships in school.

Integrating Community Partners in Project Based Learning

Use this resource to bring community partnerships into your projects

Eliminating the 0-100 Scale

The 0-100 scale for grading divides points unevenly in each grade chunk creating a situation where a small number of failing grades can outweigh a larger number of passing grades

How to Tell a Story of Learning in a Podcast or Video (Workshop)

The resources you need to run a workshop on telling stories of learning (or just to learn how to do it yourself!)

The 2×10 Intervention

A concentrated approach to boosting student trust and growth. Try this strategy to deepen class connections and encourage students to reinvest in learning goals.

Providing Wise Feedback to Students

Effective teaching involves setting high expectations for students and providing them with the necessary support to meet those expectations, fostering an environment where students can thrive through understanding, guidance, and belief in their capabilities by the instructor.

Notice & Wonder Welcome Routine

Use this welcome routine to get students thinking about the lesson without risking the “wrong answer.”

Mood Board Welcome Routine

A supportive welcome routine that is authentic and establishes trust and respect in your classroom through humorous mood boards.

It Takes a Village to Raise a Writer

We called our project the Earth Authors Program. It began with Ramnath setting the groundwork by giving children an authentic reason for writing.

The Six Relationships that Characterize Great Schools

Underlying Deeper Learning are the relationships that make learning meaningful and sticky.

Using Continuous Improvement to Streamline the IEP Process

IEP goals are the heart of the educational program and it is possible to improve the system design so that 100% of IEP goals can be achieved, setting students up for a lifetime of access and success.

A Troubleshooting Tool for School Improvement

NYC Outward Bound Schools have developed a new version of the Lippitt-Knoster model to aid school leaders and teams in managing complex change for equity improvement.

Putting the Science of Reading into Practice

Lesson study works especially well for areas of teaching that have rigorous research, like the science of reading.

They Have a Point…

I want to tell you a story. It’s a story about innovation. It’s a story about improvement. It’s a story about equity.

The Performance Cycle: Building Community

A learning community’s activities and relationships are designed to help set a learner’s feet on a path toward a positive social future.

Teach Like A (Historically Accurate) Pirate

Eighteenth century pirates were participating in one of the most ambitious experiments in radical democracy in the history of humanity.

A Weekly Student Survey Transformed my Teaching

We learn most from the real experts in our classrooms: our students

Can Ted Lasso Fix Education?

In addition to everything else schools are, they are–fundamentally–teams

How to Collaborate with a Park: A Guide for Teachers

One of the biggest time-sucks in project planning is locating, vetting, and integrating relevant resources required for project-based learning

The Peace and Well-Being Film Project

How did the teachers connect the perspectives of different subjects into a single film project?

How Rafia Made It All Add Up

She spent the next five days obsessing over the problem amidst reams of paper, half-chewed pencils and scattered notebooks

Getting to Great

He hesitated, “In general, I think anyone can do what they set their mind to do as long as they know they are not alone in doing it,”

How I Planned a Project Using ChatGPT

Middle School teacher Sean Gilley explains how he uses Chat GPT to share the load on project planning, so he can focus on the parts of teaching that matter most

The Joy of Collaborative Short Story Writing

What would it look like if you got three students to write a beginning, middle, and end to a short story?

Assessing Student Work with Next Generation Science Standards

“Creating a project-based curriculum in science was going to be a challenging albeit passionate undertaking.”

Strengthening Family-School Partnerships

Could a partnership between the school and families with open communication be the key to student success?

What Does It Take For Black Teachers To Thrive?

Currently, our nation is experiencing a national teacher shortage that has disproportionate effects on students

Dance Dance Reconstruction

I never intended to become an advocate for teaching history in elementary school; it’s something that just sort of happened…

Learning Behind the Lens

A student reflection on collaborative project work

The Price of a Good Education

“Hey, I’m gonna need that hundred dollars by the end of the day,” Max said as he double-checked the owed amount on his collection sheet.

Lightning In A Bottle: The Al Qamar School Story

“Paagalon ka school” (“School for lunatics”), “The Motley Crew’, “The Rag-Tag Army” were the not-so-flattering epithets the community used to describe our school —one would have thought we had started a rock band, not a tiny little school with nine children and grand ambitions.

What Did You Learn in School?

This is a story about the lessons White boys learn in school. Or at least it’s about what I learned in school- about race and class and gender and what we do or don’t owe each other.

Welcome to Unboxed Issue 24

The Unboxed Issue 24 letter from the editor

Time for Connection

The past years of the pandemic has made it difficult for students to connect with each other, which is essential for their growth and development, and as teachers, it’s important to provide opportunities for them to connect peer-to-peer despite the limited time.

Hazmat Suit in New York City?

I was dead certain that my 8th graders would not be able to guess what was going on with the picture I had selected…

Balance of Convergence & Divergence in Building Efficacy

WHEELS, an NYC Outward Bound School believe in the power of continuous improvement cycles to increase the collective efficacy of teacher teams…

C3 Mobility

College students lead and engage with high school students to provide mentorship for the college transition

Going Beyond The Equity Pause: The CARPE Student Fellowship

So you want to involve students in your improvement work. Where do you start? Naturally, most improvers will begin by conducting empathy interviews.

Swimming Against the Current: Resisting White Dominant Culture

Practical advice for “walking the walk” in equity-focused improvement work

The “Totes of Hope”: A Mental Health Humanities Project

To address the youth mental health crisis, 11th grade Humanities teacher Andres Perez and his students at High Tech High Chula Vista sewed tote bags for patients at Rady Children’s Hospital Psychiatric Outward. Along the way they learned about the systematic issues in society that could lead to troubling mental health issues, and how to take action toward them. They also learned the importance of iterating a product and a process, and giving grace to oneself through it all.

“Worksheets Won’t Make Good Artifacts”

What happened when a large Kentucky district decided to go big on Deeper Learning

“Dear Math, You are Dreadful”

15-year veteran math teacher, Sarah Strong, and her high school student, Gigi Butterfield, get into why kids hate math (at least some of them), and what to do about it.

How to Codesign with Students

During our seven years as High Tech High students—and eventually, student leaders in the Student Ambassador program—we worked alongside our teachers and school leaders to plan and make decisions both in and out of the classroom.

Welcome to Unboxed Issue 23

The Issue 23 letter from the editor

Why Root Cause Analysis?

Introduction text to using root cause analysis

Improvement as a Tool for Our Collective Liberation

Brandi Hinnant-Crawford talks to Stacey Caillier about how improvement science can be used to dismantle oppressive structures

Struggling with Improvement? Try a Planned Experiment!

Ben Daley recommends “planned experiments” as a means of inquiry and an alternative to the Plan-Do-Study-Act (PDSA) cycle

Educators Building Software

How a team of educators built a suite of software for students, teachers, and administrators without knowing how to code.

Intentional Integration: Technology Choices for Teachers

Technology is no longer an occasional variation in a paper based learning environment. Increasingly, the laptop is the learning environment.

Four Ways Game Design Levels Up Engagement in Your Classroom

There’s a lot that project-based teachers can learn from game designers…

Two Approaches to Grouping Students in Projects

Early in the spring, I got a phone call from a school principal asking what Unboxed had on group roles in projects…

Rock Stars, Eggs, and Teaching

What really counts in the “egg drop challenge” is what happens after an egg breaks…

Building Bridgemakers (Excerpt from Hip Hop Genius 2.0)

When Walter arrived at St. Paul, Minnesota’s High School for the Recording Arts (HSRA), he was already an activist…

Liberate Your Curriculum

A liberated curriculum is a curriculum that represents, elevates, honors, and integrates all young peoples’ cultural and linguistic backgrounds and cultural ways of being.

What is PBL?

A key question for PBL educators: how will we know if we are doing project-based learning well?

Welcome to Unboxed Issue 22

It’s got me thinking about how much of my media diet consists of stories of either “well-intentioned people who ended up making things worse for interesting reasons,” or “ill-intentioned people who made things worse for predictable reasons,” and how little time I spend with stories of people succeeding at making some bit of the world a bit more fair, humane, and livable for everybody in it.

Welcome to Unboxed Issue 21

Before 2020, you could have been forgiven for thinking that school buildings were an anachronism.

The Six Equity Stances of Liberatory Project-Based Learning

The Six Equity Stances of Liberatory Project-Based Learning creates a way to identify, challenge, and critique the social forces that reproduce inequity and oppression.

What an English Language Learner Coordinator Does

Schools are full of adults who aren’t classroom teachers, but a classroom teacher can go through their entire career without really…

Learning is a Full-Body Sport, So Take Care of Your Full Self

Are you supporting your wellness as we transition out of the hardest school year in history?

Honors Pathways and “Small-ologies”

The honors biology pathways allowed students to develop relationships and no part of school felt more absent during distance learning than relationships.

Increase Student Ownership with a Student-Facing Project Map

A PBL scaffolding tool for communicating the project road map

When Place Shapes the Product

Genesee Community Charter School is centering students in a place-based curriculum provides them with a deeper understanding of…

Empathy Interviews Protocol

Learn about the problem from a user’s perspective to gain a deeper understanding of a user’s experience of the issue you are working on

Student-Led Conferences: A How-to Guide

Traditional parent-teacher conferences often only passively include the student, if at all. Student-led conferences are just the opposite.

A Community Committed to Deeper Learning

Almost exactly one year into the global pandemic, the deeper learning community gathered virtually…

Glossary — Issue 20

Designing the Largest Classroom: Online Learning at Scale

We need to assess our resources before we can design online experiences. The online classroom…

Making Game Controllers Accessible to Everyone

Teachers Corey Clark, Curtis Taylor & Matt Gottilla designed the AbleGamerz Project…

Radical Self-Love: A 3rd Grade Project Story

Our encouraging words, listening ears, hugs and high fives make a big difference in the…

Serving English Language Learners Starts by Serving Teachers

I stood in front of the classroom, testing guidelines in hand, as 17 sixth-grade studen…

Morning Meeting: Rooting the Day in Community and Social Justice

Mara Gonzales ditched the “Would You Rather” questions in her Morning Meetings and now starts the day with discussions about recognizing privilege…

Improvement as a Journey

Every trip begins with a desire to get from where we are now to where we want to be…

Welcome to Unboxed Issue 20

For teachers, the end of every year feels like the conclusion of a quest: you’re physically and mentally exhausted, you feel deeply bonded with your traveling companions, and as you look back you recall your feats of courage, dexterity, and cunning, as well as your questionable choices, missed opportunities, and all the people you wish you had done more to help.

Category: Uncategorized