How To Help Struggling Students Catch Up And Keep Up Even If They Are Unmotivated, Don’t Do Homework, And Won’t Come In For Extra Help.

One of the main reasons students struggle in school is that they do not do their work. Period. So what do you do with students who are unmotivated, won’t turn in their homework, won’t come in for extra support, and won’t access any of the supports you’ve put into place for them?This was my struggle about mid-way […]

How To Know Exactly What Feedback To Give Every Single Time

Have you ever gone into a classroom where the instruction was soooo bad, you weren’t sure where to start? Me too. In fact, I used to really struggle to give teachers – particularly struggling teachers – meaningful feedback, especially when there was so much about their practice that needed work. How do you give struggling teachers feedback that […]

How to Support Your Struggling Learners DURING Class Without Creating Separate Lessons

One of the biggest mistakes I see people make when developing a support plan for students is that they create a separate lesson plan for struggling learners, one for on-level learners, and one for students who need more challenge. That’s too much work. Supporting struggling learners shouldn’t mean that you exhaust yourself in the process. If you […]

How To Overcome The 2 Most Common Forms Of Resistance During Feedback Conversations

Whenever I teach our Feedback Framework, I always get this question: “That’s great for most teachers but does this work with really resistant teachers?” I get it. There are some teachers who are so resistant it seems that they won’t act on your feedback no matter what you do. Well, there are no magic words you can say […]

The Anatomy of a Good Feedback Conversation

You’ve finally found it . . . You see, I often get asked for a script for conducting feedback conversations with teachers. And while I can’t give you a word-by-word script for each feedback conversation you face this year, I can give you a Feedback Conversation Framework that we teach here at Mindsteps. It is pretty failsafe and […]

How to Turn Your Worst Performing Students into Superstars in Just One Semester

Previously, I talked about how I discovered a “red flag” system as a way of helping me offer support for students early, before they were caught in a free-fall of failure and had given up. (You can read about my system here). It’s just one part of the Student SUCCESS Plan. So you know already that […]

That time I gave really bad feedback…

I welcomed Laura into my office and offered her a seat at the small conference table across from my desk. I sat down next to her and opened my observation notes. Smiling, I thanked her for coming in and handed her a written summary of the main points I wanted to discuss. One-by-one, I reviewed those points, […]

How to cut your student failures in half

Note: This is Part III of a series. Read Part I and Part II  We’ve always been taught to wait until students start failing before coming up with an intervention approach. But, if you wait until students begin to fail to intervene, you’re too late.Here’s why:Students who are failing are often in fight, flight, or […]

The First Discipline of Buildership – Feedback

Don’t you hate it when you are giving a teacher feedback and . . . Crickets. No response. Nothing. And what’s worse, you just know that the teacher will ignore your feedback and not make any changes in the classroom. Total. Waste. Of. Time.Well what you might not realize is that there is a reason for that reaction and it’s not what you […]

How to Prevent Failure

[This article is Part II of a series: Read Part I: Why Remediation is keeping your students behind here]Previously, I told you about how frustrated I was with remediation and how I realized that the reason that I was so frustrated was because I was focusing on remediation which responds to failure rather than preventing […]