The social media environment has changed in the past 5 years. Blogging used to be more of a thing, but now podcasts and Twitter threads and so on have often served as more effective (or convenient) way to share ideas with a broader audience. I have had the pleasure to join several podcasts over the past year on a variety of topics. I am sharing them here in reverse chronological order. Rebuilding after 2020-21 with the Human Restoration Project Episode description: “In our conversation, Dr. Horn and I discuss how teachers can wrap up the 2020-2021 school year through reflection. How can we bui ..read more

It’s that time of year — I get to brag on my amazing students and mentees for their important research. (I am going to focus on journal articles here, but if you want to see more about what we are finding on the National Science Foundation-sponsored project, my lab’s major current research project, Supporting Instructional Growth in Mathematics study (Project SIGMa), you can look here.) For those of you not familiar with my lab, we study teachers’ sensemaking from an anthropological perspective. We blend a mix of methods to really dig into how teachers (mostly math teachers, mostly teaching ..read more

About 5 years ago, I wrote a blog post calling out the problematics of Teach Like a Champion (TLAC). It gained a bit of traction, started some conversations about why this very controlling pedagogy was becoming so popular in schools that served primarily Black and brown children. After this past summer of 2020, with the murders of George Floyd, Breana Taylor, Amaud Arbery and so many others, the Black Lives Matter movement became re-centered on the conversation about anti-Black racism in the U.S. and its all too frequent lethal consequences. In June, I participated in #Strike4BlackLives, led ..read more

Maxine Greene, a renowned philosopher at Columbia Teachers College, loved to teach. At 93 years old, she still held seminars in her apartment. During one of these sessions, she asked her students, “What is the purpose of education?” She listened as they debated and discussed. Then, drawing on the wisdom of her decades of attention to such important questions, she shared, saying that, in her view, education’s purpose is to help students to meaningfully put together three words: What could be? I heard this story yesterday from one of the students who had attended that class. It remind ..read more

Humor serves many functions in my life. Noticing the absurd. Playing with unexpected associations and enjoying the surprise. Sharing inside jokes with friends. Resisting, venting, and gaining temporary relief about abuses of power by belittling them with laughter. I am obviously not unique in this. Humor is a crucial part of being human in a complex (and often ridiculous) world. But humor –– especially in certain forms  –– is not always welcome in school. What does this mean for students’ expressions of their humanity? Think about the well known class clown archetype. Some educators ..read more