Teaching is a profession with an exceedingly short runway: each year schools hire new teachers and ask them to supervise a classroom and implement a curriculum from day one.

When smart phones saturated the market a decade ago and Facebook reached its dominance about five years later, the way the current generation of students interact and learn changed.

“Growth mindset” has received a great deal of interest since Carol Dweck, a Professor of Psychology at Stanford University, began writing on this topic in the last dozen years.

There’s a never-ending battle in many of the classrooms I have visited throughout my career: squirmy children, who obviously need to move, are often asked to sit in their chairs for long periods without interruption.

Anyone who is in a position of evaluating writing samples knows there’s much more to good writing than using proper grammar and correct punctuation . . .

When Winston Churchill was a 15 year-old student at a British boarding school, he wasn’t doing very well. Following a particularly bad school year in 1889-90, his mother, Jennie Churchill, wrote him a letter…

“To become skilled at almost any activity requires extensive and continual practice, whether the skills are physical or cognitive in nature. Just as an athlete’s performance diminishes during the off-season if he or she practices less, students’ reading performance falls off during the summer months if they don’t read.”