Part of our work in Bend, Oregon is piloting a new social studies curriculum, one that we are co-creating with the teachers. At the 4th grade level, the students study the 19th Amendment and the women’s suffrage movement in the U.S. and England. Many of the topics, like this one, I would say aren’t immediately engaging to students of this age—religious freedom, women’s suffrage, child labor laws—so much of our work is finding the texts that best present the content, and then finding ways to teach the texts in ways that captivate the students.

Finding the Right Book

The principal of the school, Beth Martin, often asks me how I choose the books to use in curriculums, workshops, or classrooms. Over the years I’ve internalized several criteria which include art, story, content, and concept.

1. Art and Illustrations

For children’s books I first look at the art and graphic design. Art is, of course, subjective, so it’s kind of a gut call whether the book is visually appealing or not. If the illustrations feel like they were made “for educational purposes” or the book feels overly dated we put it aside. For instance, we decided not to use this book, Tools, that is an anchor text in the EL curriculum. Not only are the photographs dated, but many of them aren’t culturally appropriate.

Art and graphic design do matter. When I first began teaching high school English, I remember having conversations with my colleague in the English department, John Hanlon. When we chose which books to purchase for the school, we looked at the cover, the font, the quality of pages—the book as object itself was important (I remember we chose the Vintage edition of many books back in the 90s).

When we offer students books with compelling illustrations, like those of Rafael López, we send the message that the book itself does matter.

2. Story

It may seem obvious that the story the book tells is important, but it’s remarkable how many children’s story books have no narrative at all. The ones I quickly dismiss are books that seem overly didactic. Books like the following:

I certainly agree that themes like friendship, community, and diversity are important, I just don’t want to spend time in the classroom on decontextualized themes.

When I’m looking for books I try to see through the eyes of students at that age. Many children’s books seem to not be written with the kids in mind. There are other authors that are masters at connecting to the lived worlds of children—writers like Mo Willems, Oliver Jeffers, Jon Klassen, and Jacqueline Woodson.

3. Perspective

In all the books I select I want them to tell stories both through art and text in different ways, representing different perspectives, and ways of seeing the world. I could have used the word “diversity” of authors here, but I think perspective encompasses more possibility in what might be achieved in book form. Perspective includes stories told by a wide range of storytellers from different age groups, orientations, and cultures. Perspective also includes new ways of seeing the form of the book itself—with characters breaking the 4th wall speaking directly to the reader or picture books with no pictures.

4. Content

When teaching a subject other than Language Arts, I ensure the book dives deeply into the content that I want students to know. This may seem obvious, but in working with schools, I’m often shocked by how many books based on a particular subject area have very little content in them, even books chosen for for often adopted curriculums.

When we built a unit around the “lifecycle of the bee” I read dozens of children’s books about bees. Few of them actually communicated very much about the biology of the bees themselves. I’ve seen this with books about nearly every subject, but particularly in units focusing on weather, oceans, and outer space.

The perfect book combines all three elements: illustration, story, and content. For instance the book we did use as our core text in the bee unit, Honeybee, by Candace Fleming and Eric Rohmann tells the story of honeybee from birth to death. The illustrations are beautiful and each page describes an aspect of a bee’s life.

5. Concept

All of the above might make the book suitable for a read aloud, or serve an anchor text for teaching the content, but the real magic happens when a book resonates at a conceptual level. As I read, I look for elements of the book that will offer a conceptual centerpiece to build an experience for the classroom community. This is probably my “purple pedagogy” as described in my post a few weeks ago. In addition to education, my academic background is in both the study of literature and in theater production. As a theater director, when we read a play, we’re looking for the big idea that will guide the conceptual thrust of the production. In Hamlet for instance if we focus on his inability to take action—to revenge his father—then that concept informs the choices the actors, the costume, the lighting, and the set designers will make.

At times the guiding conceptual ideas are right on the surface of a book, even in the title. In Jacqueline Woodson’s book The Year We Learned to Fly, she describes how difficult it was for a brother and sister to move from one neighborhood to another. The children, through their resilience and with the help of their mother’s advice, learn to fly.

After reading this book, we’ve asked students to think about “When do you fly?” The flying metaphor can carry us through the year by coming back to question such as:

• How can we fly together as a community?

• When we experience adversity or challenges, how can we fly above them and succeed?

• How can we help each other to fly?

I also like the book because it best encapsulates my hopes for our classroom community. I want us to fly together; I want us to lift off the ground a little bit, away from the everyday doldrums of an education institution; and I hope that we can create such beautiful and compelling work together that we will leave the classroom feeling elevated and inspired.

Building Experiences from Books

This brings us back to our study of the 19th Amendment. In researching this topic there is actually a wealth of high-quality text for students. One possibility is to do a biographical study of different influential figures during the women’s suffrage movement.

The Bold and the Brave is a wonderful overview of the various people who contributed to the movement.

And it can be supplemented with books that dive more deeply into individual figures.

The book we landed on for our core text was How Women Won The Vote: Alice Paul, Lucy Burns, and their Big Idea by Susan Cambell Baartoletti and illustrated by Ziyue Chen.

It is both a biography of Alice Paul and Lucy Burns and it also tells the story of the 1913 Women’s Suffrage Parade and it was this that caught our attention.

The challenge is finding books that don't just teach information but invite students into an experience. When we found How Women Won the Vote, we realized the parade at the center of the story might become an experience of its own.

In my next post we’ll do a deep dive into this book and I’ll tell the story of how the 4th graders at North Star Elementary School designed and led their own parade.

Part of the magic of Mary Oliver’s poetry is the way we read one of her poems and then suddenly encounter a phrase that cuts to our core. In one of her most quoted poems, “The Summer Day,” we reach the end of the poem, after examining a grasshopper, with the astounding question:

Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

Although this poem is her most well-known, many of her poems embrace a similar structure—a kind of wandering and observing in nature followed by a piercing insight that lifts us up and speaks to our larger existence beyond one particular moment.

This has always been one of the great joys for me of reading literature. We’re reading along and suddenly we come across a sentence or a phrase that makes it all worth it. Perhaps this is why I love Shakespeare’s plays so much. He, like Mary Oliver, consistently delivers poetic insights. One of my favorite moments in Hamlet occurs in Act I, when Hamlet responds to the appearance of his father’s ghost with the observation:

“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy”

These nuggets of wisdom are why I read with pen in hand, marking each resonant line I come across in a book of poetry or a novel.

A Calendar of Wisdom

Leo Tolstoy seemed to have something similar in mind when he assembled and wrote A Calendar of Wisdom at the beginning of the 20th century. Each page of his book is a day of the year. He collects quotes that speak to him and then offers his own insights about his selected quotes. He might at one point quote Ralph Waldo Emerson:

The joy of your spirit is the indication of your strength.

And then on the same page offers his own response:

You must believe in the possibility of happiness in order to be happy.

Tolstoy’s book reminded me of when, in high school, I first read the transcendentalists—primarily Thoreau, Emerson, and Whitman—marking insights along the way, many of which have remained with me throughout my life.

Braiding Sweetgrass

I’d bought Tolstoy’s Calendar of Wisdom many years ago and it gathered dust on my shelf, largely forgotten. Then recently I was teaching Braiding Sweetgrass, Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teaching of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer. To prepare, I began reading her book, pen in hand, considering what sections to focus on for class. I found myself underlining sentence after sentence. I thought about the fact that, in classrooms, we often teach students to “mark up text” and emphasize “choosing importance,” yet we rarely talk about the deeper purpose behind those acts. Underlining text is a precious act, a conversation between the reader and the writer. It is a response, saying I hear you, this means something to me, and I want to acknowledge it, keep it, and remember it in the future.1

In reading Braiding Sweetgrass, I found myself on a journey to understand what Kimmerer refers to as the “indigenous wisdom” within the book. When I read any book, I’m looking for what wisdom the author might offer—I’m considering what I want to take with me from the experience of visiting another person’s mind.

All of these ideas, however, are very abstract. I’m not sure if I was quite there as a high school student, and most of our students aren’t even close to wanting to read for wisdom (or even wanting to read for entertainment for that matter). I began to think about a concrete way for students to notice moments in a text that truly speak to them, beyond the “reading strategies” like making “text-to-self connections” that are often taught as quick activities that rarely help students understand the deeper reasons behind why we, as human beings, read books.

As we explain in our book A Reason to Read, when we approach a text, we look for ways to actually do something concrete with the text. As much as we’d like students to read “for the sake of reading,” as difficult as that always might have been for many students in the past, it is even more challenging now with the ubiquity of screens, as evidenced by what the New York Times recently highlighted as a “generation-long decline” in reading scores.

A Book of Wisdom

Before beginning to read Braiding Sweetgrass, I told students that we were going to create an individual and collective “Book of Wisdom” modeled after Tolstoy’s calendar. As they read the book, they would “underline any lines, phrases, or even words that speak to you.” I shared what this looked like in my own reading of the chapter, “Asters and Goldenrod.” Near the end of this chapter Kimmerer writes, “To see if in some way, the songs and our stories could help people fall in love with the world again.” What strikes me about this quote, and Braiding Sweetgrass in general, is that in writing a science book about biology, she writes about the beauty of nature and falling in love with the natural world (which reminds me again of Dan Bisaccio’s teaching story from my last article, A Purple Pedagogy).

As students search for quotes, I explained that it is important to select the quote and to explain their thinking behind it. When we listen to others’ interpretations, it deepens our own by offering us another way of seeing the world. It’s also important to put our thinking into words. As E.M. Forster famously wrote about the process of writing in his book, Aspects of a Novel:

How can I tell what I think till I see what I say?

We see this in Tolstoy’s A Calendar of Wisdom. Tolstoy first selects quotes others have written (from such varied sources as Lao-Tzu, Marcus Aurelius, the Bible, the Talmud, Lucy Mallory, and Confucius). He follows each entry with his own response—his own reason for selecting the quote and why it speaks to him.

We often think of students’ responses to quotes as dry and analytical (think of weekly “response” papers ubiquitous in college classrooms). Tolstoy shows how poetic and insightful our own writing can be in response to others—we can be jazz musicians, playing off an original theme, offering our own “words of wisdom.” And this is precisely the goal: for reading to inspire students’ writing—to move them beyond “doing homework” and writing a response because it is assigned—to a space where they are inspired to write their own ideas, riffing off the words and ideas of others.

The Final Product

At the end of the unit, students browse their collection of quotes in their “Book of Wisdom” and identify a single quote—it could be their own or one from Braiding Sweetgrass—they want to contribute to a collective “Book of Wisdom.”

While reading selections from Braiding Sweetgrass, we also undertook a photography project capturing black-and-white images of the natural world in response to the question posed in the book: “Why is the world so beautiful?” The students paired their chosen quotes with black-and-white photographs (and in some cases took entirely new photographs to accompany their chosen “words of wisdom”).

We then collated all the photographs and text into a shared Book of Wisdom.

Although we’ve only created Books of Wisdom in response to a particular text, I can imagine a class creating a Book of Wisdom for an entire year of reading.

We’ve led this experience as a workshop for conferences and for schools. The examples below are from a Deep Dive at a Deeper Learning conference in San Diego, U.S.; The New School of Thought conference in São Paulo, Brazil; and for teachers at Hope High School in Providence, RI.

The Process

Words of Wisdom is an approach for engaging with a text on a deep level, inspired by Leo Tolstoy’s A Calendar of Wisdom. As you read, you will collect words, phrases, sentences, or paragraphs that you feel are worth holding onto.

Materials

• Notebook or journal

• Focal text or book

• Pen, pencil, or highlighter

1. Read and Underline

As you read, underline (or mark up in a way that you prefer) passages that:

• seem wise to you

• speak to you in some way

• change how you see something

• seem important for the overall text, perhaps summarizing big ideas

You may select a sentence, phrase, word, or even paragraph.

2. Respond

After selecting a quote, write a short response explaining why you chose it. It doesn’t have to be purely an analytical response. Your response may be poetic, or the quote might be a springboard for your own original ideas or observations about the world.

3. Build Your “Book of Wisdom”

As you collect quotes, have in mind an overall “Book of Wisdom” that is uniquely yours. Feel free to add doodles, sketches, or even printed photographs to your book. Think of it as an “art object” you are developing over time.

4. A Collective Book of Wisdom

At the end of the project, select one quotation and response from your book to share with the class and add to a community “Book of Wisdom.”

Download the process (and revise for your own classroom).

Recently, I came across a list the drummer Questlove put together for Rolling Stone—his top 100 Prince songs. Having been a Prince fan since middle school when he released 1999, I opened the list expecting the usual hits. What I found instead was a selection of many cuts I’d never heard, along with Questlove’s reflections on how the songs shaped him, his listening experiences with Prince in his younger days, and how he sees Prince’s impact across multiple genres of music.

This week, while walking my dog, I worked my way through Questlove’s list, reading every entry and listening to each song in order counting down from 100. So, on the 10th anniversary of his death, Prince has been on my mind. As I was thinking about what to write here, I realized that Prince has had an influence on my teaching, perhaps quietly, behind-the-scenes, but an influence none the less.

Prince’s Unique Culture

When you listen to the song Purple Music, you’ll hear Prince experimenting with the idea of a new sound he describes with only one word, “purple.” (perhaps influenced by Miles Davis’s “blue” period in jazz most pronounced on his album, Kind of Blue). Prince’s purple sound would come to fruition in the movie and its even more influential soundtrack, Purple Rain. Questlove notes that Prince’s sound “isn’t funk, rock, jazz, or fusion. It isn’t pop or Latin. It’s just Prince.”

It wasn’t only Prince’s sound that was unique. He developed his own lexicography replacing words with icons (for instance the song “I Would Die 4 U” and most notably his own name).

In addition, in the realm of fashion, his outfits were all custom designed, and strikingly original. He explains his approach to style:

“Style is not lusting after someone because they’re cool, style is loving yourself till everyone else does too.”

In all his creative efforts—his forays into filmmaking, album cover art, even in building his own architectural world at Paisley Park Studios—he created a unique and cohesive culture that infused all of his work.

A Unique Classroom Culture

At the center of Prince’s work is a defining concept: “purple music.” What would it mean for our classrooms to be shaped by a similarly clear idea, so that when students enter the space, they know they’re not just “doing school”?1

Typically when we reflect on a classroom’s culture it is defined by either the subject-matter or the teacher’s reputation. We all can remember entering the dreaded “Mr. Myers” classroom who had a reputation for being the meanest teacher in the school, or we had to go to American History class where we would spend the year methodically working our way through the district-required textbook. Either way we knew we were at school doing the usual school business, nothing inspired, nothing to make us want to get out of bed and go to school every day.

Taking a lesson from Prince we might consider the questions: How can we, as teachers, create our own “purple music”? How can we intentionally design classrooms that are distinct and lead students to the heart of the disciplines we teach?

Here are a few teachers with answers.

1. The Shadows of Fergus: A Guiding Concept

Perhaps one of the best example I’ve seen of creating a clear, guiding concept for the classroom is in a beginning of the year routine. Adrian writes about his first day of school with his 5th graders:

The first day of school for all students! When students arrived, they found on their tables a one-page explanation of the origins of the name of our classroom. We read W.B. Yeats’ poem, Who Goes With Fergus? and spent the morning discussing its meaning, metaphors, and how it is connected to our classroom, The Shadows of Fergus.

First, I love that his classroom has a name, The Shadows of Fergus, and that this name has a purpose behind it that defines his classroom’s culture, which is, at the essence, “to be your full, authentic self.” Adrian also builds his classroom culture through a shared close reading of Yeat’s poem, modeling his high expectations for students to bring their full selves to complex texts.

2. Raggedy Ann and Andy: The Passionate Teacher

My first foray into public education was as a little 1st grader walking into the classroom of Mrs. Patty Deig. The room was full of decorations of Raggedy Ann and Andy. Raggedy Ann was a doll from 1915 that then became the lead character in a series of books, the first of which Raggedy Ann Stories, was published in 1918. First off, let me tell you I wasn’t into Raggedy Ann. I went to school that first day with my Spider-Man lunch box and, as a first grader in 1977, I was obsessed with a movie that came out the previous Spring, Star Wars. And yet Mrs. Deig’s passion for Raggedy Ann was infectious. She’d begin the day at the piano every morning and we’d sing along to a series of songs. Then we’d transition to the rug for read-alouds. Often the books she selected were from the Raggedy Ann series.

Now if this feels dated to you I can tell you that it felt that way to me at the time as well. But that’s not really the point. Even though I personally didn’t have much inherent interest in these books, her passion for reading, and centering her classroom on books she cared about, showed all of us what it means to be a reader. Yes, she taught us phonics and how to read as well. But it was her passion for the act of reading itself and how she modeled that in the overall classroom’s zeitgeist that showed us how we too could be passionate readers.

One of the books that was the earliest influences in my teaching was Robert Fried’s The Passionate Teacher. Fried writes,

To be a passionate teacher is to be someone in love with a field of knowledge, deeply stirred by issues and ideas that challenge our world, drawn to the dilemmas and potentials of the young people who come into class each day—or captivated by all of these.

More recently, here on substack, Jared Fox has begun a series of posts about “Passion-Driven Pedagogy.” This series, just beginning, is meant to, in his words,

“encourage educators to find the space and courage to bring what they are most interested in into their classroom. For me, one example of this meant teaching about the history and science of New York City’s water supply and waterways—topics that allowed me to share my own love of nature alongside my students.”

Most importantly, as these examples demonstrate, passionate ideas also should be at the very center of the discipline, what Fried describes as being “in love with the field of knowledge.”

A professor of history at my college was in love with baseball. His lectures on Roman History were often peppered with tangents about baseball, not at all related to the subject-matter at hand. Passion for passion’s sake isn’t the goal here. It’s using our passion for a subject area to create our own “purple music,” a guiding concept that signals to students what is at the heart of our teaching and why we care.

3. Dan the Science Man: Fostering a Love of Nature

Biology teacher Dan Bisaccio’s classroom was base camp. His students knew they wouldn’t be there long. It was a space for gathering up everyone to head out on an adventure. The adventures consisted of research projects in the woods around the high school. Dan partnered with the Smithsonian Museum to monitor a permanent biodiversity plot near the high school as part of the SIMAB program (Smithsonian Institution’s Monitoring and Assessment of Biodiversity). SIMAB is a program built for scientists doing actual scientific work. Every year, Dan trained his students in how scientists track biodiversity by working alongside them in the woods. He also took his students on trips around the world, working on parallel biodiversity sites in Costa Rica, Belize, Saba, Jamaica, and Mexico (I worked with him and his students at El Eden Bio-Reserve in Quintana Roo, Yucatan).

Dan’s “purple music” was one phrase he told me when I visited his classroom. This was when the “standards movement” was just beginning in the late 90s and disciplines were defined by seemingly infinite lists of standard skills students should master in every discipline. He said,

I have one standard, for students to love nature.

For students to love nature, Dan realized that they need to have a deep understanding of how things work in the natural world and engage in the work of actual scientists.2 You can see that from the photos that Dan has a great passion for nature. Even in retirement, he leads field walks in his small town of Troy, New Hampshire, open to anyone who wants to join.

Your Purple Music

Prince teaches us through his concept of “purple music” that by bringing disparate elements together, by experimentation and fine-tuning his sound, and by working through multiple modalities, he could create something unique.

The examples I’ve offered show the same is possible for our teaching.

For Adrian, it’s the idea of becoming your full, authentic self through language and literature. For Mrs. Deig, it was a lived love of reading. For Dan, it was a ongoing relationship to the natural world beyond the classroom walls.

What strikes me is that all of these examples emerge from finding the center of the content we’re teaching and building immersive learning experiences from that center.

To find our own purple music we might ask ourselves:

• What do I want students to understand deeply about this subject by the end of the year?

• What in my content are is really worth caring about?

• As a community, we are spending many hours of our lives together. What is most important in our shared space? What really matters?

When designing a unit Rob Fried asks us to consider our personal stake. He asks, “What would you say to students about why this unit is personally meaningful to you?” Similarly in Understanding by Design, authors Wiggins and McTighe encourage us to consider the enduring understanding of what we are teaching—focusing on what the foundation is for the content we are teaching. This is the work of finding our own “purple music,” the defining idea at the center of our teaching.

Thanks for reading to the end. Enjoy some Purple Music! (and please note that many of Prince’s songs aren’t appropriate to play in classrooms, including the song “Purple Music!”)

My high school students didn’t always have time to do the homework. As an English literature teacher, it was common practice to assign a chapter of homework every night, and, at the time not knowing any better, I did. A chapter of most books takes some time to read, even for the most fluent of readers. My students had after-school jobs, sports, theater or simply lives at home that made it difficult to complete their homework. I’ve written before about how we should rethink how we give homework in schools—but at the time my solution (inspired by my then professor Eileen Landay), was to focus on a small portion of text. Whether my students completed the assigned reading or not, I wanted them all to be engaged and to participate in the day’s class.

Since those early teaching days, I’ve used this approach of focusing on a small portion of text in numerous settings including classroom visits, teacher institutes, and workshops. There are several different “deep reading” techniques we’ve used to analyze text including Tip of the Iceberg. Framing Text, inspired by visual artist Cynthia Weiss’s activity of seeing the world through frames, is one of our most powerful approaches.

Engaging with Complex Texts

We’ve often used this approach with particularly complex texts. Working with high school students in St. Paul, Minnesota, we introduced them to Vladimir Nabokov’s Speak Memory. After working with the opening of the book, one student said, “Wow, now I really want to read this book!” and let me tell you, Nabokov’s opening doesn’t inspire most students to want to read more!

The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for (at some forty-five hundred heartbeats an hour).

At the Habla Teacher Institute we chose as our anchor text, Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes. Donald King, former Artistic Director of the Providence Black Repertory Theatre, said, “I never liked that book. I’ll even venture to say I hated it when we read parts of it in college. That approach to just the first paragraph made me see the intricacies, possibilities, and even beauty in the text.”

The Process

Read more

Welcome to The Teacher Toolbox. In this space, I’ll collect all of the activities and strategies I’ve developed, adapted, and found for teaching and learning.

As I post new ideas, I’ll add them to this page for easy access in the future. Feel free to bookmark it and return whenever you need fresh inspiration.

This Toolbox is designed as a supplement to the two books Eileen Landay and I have written. The first, A Reason to Read: Linking Literacy and the Arts, was published by Harvard Education Press in 2012 and examines the theory and research behind our work while also offering a host of activities. The second, ENGAGE: Creative Strategies for Teaching and Learning, published in 2022 is more of a handbook featuring over a hundred activities, strategies, and thinking routines. Here I’ll be offering completely new activities as well as further developing ideas we wrote about previously.

The activities featured here can be adapted to any age of learners. Most of my work as a teacher is in the areas of literacy development, language arts, and the arts, although more recently I’ve been working more in the sciences as well. Let me know which activities here have been helpful to you and your students, and what you’d like more of.

All the best,

Kurt

Building Community and Beginnings

I generally don’t like building community activities for the sake of building community itself—icebreakers that are fun but don’t really move our content teaching forward. I’ve found that we can achieve both at the same time. Here are some ways to begin the school year, a unit, or a course you are teaching.

• Rapid Bios— a quick, but meaningful way of introducing everyone in the room

• The One Word Wall—a solution for those empty walls and a fantastic way to build a sense of community and classroom ownership (via Tom Rademacher)

• 10 Words—What are our first impressions of a given topic?

• Sing to Me—building community with a complex text

• Inquiry Walls—designing paths of inquiry to guide learning (see this in practice with a unit on the Europa Clipper mission)

Comprehension and Content

Approaches for helping students read deeply and understand content.

• Knowledge Check—integrating low-stakes content assessments into our daily teaching

• Yes, and . . . —helping students to remember what they’ve learned

• Brain, Book, Buddy—a classroom routine for remembering content (from Blake Harvard via The Bell Ringer)

• Research Boards—giving students agency to learn content independently

• Tip of the Iceberg—a strategy for reading deeply beneath the surface

• Marking Up Text 2.0—an new approach to “marking up text,” building on ideas from our book Engage

• Framing Text—an invitation for all students to access complex texts

Exhibiting Student Work and Culminating Events

Here I’ll share ways that students can demonstrate their understanding of content. We’ll also look at how we can create spaces for students to show their original ideas and work.

• Infographics—an artful approach for sharing complex processes

• A Book of Wisdom—building a book of insights from our readings

Every week I visited our local comic book store, sorting through hundreds of used comics and purchasing two dollars’ worth at twenty cents each. In my bedroom, I had a poster of Bilbo Baggins confronting the dragon Smaug from the Rankin/Bass animated The Hobbit. We played a variety of role-playing games that had recently been invented, including Dungeons & Dragons, Marvel Super Heroes, and Gamma World. It is no coincidence that Stranger Things took place in southern Indiana, the same place where I grew up, and that the lead characters in the series graduated from high school the same year I did: 1989.

And then I went to high school.

Not wanting to be seen as a “nerd,” I put all of this aside. I stopped collecting comics, stopped reading them, and stopped playing games. As I grew older, though, I didn’t stop entering imaginary worlds; they simply became the worlds of “respected” literature, from Shakespeare to Faulkner to Morrison to Márquez.

Game of Thrones Teacher Night

At our school Habla, we had a group of young teachers that were devoted fans of Game of Thrones. They would all gather every week for a viewing party. I joined them for the final episode, and being the oldest guy in the room, they asked if I had ever played Dungeons & Dragons.

I confessed that I had played in middle school, and they asked if I’d run a game for them. I hadn’t played in years, so I bought a Starter Set, and we began.

For those unfamiliar with D&D, the game is run by a person called the DM, or Dungeon Master. Their job is to build the world the other characters will inhabit and to guide them through it—creating an open world of NPCs (non-player characters), quests, and challenges. Everyone else creates a character with a backstory and personality. Although there are mechanics to the game, it is essentially about building an imaginary world together.

With a group of educators—mainly English and art teachers—playing D&D together, we became interested in how we might bring this idea of world-building into our classrooms.

Ian Wiggins, one of the teachers, taught English language learners and created an experiment in his classroom based on the premise that students collaboratively building an imaginary world would generate more written and oral language than a conventional ELL curriculum. He taught students who were just beginning to learn English. Rather than beginning with the usual basic grammar curriculum, he began by building a world with his students.

Ian explains:

After we finished our exploration of imagined worlds in film and fiction, we started to think about how we might create our own. We began with the fundamentals of what we know to be true: the land, geography, native plants, climates, animals, and how those things shape the cultures, languages, and beliefs of the people who inhabit those lands. Then we set out to design our own worlds, starting with geography, climate, plants, and animals. From there we asked ourselves: What might they eat? How might they dress? What gods, monsters, heroes, or stories might fill their world, imaginations, and religions?

The semester culminated in an exhibition in which students presented their imaginary worlds to their families.

Kids on Bikes

During the pandemic, we had to shut down our school in Mexico. With the unused building, we gathered a few families together to create classroom pods. The parents shared the teaching load, and my area was 1st- and 4th-grade English language arts.

Given how strange those times were, I didn’t want to teach a conventional language arts curriculum: read a book, discuss it, and write. Our D&D gaming group had branched into other role-playing games—games in which you build a world and inhabit different characters within it.

I saw the potential of RPGs for language development, particularly because the 4th graders were a diverse group in terms of English proficiency.

With Ian’s teaching as inspiration, I proposed to the students the idea of basing the class on an RPG and asked what kind of world they would like to spend the semester in: fantasy, science fiction, cute and cozy, folklore, mystery, frontier, post-apocalyptic.

Most people only know D&D, but there are over 13,000 published role-playing games, so we could almost certainly find one to match their interests.

The Netflix series Stranger Things was popular at the time, so they asked whether that was a possible theme. Game designers Jonathan Gilmour and Doug Levandowski created Kids on Bikes, a role-playing game inspired by Stranger Things and the 1980s influences behind it—films like E.T., Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and The Goonies.

Building a Town

At the beginning of the Kids on Bikes rulebook, in a section called “World Building,” the authors offer this prompt:

Kids on Bikes should probably be set in a small town at any point in history
before everyone had a video camera in their pocket at all times. It should
probably be a place remote enough that the rest of the world just doesn’t
care about it but close enough that black helicopters can be there within
hours. Everyone in the town probably knows everyone else — for better
or for worse. People look out for each other, but rumor also travels fast. Ultimately, though, this is all up to you.

They then offer prompts to help the group create their own imagined town:

1. Our adventure takes place in… (name of town and state)

2. The industry our location is best known for is…

3. Our town is famous for…

4. Our town is infamous for...

5. Economically, our town is… (prospering, floundering, stagnant, etc.)

6. A notable local organization is…

7. A notable local landmark is…

8. Our school’s sports team is called…

I gave the class these prompts, and they collaboratively went to work. Their job was to build a map of their town and keep a town chronicle.

The town chronicle was the class’s shared responsibility. They chose a town historian for each session, a role that rotated from class to class. The chronicle was paired with a Google Slides deck that gave students space to add images and media that extended their world-building. For instance, there was a research laboratory in their town, Whitewood, called The Lida Corporation.

Creating Characters

The students then created the characters they wanted to play. Kids on Bikes sets up character creation with the following paragraph:

The core of any RPG is the character you’ll be embodying. You and your GM [Game Master] should work together to agree upon a character you’ll be excited to play. One who reminds you of yourself in important ways — but who also is different
enough from you to be an escape from the real world.

The game then walks the players through a detailed character creation process involving selecting personality traits, motivations, fears, relationships to other characters at the table, skills, and even what they have in their backpacks.

Each character also had their own journal. This was an English class, after all, and I wanted to ensure that students were consistently writing in English. The town chronicle belonged to the whole class. The character journal ensured that every student tracked their own progress through the adventure while allowing for deeper character development as the story unfolded.

Once we finished sketching the basics of their characters, I asked students to write a character profile in their journals. As we all know, getting 4th graders to write extensively can be challenging.

The students in this class wrote silently for the final thirty minutes and then took their journals home to continue writing.

The Adventure Begins

Each class became a day in their characters’ lives in Whitewood.

They began by reading the Whitewood News, a newspaper I created for each session with the latest gossip and events. I would set the scene, and then they would narrate in third person how their characters were beginning the day. Soon the characters would ride their bikes to meet up, and the story would begin.

They moved fluidly between narrating their characters’ stories in third person and improvising scenes together. We often left the classroom to act out scenes or adventures outdoors.

Supplemental Texts

In addition to the adventures unfolding in class, the homework involved students choosing mystery books they wanted to read.

I introduced them to one of my childhood favorites, The Boxcar Children, and they became hooked on the series. Together we also researched contemporary mysteries. Every two weeks, students shared what they had read, what they thought about it, and whether they would recommend it to each other.

Because they were reading within one genre, it gave us the opportunity to discuss common narrative structures, character tropes, and recurring themes.

Series like The Boxcar Children often follow a fairly predictable structure. As students read more, we paid particular attention to moments when books broke from genre expectations. This led to conversations about innovation and “thinking outside the box,” and students began searching for stories that surprised them through diverse characters or plot twists.

These discussions then informed the story we were creating through the role-playing game. It pushed them beyond predictable storytelling and encouraged them to take risks in their improvisation.

Experiments in World Building

Much of our students’ lives are filled with consuming information. Movies, television, video games, and books all offer compelling imaginary worlds to enter. Even a robust literature curriculum is often designed around students reading a sequence of books.

In Second Words: Selected Critical Prose, 1960-1982, Margaret Atwood points out how critical reading is to being an effective writer:

“It is my contention that the process of reading is part of the process of writing, the necessary completion without which writing can hardly be said to exist.”

Students do need to read extensively to develop literacy.

What I believe we do not do enough of in schools is give students the agency to know that they can also create—that they have the power to bring something new into the world.

World-building does not require a full RPG campaign or even an elaborate setting. We’ve been experimenting with curricula that involve reading Mesoamerican myths, writing origin stories for imaginary worlds, and designing galaxies of planets that combine science and the humanities (more on that soon).

The goal is not to choose between reading and creating, but to let each deepen the other. The richest literacy experiences happen when students move back and forth between entering worlds imagined by others and building worlds of their own.

One of my favorite moments in a movie is when detectives (i.e., Mulder and Scully) stumble upon a cork board in a secret room covered with a character’s obsessive research on aliens, vampires, or some massive hidden government conspiracy. I’ve always loved the organization of a multitude of photographs, articles, maps, and various ephemera. The walls reveal the thinking of a character—how that person organizes images, how they annotate text—they are windows into how their mind works and how they see the world.

This is especially evident in boards created by mathematicians. Stephen Hawking had a blackboard in his office at the University of Cambridge filled with ideas. It’s a wild collection of quotes and doodles including lines like “DON’T FORGET TO DOUBLE-CZECH YOUR RESULTS” and an alien Pan-like humanoid exclaiming “IT DOESZ WORK!!!” The blackboard was from a conference in 1980 that Hawking attended with colleagues, all seeking the answer to the “theory of everything”—theorizing how it might be possible to combine the rules of general relativity and quantum mechanics. The blackboard was a playful and welcome distraction from the heavy ideas of the conference.

Juan-Andres Leon, a curator at the Science Museum in London, the current home of the board, writes:

None of this blackboard’s scribblings are by Hawking’s own hand (he had stopped writing on blackboards in the mid-1970s), but were made by a dozen collaborators during the workshop.

This deepens rather than detracts from the interest of the blackboard and indeed one of the reasons we chose it for the exhibition was to evoke the collective nature of scientific work, where Hawking’s co-authorship is evident, even if not drawn by his own hand.

He further explains that “senior researchers rarely work on their own but are rather part of a distributed cognition system.”

Distributed Cognition Systems

Traditionally, classrooms in the United States have been organized around the idea of the student as an individual performer. This idea grows out of a long history of schooling shaped by industrial models of efficiency and measurement. From the early 20th century, as public education expanded, systems were designed to rank individuals in the form of timed tests, grade point averages, class rankings, and high-stakes exams. Even the physical design of classrooms—rows of desks, forward-facing, spaced just enough apart—reflects this. How many times growing up did we hear “Keep your eyes on your own paper.” (I’m talking to you Mrs. B.!)

And yet, that’s simply not how the world works beyond school. In nearly every profession, knowledge is constructed and applied through “distributed cognition.” If a doctor is facing a complex case, they might consult a multidisciplinary team. In high-stakes litigation, lawyers work collectively. Harrison Ford, known for his iconic roles, stated in an interview,

Acting is not about competing. Acting is about cooperating. Acting is about collaboration. It's about your utility, your usefulness, your capacity to add to the work that has already been done and will be done. You're just part of a team.

Which raises the question: why is so much of learning in our schools still focused on the individual student? I’d rather my classroom look like that quantum physics conference, with groups of researchers taking on difficult questions, exploring solutions, and occasionally taking breaks to draw squids and other wondrous creatures on inventive boards in the break room.

Research Boards

I had Hawking’s board in mind when I thought of the idea of Research Boards. In January, a group of Brown University students visited our school Habla in Merida, Mexico for a short study-abroad experience. We took them through a series of pedagogy workshops that connected deep content to meaningful engagement. Our key questions were:

What sustains life? What sustains us?

We guided them through an inquiry-based experience (described previously in this article) learning about the Europa Clipper mission—a NASA mission designed to determine whether Jupiter’s moon, Europa, has the conditions necessary to support life. The question, “What sustains life?” gave us our focus for scientific research, while the question, “What sustains us?” informed our reading of poet laureate, Ada Limón’s, poetry. As part of the mission, her poem “In Praise of Mystery” was commissioned by NASA and inscribed on the spacecraft.

After learning about the Europa Clipper mission, students gathered in small groups around circular tables. On each table was a blank piece of butcher paper. They had around 45 minutes to research the question from a scientific perspective, “What is needed on a planet to sustain life?” The table was to serve as their collective answer to that question. We asked them to cite specific sources and not simply plug their question into AI. They were also free to doodle and draw in the spirit of the physicists’ blackboard. Because each student was concentrating in a different discipline, it truly felt like a distributed cognition system.

Although this was our first foray into Research Boards, I can imagine using this approach in many different ways: with online platforms, on classroom whiteboards, or—my preferred method—on an actual blackboard with chalk.

Research Boards have several implications for student learning:

• Students focus on a key question, diving deeply into content and often discovering new and surprising insights—sometimes beyond even the teacher’s knowledge.

• They use diverse modes of research, particularly the technologies available to them, and discuss together what counts as a valid source.

• They learn from one another, especially those with deeper or broader knowledge in the area of focus. (In the example above, one student was specializing in biochemical engineering.)

• They are at the center of the learning process. Ted Sizer’s maxim of “student as worker, teacher as coach” becomes fully visible—students do the heavy lifting of research while the teacher guides when needed.

• They have permission to be creative and playful. Illustrations, drawings, and doodles illuminate group thinking.

If we want students’ thinking to reflect the way we actually work in the real world, then we need to create classroom spaces where students can work through ideas and work on products with each other. A research board is simple—a guiding question, an open surface (digital or analog), and time for discussion and note-taking. What matters is that students are doing the work of thinking together, not just staring at their own paper in fear of incurring the wrath of Mrs. B..

Download the Research Boards “How To” PDF here.

Inspiration and Resources

1. Mathematicians’ Blackboards

   In researching different kinds of boards, I found this article in the New York Times featuring blackboards of mathematicians, stunningly photographed by Jessica Wynne. If I knew more about math teaching, I’d love to build an experience around these!

2. Note Taking

   Reading ’s article on note-taking and see the playful marginalia reminded me of how we can combine “serious” ideas with Stephen Hawking’s sense of playfulness.

3. My Daughter’s Science Notebook

   Just for fun, my daughter annotates all of her notes from her 9th grade science class in the style of different characters from the Marvel Universe. This inspired me to think about ways we can open up our classrooms to students’ individual passions, even in everyday tasks that might not initially seem creative. Can you guess the Marvel characters that inspired each illustration?

   

   

   

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Every morning on the drive to school, my kids and I listen to the trivia podcast Good Job Brain. The hosts start with a few classic Trivial Pursuit questions, then move into themed rounds built around a central idea. Although we started listening for fun, it also serves as a cognitive warm-up for the day—and it made me wonder: why not try something similar with students?

When I was designing a PD session for teachers in Chicago, I realized that I often jump into a key text taking for granted that students have the background knowledge that would support their comprehension. The book we were working with is the picture book Malala’s Magic Pencil. I had read recently that only 23% of people in the United States could identify Iran on a map, and I wondered how many of us could identify Pakistan, the setting for the book.

I’m not advocating for a social studies curriculum that was like mine when I was in the 7th grade. Every week we were given a different map to label and color and then tested on the states/countries/capitals at the end of the week. Chris Hefferman, a 7th grade social studies and math teacher, notes in an article about the importance of teaching geography:

Geography matters today more than ever, but only if we are looking at the right things. Google has changed our world, and geography is included in that. I haven’t given my students a map quiz in years because there isn’t really a need to memorize where countries are. Students can Google any country in the world to find its location.

He then points out the need to learn what he calls, “human geography.” He eloquently explains what students do need to know:

They need to understand the relationships that exist between cultures. They need to see not just the differences in cultures, but the similarities. Students need to know that the kid sitting in a school in Afghanistan today probably doesn’t speak the same language, practice the same religion or live in a home that looks anything like a student in the United States, but they have a lot of things in common. They both love their families, they both want to play and they both want to learn.

Certainly most of the literature we teach, if it is curated with a diversity of voices in mind, can help students to reach a deeper understanding of “human geography.” But I also want them to have a concrete sense of where they are in the world. How do we help students develop this sense of a global geography without a curriculum of rote memorization and testing?

Knowledge Matters

If you’ve read my previous articles, you know that recently I’ve been learning more about the “science of learning.” A decade ago, my colleague Liz Remington at The Learning Alliance, an organization dedicated to the “science of reading,” introduced me to cognitive approaches to reading through books like The Reading Mind by Daniel Willingham and Proust and the Squid by Maryanne Wolf. Having been trained as a secondary-level literature teacher, many of these ideas were new to me. Since then, thanks to Holly Korbey at The Bell Ringer, my reading has broadened to include more at what now is commonly referred to as the “science of learning.”

One of the principal ideas to come out of this movement is that knowledge learning is critical not only for reading, but for learning in general. Willingham writes:

The conclusion from this work in cognitive science is straightforward: we must ensure that students acquire background knowledge in parallel with practicing critical thinking skills.1

Natalie Wexler warns us, however, that “Education certainly shouldn’t end with facts.” This point is one that I think is critical. The potential danger of the “science of learning” movement is that we go back to a time when we plodded our way through textbooks. We can all probably remember a class in which we were given a textbook, read a chapter every week or so, and then were tested (often with a multiple-choice test), on the facts we had memorized (usually hurriedly the night before). And yet we do need to teach students content. Wexler then follows up on her above statement, “But if it doesn’t begin there, many students will never acquire the knowledge and analytical abilities they need to thrive both in school and in life.”2

In this week’s article, I’ll offer a quick and simple strategy I’ve developed, the Knowledge Check, that we can use when we teach any text or concept in the classroom.

Read more

Recently I was on a panel in Chicago at the Forum 301 gallery. The topic of the night was the role of art in society and education. Many of the other participants on the panel were professional visual artists. Although I might say that I’m an actor or theater director, it’s actually been over thirty years since I’ve directed a conventional play. So when questions were asked about “the process of an artist” and ways we might “look more deeply at art,” I sat listening, at first feeling that, since I’m not a formal artist, and especially not a visual artist, the answers were best left up to the others.

Other colleagues of mine, seeing that I wasn’t speaking much, kept handing me the mic encouraging me to answer some of these questions. Then something clicked. When I did direct theater, I felt my role was to guide a community of people—actors, designers, tech crew—towards a shared vision with a clear goal. Although I always had a few initial ideas about what some elements of the production might look like, I preferred to collaborate by asking questions of the ensemble and exploring what might be possible. Then, over the few weeks, we would arrive at answers in the form of sets, costumes, lighting, sound, and character choices.

Isn’t this the same thing we do as teachers—ask questions and explore a topic or text until we arrive at a place where the students can share their own understanding?

Teaching as Theatre

As a teacher, my question of the room is always, “What will we be able to achieve as a community?” My second teaching experience was as an English teacher at Hope High School in Providence, RI in the 90s. Recently, Anne Deavere Smith had performed and published her play Fires in the Mirror. In the play, Deavere Smith created a one-woman documentary theater piece by conducting interviews with people affected by the Crown Heights uprising of 1991. She then organized and edited the interviews into a series of continuous monologues in the voice of the interviewees.

My students and I read the script and watched selections of her play (on VHS!). I asked my students if they’d be interested in doing a similar project this semester as a class. They enthusiastically agreed (knowing the alternative would be diving into another extended novel - we had just finished reading Black Boy by Richard Wright). We came up with a research question together, “When do you feel seen and known in Providence?” Students interviewed family, friends, and neighbors and, similar to Deavere Smith, selected the interviews they wanted to highlight, edited them to create a script, and then rehearsed and performed for the school community.

For me this changed the dynamic from my first teaching job where I generally felt my role was to “teach” stuff and students were expected to show their understanding of it. My first forays into teaching were almost purely content-based. I thought my role was to be as animated as possible, essentially performing for students at the front of the room and getting them excited about Shakespeare, Gatsby, or whatever the subject of the day might be.

Reflecting on this during the panel discussion, I took the mic and told the audience that I do see myself as an artist—but not in the traditional sense of someone working alone in a studio. Teaching, for me, is an art. It is a collaborative art form in which a classroom community creates something new and original. I still see myself more as a theatrical “director” than a traditional “teacher” or “facilitator.” Together we work toward a shared goal, and it’s my role to lead us there as elegantly and gently as possible.

Knowing the Destination

Ted Sizer’s work in the 1990s introduced me to the idea of exhibitions of learning. An exhibition is a way for students to demonstrate their understanding of the content for an authentic audience.

In his book Horace’s School: Redesigning the American High School he wrote:

Exhibitions can be powerful incentives for students. Knowing where the destination is always helps in getting there, and if that destination is cast in an interesting way, one is more likely to care about reaching it.

Sizer’s words reminded me what it means to lead a theater ensemble and crew. We have a shared understanding of what the destination is. We have a deadline. And so, as a classroom, we work towards that end with a sense of urgency and purpose. After encountering Sizer’s work in my second year of teaching, I knew we needed that same sense of shared purpose as teachers and students.

And so over the years I’ve created hundreds of exhibitions of learning with young people, with teachers, and even with parents.

We Pin Quick Wishes on the Stars

Most recently Beth Martin, the principal at North Star Elementary School in Bend, Oregon, asked me to stay after a day of working with her teachers for the evening parent meeting. The goal was to introduce parents to the ArtsLiteracy approach to teaching texts.1

At the beginning of our gathering in the school library, the thirty or so parents sat comfortably with the people they knew. After a brief introduction, I asked them to rise from their seats, find someone they didn’t know. We began the session with an activity called Quick Memories, sharing stories about the topic at hand, “the night sky.” We read the poem In Praise of Mystery by Ada Limón that was inscribed on the Europa clipper mission. Part of the poem reads:

we point to the planets we know,
we pin quick wishes on the stars

At the end of our session I asked the parents to think about what wishes they would “pin on the stars” for their own child or children. Our final exhibition, for just a one hour session, was reading their wishes for their children and hanging them on a tree.

The next day a parent stopped me in the front office and said, “You know we came to the meeting expecting one thing, we had no idea we were going to experience that. We couldn’t stop talking about it all night!” I’ve found that these shared exhibitions (when done well) elevate learning to a point where students remember the content precisely because they remember the experience. Learning isn’t just “doing school” in Denise Pope’s words.

The idea of the Exhibition gave me, as a teacher, permission to bring all I’d learned in directing theater to the classroom: a shared sense of purpose, the wrestling with and discussing of complex texts, the need for a shared and supportive community, and most importantly the chance for students to bring their total selves to the room.

At times someone will ask me if I miss directing theater. I don’t. Every time we step into a room together as teachers and learners, we have the chance to create something extraordinary.

Resources

Ada Limón discussing her poem, “In Praise of Mystery”

This video is a great introduction to the overall NASA clipper mission

Anna Deavere Smith, Fires in the Mirror (you nearly get the VHS experience!)

All of our curricular planning begins with selecting a key text. Although we have built institutes, workshops, classes, etc. from a central concept, theme, or even skill (i.e., in a language classroom, telling stories using the past tense), my first question is almost always, “So what is the text?” When a New York Times journalist visited us at our former ArtsLiteracy lab school, Brown Summer High School, he noticed that students were wrestling with complex texts and saw great potential in the synergy between performance and literacy development.

One of my favorite texts to use at the elementary level is Malala’s Magic Pencil. It also works beautifully with adults, since in a two-hour workshop we have time to read the entire book. (There are also versions of her biography written for middle and high school students.)

Malala writes about how she would change the world if she had a magic pencil. The opening pages pose the question, “What would you do if you had a magic pencil?”—giving us both our essential question and a theme centered on transformation and change.

The book ends with her speech at the United Nations, delivered when she was only sixteen years old. She speaks about the universal right to education and famously asserts:

It is the power of her words in this book that makes it such a rich text for vocal work.

Orchestrating Words

At our Habla Institutes, Darío often orchestrates “found sounds” with teachers. He has done this in many ways—using vowels and consonants, everyday objects, and vocally or kinesthetically generated sounds. While watching a video of Malala giving her United Nations speech, I thought it might be interesting to try Darío’s technique using phrases from her speech.

Video has become ubiquitous in classrooms. Too often, however, a video is simply played and students are told to “pay attention.” Just as we have explored ways to read purposefully, I believe it is equally important to create a clear purpose when “reading” video.

For Malala’s speech, I asked teachers to watch a five-minute clip and collect powerful, key phrases. Afterward, in small groups, they shared both their phrases and the thinking behind their choices.

Each person then chose one phrase—the one that spoke to them most deeply and that they wanted to hold on to.

With this phrase in hand, participants stood up and walked around the room looking for others who had selected the same words. Groups formed organically. A few teachers noted, somewhat despondently, that they were the only ones who had chosen their phrase. I reassured them, “That’s perfect. We want a diversity of phrases and group sizes in the room.” Eventually the room settled into about ten groups, the largest with roughly twelve participants.

Within their groups, they compared their selections and agreed on an identical wording. (Some had chosen longer portions of a sentence, so the goal was to arrive at a phrase with the same number of words.)

I then taught them a set of conducting gestures based on what I had learned from Darío.

Leading the groups as if they were different instruments in an orchestra, we created a true Symphony of Words.

In the above video, musician Darío Bernal Villegas demonstrates the “conducting gestures” for leading groups to start, stop, continue, and increase/decrease volume.

Variations on a Theme

Once we had established the Symphony of Words, we were able to return to it throughout the session. After reading the book, participants created headlines for Malala’s story—a comprehension strategy I like to use with younger students to surface the “big ideas” of a text. We then read the headlines aloud together from each of the tables.

At the end of the session, teachers wrote their own responses to the prompt, “If I had a magic pencil, I would . . . ,” focusing on changes they would make in their homes, neighborhoods, workplaces, or on a global scale. I encouraged them to think about serious issues but also to have some fun with the prompt, adding levity to what can be a heavy topic. In small groups they combined their answers into performances focused on the sound and feel of the words—remixing, repeating, and amplifying key phrases.

Into the Classroom

The next day I watched teachers try this approach in first- through fifth-grade classrooms. Most began with pure sounds, as I had modeled at the start of our workshop. The activity requires some facilitation skill, but the teachers did a terrific job leading their own Symphonies. I also picked up a few techniques for making it work even better—especially with first graders!

At its core, the Symphony of Words supports key dimensions of literacy:

• Students synthesize a text down to its essential phrases and articulate the thinking behind their choices.

• Repetition of words and phrases supports comprehension, especially for complex texts and for language learners.

• Pronunciation is naturally refined as students listen to one another and make corrections together.

• Words gain emotional and aesthetic power. Students put their bodies and voices behind the language, allowing it to resonate and come alive off the page.

I’ll keep experimenting with variations on this theme, and I hope you will too. I’d love to hear your ideas—whether in person or here on Growing Ideas.

Malala Yousafzai’s address to the United Nations Youth Assembly

the strategy of recalling facts, concepts, or events from memory in order to enhance learning. The act of retrieving something from your memory actually strengthens the connections holding it there, making it more likely that you’ll be able to recall it in the future.

For a detailed look at the research and publishing around this practice, read the Bell Ringer’s article here. In an Edutopia video Dr. Jim Heal explains that:

The more times you go to your long-term memory to pull a piece of information back into your working memory, it strengthens what’s called the memory trace between those two parts of your mind. Strengthening that path is part of the act of learning.

All sounds good but like many of the ideas coming out of the “science of learning” the persistent question is, “How do we incorporate these ideas into actual practice?” As I mentioned before, as much as I like books like Daniel Willingham’s What Don’t Students Like School they often lack engaging practices that we can incorporate into our own teaching toolkits.

This practice inspired by one of the core tenets of improvisational theater provides an engaging way for students to remember content they’ve studied.

Yes, and . . .

When actors are improvising a scene, one of the most important rules is to always keep the scene moving forward. Greg Atkins, an improvisation teacher, notes what happens when the opposite occurs, “Saying no stops the action, stops the ideas, stops the story, and is basically a poor choice.” Instead, actors should take an approach where they implicitly say “yes” to what the other actor on the stage offers. Let’s look at a couple of examples:

The “No” Approach

Actor 1: Look at the stars—aren’t they beautiful.
Actor 2: I don’t see any stars. It’s daytime.

The “Yes, and . . . “ Approach

Actor 1: Look at the stars—aren’t they beautiful.
Actor 2: Wow, they really are. And I think I can see Mars!
Actor 1: Wait, is that really Mars? I think it’s moving!

Atkins advises, “Get in the habit of saying ‘yes and’ . . . That way you accept the information and continue the give-and-take.” It’s useful advice not only for acting, but life in general (and something I’m still working on!)

Yes, and . . . In the Classroom

This approach first came to me when I was teaching The Odyssey in a Sophomore English classroom. We know Homer’s epic poem was passed down orally for hundreds of years before it was written—yet today usually our first encounter with the poem is reading it in print in school. In my classroom I’d ask my students to try to take notes on a chapter so as to be able to retell as much of the story as they could. I didn’t grade the retellings—they were meant to be a fun way for students to see how much of the story they could remember. I also encouraged them to actually pretend they were around a campfire hundreds of years ago telling the story to a group of young children. So their telling of the story had to focus on both remembering the plot and engaging the audience in a performative way. Here’s what we would do.

1. Small Groups. Organize the classroom into small groups of three or four students.

2. Yes, and . . . Explain that we will be retelling the chapter of the book with each person telling a part of the story continuing around the circle. Approach the storytelling with a Yes, and attitude meaning that if a person skips a part of the story, rather than stopping, continue by picking up where they left off. The storytelling should be continuous without pause or commentary.

3. Review Notes. After reading a chapter of The Odyssey, give students a few minutes to review their notes with the goal of being able to tell the story as accurately as possible. Note that the goal is to hit the major plot points—not retell every little detail of the story.

4. Tight Circles. After having had time to review their notes, students put their notebooks aside. The storytelling needs to come from the information they can retrieve in the moment. Push the desks aside and arrange students in a tight circle sitting nearly knee to knee.

5. Storytelling by beats. Choose a person to begin. That person will start at the beginning of the story and set the scene. Then they will pass to the next person who will tell the first beat of the story. Continue around the circle with each person sharing the next beat of the story. As a general guideline each beat should take no longer than 30 seconds of storytelling. Continue until the students reach the end of the chapter.

6. Reflection. Ask students to then review their notes, and/or the text, to see what they missed. We are now checking for how much information we were able to retrieve, and noting where the gaps are.

Since this original pilot of Yes, and . . . I’ve used it with different age groups and different subject areas. At the elementary school level, it can work with even the youngest students using read-alouds. Ask students to remember as much of the story as they can as they listen to it. Repeat the story (perhaps reading it every day for three or four sessions.) Then move around the reading circle of students asking them one by one to retell the story “piece by piece.”

Most recently we used it with a science unit on the lifecycle of bees. We read the book Honeybee: The Busy Life of Apis Mellifera and had participants take notes on the lifecycle of a honeybee with the help of this sequencing template we designed. Participants reviewed their notes and then used the Yes, and . . . approach to retell the lifecycle from birth to death.

Yes, and . . . is one creative approach we’ve developed to help students commit information to their long term memories and self-assess how much they are able to recall. Certainly helping the students to remember content is critical and it’s equally important to develop artful approaches for showing deep understanding of their content beyond memorization. In the bee unit described above, participants then created infographics showing their understanding of the bee’s lifecycle (see my earlier post here). A question I always consider is not just whether students know the content—it’s whether they can use this knowledge for original and creative purposes.

This week, we’re working with a group of university students enrolled in an education course at Habla. During a sample unit, they explored the guiding question, “What sustains life?” by creating an imaginary planet through an interdisciplinary lens that integrates the sciences, the language arts, and the visual arts.

10 Words On Topic

To begin the experience, students listed ten words they associate with the word planet. They write the words as quickly as they came to mind—descriptive or poetic. The words didn’t have to be in English; students were free to mix languages as they wished. The activity typically takes about three minutes. Here are some examples of what students came up with:

Next, the students created a “spoken word” reading of their ten words. As they read, they could repeat words and rearrange them in any order they liked.

Extensions

From there, we took the word lists in a variety of directions, including:

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Over the past couple of weeks we’ve been home here with our kids who are on vacation. We didn’t travel anywhere, so spent most of our days rewatching and watching Stranger Things, playing board games, and sharing meals together. I always enjoy reading other people’s “best of” lists and decided to try one out for the first time. So here is a “best of,” a few things that caught my attention this year, related to education and beyond.

As a side note these are all the best of each category I experienced last year, not necessarily things that were released or published during 2025.

Best TV Series: Slow Horses

From the times when I watched James Bond as a kid with my father, I’ve always loved a good spy story. Gary Oldman’s portrayal of a unkept but incredibly competent spy is captivating. The episodes move along briskly and each season has an overall mystery to be solved. Loved every minute of it.

Best Movie: Poor Things

I’m a bit late to this one. If you like movies that are quirky and offer expansively imaginative and even surrealistic worlds then this is one not to miss. It was close between this one and Michael B. Jordan’s Sinners but I think the overall inventiveness of this film wins out for me.

Best Book: Hyperion by Dan Simmons

My father reads almost exclusively science fiction. I never fully appreciated the genre and generally thought, in my younger years, as an English teacher, I should be reading “better” fiction. My reading habits have changed over the last few years and a friend of mine recommended the book Hyperion claiming “It’s the best science fiction series of all time.” After reading the series it’s certainly the best that I’ve read in the limited time I’ve been reading the genre. It has the structure of Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales following the individual and interrelated stories of interstellar pilgrims on a quest. It’s gripping and literary. So I get the best of both worlds!

Best Board Game Experience: Harmonies

In 2025 I played 112 different in-person board games for a total of 488 plays. Yes, that’s more than an average of a board game every day. Last summer we were leading a professional development day for a High Tech High school in San Diego. During the lunch break I noticed a group of teachers next to us playing a board game. They invited me to play and we played right up to the bell! Harmonies has a captivating table presence and is easy to introduce to anyone. In the game you are building an ecosystem and then populating the topographical map with animals. It plays in about 30 minutes.

Although I loved this lunchtime gaming experience, my overall favorite game that was released this year is Galactic Cruise, a game in which you plan the logistics for launching a cruise ship into space. It’s remarkably complex though (the rulebook is 50 pages) and probably not for most folks that haven’t played a game of this level of difficulty.

One for everyone is a new party game originally from Japan, ITO. We played this at our school Habla’s staff holiday party. In ITO you have a category, i.e. things that make you sleepy. Each person has a secret number between 1 and 100 and offers an answer to the prompt that corresponds to the number they have on their card. For instance, thinking about the prompt above, the number 100 might correspond to the word “anesthesia” and a low number might pair with “caffeine.” Then the entire group reveals their numbers and if they are in the correct order, everyone wins! Any group I’ve introduced to this game wants to play it over and over again.

Best Education Substacks: The Bell Ringer and Adrian’s Newsletter

Admittedly I’m relatively new to Substack, both as a reader and writer. For authors reading this I’ve enjoyed reading many of your posts about education and I’ve been excited to find a space beyond formal journals and books to read about ideas in action.

Holly Korbey of The Bell Ringer is a close friend and colleague, and although we’ve been working in education for years, we’ve taken different paths: she as an education journalist and me as teacher and school leader. Through Holly’s writing, and the cognitive scientists, researchers, and educators she highlights, I’ve been rethinking practices that need to be combined with the instructional approaches I’ve embraced over the last thirty-five years. Too often, educational practices are framed as a binary—traditional or progressive—with each side dismissing the other. Pulling from the best of both, I believe, is how we craft learning experiences that offer students both deep content and deep engagement.

And speaking of a beautiful synthesis of practices—Adrian’s work on his own newsletter amazes me. He teaches 5th graders and writes about his classroom in ways that clearly illuminate his on-the-ground practice while also thoughtfully engaging with the broader field of education.

Best New-to-Me Education Book: Why Don’t Students Like School? by Daniel Willingham

I’d read his book on teaching reading before, The Reading Mind, which I appreciated, but it was this book that really caught my attention. Approaching learning from the perspective of a cognitive scientist brought a new lens to considering how to design learning experiences in the classroom. Each chapter takes on a different aspect of the “mind’s operation” and the implications for teaching that we should consider. I will admit that the “practice” suggestions at the end of every chapter are lacking. But I see that as more of a call to action for us as teachers—to develop the practices from what the research suggests. I love how he consolidates the research on how the mind works and brings it to us in such an accessible way.

Hope you all have a great year and thanks for reading and supporting our work.

All the best,

Kurt Wootton

During one of the coldest winters in St. Paul, Minnesota, we traveled from Providence to offer a professional development workshop for the district’s teachers. The focus was “making complex texts accessible.” We chose one of the most complicated texts we could think of—Speak, Memory by Nabokov—and built a workshop around it to demonstrate to adults how repeated encounters with a difficult text can lead to deep understanding. When we arrived on the day of the workshop, the teachers had invited students to join as well. One teacher explained that many of these students “struggled with reading.” Just to give a sense of the text’s lexical density, it begins:

The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for (at some forty-five hundred heartbeats an hour). I know, however, of a young chronophobiac who experienced something like panic when looking for the first time at homemade movies that had been taken a few weeks before his birth.

Our team huddled on the side of the room to discuss what to do. Do we change the text to something easier? Do we split the group? We had already planned the session and decided to move forward with Nabokov. Participants engaged in a variety of activities in which they interpreted phrases, performed passages, and collaboratively analyzed the text. At the end of the workshop, one of the students said, “Now I really want to read the whole book!”

Getting students excited about seemingly obscure or “impossible” texts has always been at the core of my teaching. When I taught English Language Learners in Mexico, we read Shakespeare’s The Tempest, To Kill a Mockingbird, and Invisible Man. One of the primary approaches we developed at our school Habla to support students through these works is what we call “turning the text.” After studying a particular passage, monologue, or poem, we take one line from it and use it as a prompt. That line becomes a structure, a sentence starter, or a question for students to write their own response. Using the opening of The Odyssey, I’ll describe ways we engage students in reading the text and responding to it with a “turning the text” approach.

Break It Down

Shakespeare and Company, a theater group based in the Berkshires in Massachusetts, has a robust educational outreach program focused on “immersing students in the world of Shakespeare.” One of their primary techniques is to get Shakespeare’s words immediately into students’ voices and bodies. They give short excerpts to small groups and ask them to “bring them to life.” From phrases, they move to monologues, with four or five students performing a single monologue collaboratively. This all happens before students have even read the play.

The effect is powerful: students feel immediately successful with the text. These embodied, collaborative experiences become a bridge into reading the larger work.

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Mauricio Babilonia was always in the audience at the concerts, the movies, at high mass, and she did not have to see him to know that he was there, because the butterflies were always there.

The appearance of the butterflies is just one of many clear examples of magical realism in Márquez’s masterpiece. Other examples include Remedios’s floating through the air and then ascending to heaven, the invasion of ants in the house, and the four years, eleven months, and two days of nonstop rain in the town of Macondo, to name a few. My wife Marimar likes to point out that the idea of magical realism isn’t really about magic at all; it’s a way of being in, seeing, and narrating the world.

Having lived in the city of Mérida in the state of Yucatán in Mexico for nearly two decades, I’ve been witness to events straight from the town of Márquez’s Macondo. One night in our house a loaf of bread was carried off by ants in the dark. A multi-colored bird, the pájaro toh, appears outside our front door most mornings, waving its pendulum-like tail and crying “ca-ca-wah, ca-ca-wah.” And, yes, in the summertime, swarms of yellow butterflies fill the gardens.

A Magical Pedagogy

I first read One Hundred Years of Solitude when I was working on the ArtsLiteracy Project in the Education Department at Brown University. At the time we were partnering professional artists—filmmakers, visual artists, actors, directors, musicians—with literacy and language teachers in classrooms. Our goal was to find and develop innovative practices for teaching reading and writing, but now I realize that something else was happening as well: classrooms were becoming magical spaces.

I don’t mean magic in the sense of card tricks and rabbits-out-of-hats (although that sense of wonder and awe is certainly a part of it). I mean magical in a Márquezian sense—the idea of magical realism as a way of thinking about teaching, learning, and life. When I drive around my city, Mérida, in the sweltering heat of May, the streets are on fire with the bright orange petals of the flamboyán and the vibrant yellows of the lluvia de oro, two types of trees that bloom at that time of year. A routine drive to school becomes luminescent—transforming the stagnant into the brilliant. This is what I hope for our classrooms.

Before we go further, let’s consider what we often see when we walk into schools, particularly secondary schools: white walls, well-intentioned slogans, trophy cases, perhaps a few appropriate holiday decorations, and bland mission statements—”a community of lifelong learners, responsible global citizens, and champions of our own success.” The same is true of many classrooms with standard premade posters (“Growth Mindset—Believe You Can!”), blank walls, and rules (1. Be ready to learn. 2. Be respectful of others. 3. …).

Education policies of the last thirty years have pushed us toward pedagogies that feel equally sterile: adherence to state and federal standards emphasizing discrete skills; scripted curriculums that must be followed “with fidelity,” to quote a common administrative directive; textbooks that drain the imaginative power from beautiful stories and compelling content.

There are, of course, many schools and classrooms that are exceptions to this. I’ll share several below. Yet when I walk into most schools, they reflect many of the characteristics I’ve just described.

So what’s the alternative? In a graduate research class, our professor Ted Sizer framed an essential question as we shadowed students in eight public schools: “What do ‘aha’ moments look like in schools?” (There were very few—but that’s another conversation.) I’m going to propose a similar question here: “What does magic look like in a school environment?”

Content

Let’s go deep right away, to avoid a shallow or superficial idea of “magic.” Approaching this as a language arts educator, my first answer to the question is to find a “magical” text to build a curriculum around. By magical, I don’t mean one with literal magic—wizards and dragons—but one that is compelling and meaningful for students (recognizing that no single text works for everyone). A “magical” text often:

• is complex yet accessible

• has a compelling narrative

• is paired with beautiful artwork (mostly in the case of children’s books)

• presents different perspectives and ways of seeing the world

• offers interdisciplinary and project-based ideas (for example, see my post about the book Shellsong)

Beyond texts, we can also think about a constellation of artifacts to design learning experiences around—images, videos, music, and objects. In this post I discussed ways of using image and video. As with texts, we look for content that:

• is of high quality

• doesn’t feel like it was made “for school,” and

• conveys the actual content of the subject-area.

Here are just a few of the many texts at the elementary school level we’ve often based units, workshops, and institutes around.

And some of our favorites for building experiences for secondary, university, and adult learners.

Multitextured Learning

When we look into a classroom at almost any grade level, we usually see a familiar scene: students at desks reading, writing, solving problems, talking in small groups, or listening to the teacher. All of this matters; there are classrooms in which deep thinking happens through text and discussion alone, and I love a good seminar-based class. So I’m not arguing against that. This is more of a “Yes, and . . “

When I taught Shakespeare’s Tempest to sophomores, we attached ropes to the school’s balconies and recreated the ship-in-a-storm scene. Students screamed lines—“All lost! To prayers, to prayers! All lost!”—as they rocked on an imagined vessel. We were no longer in the classroom or even in this world. Wind and rain surrounded us. Yellow butterflies.

Shakespeare’s plays were meant to be performed. Whenever I’m teaching literature or content in any area, I’m looking for opportunities for students to move from text to original work—exhibitions, creative responses, performances—so they feel a sense of agency and ownership.

A few examples of a multitextural approach to learning:

• In Theresa Toomey Fox’s classroom at Nathanael Greene Middle School in Providence, RI, her 7th grade students read Othello. They chose a character to analyze, performed their chosen character in a rehearsed scene (with full props and costumes), and wrote an essay analyzing their character’s development throughout the play.

• In a humanities class I taught with Deb Christenson at Souhegan High School in Amherst, NH, we asked students to analyze The Great Gatsby and the decade of the 1920s through the lens of light and dark. They created an artistic piece and wrote an abstract explaining how their piece represented the lightness/darkness during that historical period. The unit culminated in an art exhibit for their parents and the school community.

  

• Sound improvisation artist from Mexico City, Darío Bernal Villegas gave groups of students creation stories from across the Americas written by Eduardo Galeano in his epic historical trilogy Memory of Fire. Using found objects from nature, students performed a textual and sonic interpretation of their given myths. They then explained in a paragraph how the sounds they chose enlivened or reflected the tone, mood, and development of the text.

  

• In Nuvia Ruland’s biology class at High Tech High Chula Vista, students explored the essential question “Where does your power come from?” To show their understanding, they created artworks and written explanations that “demonstrate student’s expertise on the associated organ system, tissue and/or cells and show what they’ve learned about maintaining health of their power, and a deep understanding of possible negative effects when an imbalance of homeostasis occurs (e.g. environment, disease, trauma, malnutrition, pollution, chemicals, etc.)” In the humanities classroom, this scientific work was paired with both a written assignment and a performative component, culminating in a seven-minute monologue.

In a Providence high school moving to portfolio-based assessment, the English department head emphasized that all artistic projects needed strong written components. In arts-integrated classrooms, I’ve often seen engaging projects that miss the depth of disciplinary learning—in the examples above, the written component clearly grounded the creativity in content. These were magical experiences and rigorous ones.

Space

Yellow butterflies. When Remedios walks into the movie theater, she sees the butterflies and knows Mauricio is there. The space is transformed. We can also create magical spaces in our schools when we begin to reimagine what might be possible with white walls and sterile hallways.

Student Work. Walking into a High Tech High school feels like a breath of fresh air. Across all sixteen schools, the hallways display beautifully curated student work with project descriptions. Two things struck me on my first visit: the consistent quality across classrooms, and the clear depth of content learning.

Design Elements

I love when teachers attend to the design elements that make a classroom feel inviting (confession: I’ve never been very good at this). In elementary classrooms, where teachers truly “own” the space, this is often done beautifully.

Here is an example from an elementary classroom at High Tech High Chula Vista.

In this photo we see many elements that can enhance classroom environments:

• Lighting. A warm lamp draws attention to the front.

• Plants. Even the smallest house plants around the room make it feel like a more organic, and less institutional, environment.

• Student work. The examples of student work are either framed with actual frames or attached to paper with a black background. The work is curated, arranged beautifully, and is original (no two pieces of student work are alike i.e. hand turkeys.)

• Objects. Other objects are added to the space including the carpet and the decoration hanging from the ceiling.

The other element that is critical for a classroom space is sound. I have Spotify playlists for many of the activities we do in the classroom: writing, reading, performing, artmaking, and playlists for the opening and closing of sessions. For a powerful example of using music in a classroom, read 5th grade teacher Adrian Neibauer’s piece on “attentive listening.”

Beyond the Classroom

Dan Bisaccio is the biology teacher featured in Robert Fried’s The Passionate Teacher. Even in his retirement Dan leads nature walks in the woods, fields, and around the lakes in his New Hampshire community. His high school biology class spent every day in the woods behind the school identifying plants and animals and tracking changes in the habitat. It’s nearly impossible to be in nature with Dan and not absorb some of his passion for biology. He uses no textbooks. There are no tests. His students and he do actual fieldwork in New Hampshire and in the Yucatán peninsula, and they send their research results to the Smithsonian. There is no better way to transform classroom spaces than moving beyond the everyday walls.

The woods behind the school. A ship on the sea. A house plant. Yellow butterflies. Each a way of turning the quotidian into something a little more extraordinary.

Often our work as educators is driven by what was lacking in our own education when we were younger. A colleague of mine, Sam Seidel on the Branch Speaks podcast, remarked on what drove his father, Steve Seidel, who, for many years directed Project Zero and the Arts and Learning Master’s Program at Harvard University:

My dad feels like so much of what has made him a good teacher or what he’s done in the classroom has come from anger which totally shocked me because, one, I don’t think of anger as a source of great teaching usually, nor do I think of my father as an angry man. He’s a very mild mannered person, very calm, very gentle. He said, “There are things about the world that I’m really upset about. There are things about the way I was educated that I’m really upset about.” So it’s like that is his source—that’s his fuel—that certain things shouldn’t be this way.

I was thinking about Sam’s conversation with his father while having dinner with my friends Miguel and Kali in San Diego. Miguel teaches AP History at a public high school. I’m not sure how we got onto the subject, but, after we finished dinner, he began telling Magellan’s story, a story that ends with Magellan’s dramatic death at the hands of the inhabitants of the Philippines.

I thought about how grateful I was that Miguel’s students experienced history through these rich stories, and at the same time, angry—angry that all of my middle and high school history experiences in Indiana public schools in the 80s consisted of plodding through textbooks, memorizing vocabulary, names, and dates, and taking multiple-choice tests. At the time if you asked me what my least favorite subject was I would have told you “history.”

My grandmother was a dedicated reader of histories, and later in life, I began reading the books she recommended—Stephen Ambrose, Doris Kearns Goodwin, David McCullough. As I read, I discovered history is really about the collected stories of individuals and I was hooked. I still wonder why many of our history classrooms aren’t shaped around these compelling stories rather than discrete facts, especially given the research on the relationship between narrative and learning.

Structuring Learning Through Narrative

Daniel Willingham in Why Don’t Students Like School? discusses the power of stories from a neurological perspective. He writes,

The human mind seems exquisitely tuned to understand and remember stories—so much so that psychologists sometimes refer to stories as ‘psychologically privileged,’ meaning that they are treated differently in memory than other types of material.

Willingham suggests to teachers that “organizing a lesson plan like a story is an effective way to help students comprehend and remember.”

This reminded me of Kieran Egan’s book Imagination in Teaching and Learning: The Middle School Years. He also encourages teachers to “build a narrative” in their classroom, and particularly in the areas beyond language arts, “While literature undoubtedly has such a role in encouraging some social virtues, I think we tend to forget that among the great stories of our culture are those expressed in our science and mathematics and history.”

Both Egan and Willingham then give examples of how we can deliver information to students by organizing our lessons with narrative structures. Egan describes how to teach about eels in the sciences, and Willingham offers the example of examining how the United States entered WWII after Pearl Harbor.

Cognitively both emphasize that teaching content through storytelling and narrative structures help students to find meaning, retain the information, and in Egan’s case form an “emotional commitment” to the material.

Egan notes,

The great power of the story is that it engages us affectively as well as requiring our cognitive attention; we learn the content of the story while we are emotionally engaged by its character or events.

From Storytelling to Storymaking

Egan’s work first made an impression on me when I was in graduate school in the 90s. During that time in Providence, RI an organization, The Coalition of Essential Schools, was founded by educator Theodore “Ted” Sizer. The Coalition was a network of hundreds of schools that were trying to reform the model of traditional “top-down” education. In the spirit of the progressive education movement, they proposed a “student-centered” education. The Coalition had a set of principles that were the pedagogical foundation for its network of schools. When I read Ted Sizer’s book, Horace’s School, one of these principles became, perhaps, my clearest signpost as an educator: Student-as-worker; Teacher-as-coach.

I understood the power of teaching through compelling stories, but I also wanted students to engage in their own storytelling—to, in Whitman’s words, create work of “original energy.” I didn’t just want them to read Shakespeare; I wanted them to be Shakespeare.

I taught English-language learners in Mexico for over a decade, and Paulo Freire’s work deeply informed how I designed classes. Working with farmworkers in rural Brazil, Freire developed literacy programs that began, not with textbooks, but with the lived experiences of students.

In Education for Critical Consciousness, he describes asking students to sketch scenes from their daily lives and using those images as seeds for words and stories. The written word grew naturally out of the world they lived in.

In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire summarizes:

Reading the world always precedes reading the word, and reading the word implies continually reading the world.

One of the most powerful examples of Paulo Freire’s philosophy in action was in Len Newman and Richard Kinslow’s Newcomers class in Central Falls, RI. We describe this class in detail in our book A Reason to Read.

Newman and Kinslow created a safe space for students to tell their stories of coming to the United States. Newman, whose parents were Holocaust survivors, began the class by telling the story of his family’s escape from Europe to the United States in the 1940s. Throughout the school year Newman and Kinslow shared stories about their own lives and invited their students to do the same. Eventually the students staged their stories in the high school theatre with the help of Big Nazo, a puppet theater in Providence. Storytelling wasn’t just a language tool—it was a way to give students a podium, a voice, and a place in their school community.

The Magic of Childhood

Last week I worked with a team of 3rd-grade teachers from Bend, Oregon to help them build a project-based unit. They are teaching Peter Pan in a “classics” unit and were looking for suggestions for a culminating exhibition. (A side note: they were also thoughtfully addressing the cultural and political issues of the text).

We began discussing what the most compelling big ideas in Peter Pan are. We all probably know the heartbreaking ending in which Peter Pan returns to Wendy and asks her to return to Neverland. She has grown older, is married, and has her own child, and she tells Peter, “I can’t come. I have forgotten how to fly.”

Wendy’s wistful reply reminded me of the stanza from the song “Puff the Magic Dragon" by Peter, Paul, and Mary,

A dragon lives forever, but not so little boys
Painted wings and giant’s rings make way for other toys
One gray night it happened,
Jackie Paper came no more
And Puff, that mighty dragon, he ceased his fearless roar.

We began thinking of ways to help students reflect on what is magical about their childhoods. We brainstormed questions:

• What was magical about your life when you were younger?

• What is magical about your life now?

• What do you think you will miss when you are an adult?

One teacher suggested a beautiful idea: hosting an evening where students share their responses, and parents share what was magical about their childhoods—as well as what magic they see in their children today. I’m not sure where they’ll end up going with this but I’d love to listen to the stories told by both the parents and their children.

In Susan Magsamen and Ivy Ross’s book Your Brain on Art, emphasize, “There are three functions that neuroscientists consider the trifecta of cognitive processing: attention, learning, and memory.” Storytelling—and the act of creating stories—can be a powerful catalyst for learning far beyond its traditional home in literature and language arts.

I’m always looking for new ideas to bring to teachers and classrooms. One of the best multidisciplinary units we built this year came from a New York Times article, “‘In Praise of Mystery,’ Hitches a Ride on a NASA Rocket.” If you’re like me, you might jump straight over to that piece and already start generating ideas of your own. But stay with me a little longer, and I’ll share some great ways to bring it into your classroom.

When we work with teachers, we usually have participants who teach across multiple age levels, so our ideas need to adapt from kindergarten through high school. We also often have teachers from different disciplines in the room, so cross-disciplinary approaches allow them to collaborate across classrooms—or, in the case of elementary schools, to make those interdisciplinary connections within a single classroom.

The article features U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón and describes how her poem “In Praise of Mystery” was engraved on NASA’s Europa Clipper spacecraft, launched on October 14, 2024, on a five-and-a-half-year mission. NASA’s goal: to determine whether Jupiter’s moon Europa could support life.

We could have begun our unit simply by handing students the article—but instead, we wanted to create a sense of mystery, to get them curious about the mission, and to begin with their questions rather than with the answers.

An Eye, a River, and a Microbe

One of my favorite ways to begin a unit is with a thinking routine. Thinking routines, developed out of Harvard’s Project Zero, are simple structures for “making students’ thinking visible.” In my last post, Tip of the Iceberg, I adapted the routine, Zoom In1, for textual analysis and interpretation. Here, we use Zoom In with an image to launch the Europa unit.

We took a high-quality image of Jupiter’s moon Europa from NASA’s website and began by showing only a cropped portion of the moon to participants. We didn’t give them any additional information—just the image.

Following the structure of the routine, we asked them to discuss in pairs:

What do you see?

What do you think about what you see?

The first question focuses strictly on observation, not interpretation. For instance, “I see intersecting orange squiggly lines,” or “I see a white background.”

Then students speculate based on what they notice: “The squiggly lines look like veins. I think it’s a picture of what’s under our skin.”

Next, we reveal a slightly larger portion of the image and repeat the questions—adding one more:

What do you see?

What do you think about what you see?

What new information do you have, and how has that changed your thinking?

At this stage, students often notice a dark section in the upper left corner. Some might start to suspect they’re looking at something celestial; others might guess an eyeball or microbes under a microscope.

Finally, we show the entire image and repeat the last three questions.

By now, we’ve likely created a class of students who are receptive—and maybe even excited—to learn more about our solar system. In our book Engage, we call this stage “Entering Concepts, Topics, and Texts”—a process that develops what Mandell and Wolf describe as the receptive mind.2

With students now ready to learn more, we offer just a brief description:

“The image is of Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons. On October 14, 2024, NASA launched a probe that will travel to Europa to explore whether the moon can support life.”

From there, students write their own questions—about the Europa mission, the moon, outer space, or our solar system—any question that comes to mind. All questions go up on a wall divided in two: Questions at the top and Answers below. As we discover answers, we move them to the lower section.

Viewing Videos with Purpose

With the ubiquitous availability of videos, we use them constantly in classrooms. But are we using them purposefully—with intention?

I found an amazing NASA video explaining the Europa Mission: short yet filled with content. I wanted to help students watch it with a clear purpose. How do we frame their viewing so it remains open enough for them to express their own interests and questions?

National Geographic and Alex Warren offer a helpful tutorial on using thinking routines with video.

I adapted one and created this structure. As you watch the video, write down:

3 things I found interesting/surprising

2 things I’d like to know more about (2 questions)

1 image that resonates with me

We first watched the video to grasp the overall story of the Europa Clipper mission, then viewed it again so students could respond to the prompts. After small-group discussions, we added the new questions to the inquiry wall. This time, though, we could also move a few to the “Answered” section—questions like How long will the Europa mission take?

At this point, there are usually over one hundred questions on the wall. Participants organize them into categories and label each section. Common categories include Technology, Physics, Existential, Biology, Astronomy, Social Implications, and Climate Change.

Where the Unit Goes from Here

From here, the classroom can go in several directions:

• Individual or small-group inquiry: Students choose the category that interests them most and begin independent research projects driven by their own questions.

• Collective inquiry: Students vote on the topics they want to explore together. For example, a physics or math class might examine how the spacecraft uses gravity assists—slingshotting around Earth and Mars—to gain momentum for its journey to Jupiter. (This maneuver saves an enormous amount of fuel—fascinating, right?)

• Teacher-directed inquiry: Teachers design lessons around key student questions or those that best align with the curriculum.

At this point, we’ve barely touched the surface of the New York Times article. What about the poem “In Praise of Mystery” engraved on the Clipper? Or the Message in a Bottle project that invited people worldwide to send their names into space? More to explore next week—same Bat time, same Bat channel.

Thanks for reading.

Much attention is being paid to the science of learning (see Holly Korbey’s Substack The Bell Ringer for a wealth of background in this subject). As I read more books and articles about the science of learning, I’m often left with the question, “Yes, but what are the actual, concrete teaching practices we can apply?”

When I start watching a movie with my twelve-year-old son, a few minutes in he inevitably says, “Pause.” Then comes the question: “What’s going on? I don’t get it.” He’s always been a kid who’s great with the concrete and struggles with the abstract. Movies often begin with a puzzle—we see an event unfolding, but we don’t yet know how we arrived at that point. As adults, we’ve had plenty of practice with this kind of narrative. After watching hundreds of films, we understand that many begin in medias res—in the middle of the action—and that the story will likely take us back in time to explain how we got there.

What comes naturally to experienced viewers—holding unanswered questions in mind, anticipating patterns, and making inferences—has to be learned. The same is true in school: students need opportunities to practice thinking beyond what’s immediately visible or stated.

Cognitive psychologist Daniel Willingham, in his book Why Don’t Students Like School? notes that our minds are naturally attuned to the concrete rather than the abstract:

Abstraction is the goal of schooling. The teacher wants students to be able to apply classroom learning in new contexts, including those outside of school. The challenge is that the mind seems not to care for abstraction. The mind seems to prefer the concrete.

Willingham differentiates between rote, shallow, and deep knowledge.

• Rote learning is memorizing and repeating information. “Rote knowledge,” he explains, “might lead to giving the right response, but it doesn’t mean the student is thinking.”

• Shallow knowledge means students have some understanding, but it’s limited. They might recognize a line from a poem and grasp its literal meaning, but not be able to situate it within the context of the author, style, or time period.

• Deep knowledge is what we truly aim for in learning: “A student with deep knowledge knows more about the subject, and the pieces of knowledge are more richly interconnected.”

In the movie example above, we draw on deep knowledge—our internalized sense of narrative structure and genre conventions—and we notice when a filmmaker breaks those conventions to create something new.

How then do we help students move to a deeper understanding of text and narrative structures in our classrooms?

Understanding Subtext

Having worked with many theater educators over the years, I’ve noticed how much emphasis they place on teaching subtext—the underlying or implicit meaning behind the words of a script.

A common activity is to give two actors a generic scene. In his book Improv!, Greg Atkins offers a series of “neutral scenes.” For instance:

ACTOR 1: Hello.
ACTOR 2: Oh, hi.
ACTOR 1: What are you doing?
ACTOR 2: Nothing.
ACTOR 1: Really?
ACTOR 2: Yeah! What are you doing here?
ACTOR 1: Not much. Just this.
ACTOR 2: Oh.
ACTOR 1: Well, see you later.
ACTOR 2: Yeah, see you around.

Atkins explains that the script provides no information about who the characters are, where they are, or what they’re doing. The actors create the world of the scene through their vocal, emotional, and physical choices. Every pair of actors invents a different world and story using the same words.

A similar concept in language arts is inferential comprehension—exploring meanings behind the literal words on the page. The following classroom approach, which I call Tip of the Iceberg, invites students to uncover and build layered interpretations of a text.

Tip of the Iceberg

The “tip of the iceberg” metaphor reminds us that only about 10% of an iceberg is visible above the surface; the vast majority lies unseen below. In textual analysis, the literal definitions of words are what we might see on the surface—while the deeper meanings, associations, and implications lie beneath.

In this activity, students work in pairs or small groups to “build” their interpretation in two stages:

1. Surface: What do you see?1

   In the first conversation, students focus on the surface of the text—the literal words on the page. What do you notice? What do the words mean? This stage ensures that all students share a common understanding of the text’s vocabulary and basic meaning. It’s the visible part of the iceberg—the 10% above the waterline. At this point, students aren’t interpreting; they’re observing, naming, and clarifying.

2. Beneath the Surface: What do you think about what you see?

   In the second conversation, students begin to explore beneath the surface. Here, they make informed guesses about what the text might mean based on limited information. What might this phrase suggest? What could this text be about? How do the words hint at a larger story or theme?

   This stage asks students to shift from the concrete to the abstract—to build interpretations, see possibilities, and begin constructing the “world” of the text in their minds. As more of the text is revealed, they revise their interpretations, just as readers (or viewers) continually adjust their understanding as new evidence appears.

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When it’s time to design a learning experience—a lesson, a unit, a curriculum, or a professional development workshop—we almost always begin by looking for just the right text. For longer experiences, we might build around a constellation of texts, but even then, those larger experiences (say, a semester-long unit) are still rooted in an anchor text.

This article is the first in a series exploring some of the key texts we’ve built learning experiences around—and the ideas and student work they’ve inspired. My goal is to offer teachers ideas for books, activities, and approaches that can help them design meaningful learning experiences at various grade levels. Most of these texts work across ages; we often use picture books with adults and older students just as readily as we do with younger ones.

With each book in this series, I’ll provide:

• an essential question—an open, generative question that invites collaborative exploration for both teachers and students

• a project-based approach to teaching the text, involving original student work and a culminating performance or exhibition of learning

• complementary readings for various grade-levels

Shell Song

The first book in this series is one we haven’t yet worked with directly, but that we’re planning to use at our Winter Institute in Chicago. Shell Song by Sharon Fujimoto-Johnson tells the true story of her grandfather’s internment in Honouliuli Camp in Hawaiʻi during World War II. In the camp, the grandfather spends his time collecting shells:

When he wasn’t forced to work,
my grandfather walked the perimeter of the fence.
Every now and then, he stooped to pick up a glittering shell.

The book is beautifully illustrated with a blend of photographs of her grandfather’s actual shell collection collaged with Fujimoto-Johnson’s luminous drawings. Throughout the text, she pairs each shell with its scientific name:

This one, a bowl filled with sun,
like his beloved Mercenaria stimpsoni.

This one, a strong, slender spire,
like their firstborn, Oxymeris cerithina.

One full spread in the book shows the complete shell collection—an image of careful attention, inheritance, and remembrance.

IDEA 1

Essential Question: What do we inherit?

In our book A Reason to Read, we described a unit led by Jan Mandell in St. Paul, Minnesota centered on the concept of inheritance. When I read this book again it reminded me of the essential question we used for that unit, What do we inherit?

Fujimoto-Johnson’s illustrations include not only her grandfather’s shells, but also photographs of “soil from Sand Island Internment Camp and Honouliuli Camp, fabric from my grandmother’s wedding kimono and obi, family photos, and fabric textures from my father’s wardrobe.”

This layering of materials invites further questions:

• What do we leave behind in this world?

• How do we wish to be remembered?

• How do we connect with our ancestors?

These questions open up a rich terrain for writing narratives about our ancestors and the legacies—tangible and intangible—we’ve inherited.

Student Work

1. Ode to an Object. Students bring a family object (or a photograph of one) and write an ode to it in the style of Pablo Neruda (see Ode to the Onion and Ode to my Socks).

2. Stories of our Ancestors. Students interview relatives or people they know in their community to write the story of one of their ancestors. Community members as an option for interviewees is important for students who might not have direct access to family members.

3. Where I’m From. Poet George Ella Lyon’s iconic poem “Where I’m From” has inspired countless others to reflect on the people, places, and objects that shaped them. Students can use this brainstorming sheet to create their own poems. For younger students pair Shell Song with the book Where Are You From by Yamile Saied Méndez and Jaime Kim.

IDEA 2

Essential Question: What are the small wonders of our world?

The grandfather’s shell collection in Shell Song invites us to notice the small wonders that surround us. Alejo Medina and his students in Chicago used magnifying glasses and microscopes to collect and analyze small objects from both the natural world and their homes. This kind of work can lead to deeper questions about collecting, curating, organizing, and naming.

Student Work

The Cabinet of Wonders (also known as a Cabinet of Curiosities or Wonder Room) began in sixteenth-century Europe, when explorers and collectors assembled rooms full of objects from around the world. Some of these collections were gathered for scientific study; others reflected colonial power and wealth.

From today’s perspective, students can explore both the wonder and the ethical implications of collecting. In the classroom, they can create their own Cabinet of Wonders with tiny natural objects—shells, stones, leaves—carefully gathered and labeled. Fujimoto-Johnson’s naming of each shell offers inspiration to consider how naming and classifying are acts of observation, respect, and relationship.

Paired Texts

In Braiding Sweetgrass, botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer writes about the importance of naming and knowing the living world around us:

“Names are the way we humans build relationships, not only with one another but with the living world.”

As students collect and study natural objects, selections from Braiding Sweetgrass help them to reflect on how naming and caring are deeply connected.

Several children’s picture books also resonate beautifully with this theme:

Sidewalk Flowers is a wordless book that follows a little girl and her father through a city. While the father stays absorbed in his phone, the girl quietly gathers flowers from the cracks in the sidewalk—a celebration of noticing and care.

Tiny, Perfect Things is another book about an adult and child heading out for a walk.

Today, we keep our eyes open for tiny, perfect things.

Like here, on the ground, a yellow leaf that the wind blew down.

By the book’s end, the author reminds us, “The world is full of wonders, no matter where we go.”

Shell Song and these paired books are about paying close attention and honoring the natural world—they are about embracing the small things that brings us joy.

Alright—that title may sound like a controversial question, so let’s break it down a bit. I don’t mean that students should never do homework. I mean that teachers should stop giving homework. Before we look at the difference between the two, let’s step back to consider the bigger picture.

The School Day vs. the Workday

In general, society seems to have settled on an eight-hour workday for adults. Most of us put in our day of work, then head home to enjoy time with family, watch our favorite TV series, exercise, or read a book. As adults, we talk about “putting work aside,” not sending text messages to colleagues at night, and spending quality time with our partners, families, or ourselves.

Yet for our young people, we give excessive amounts of work to take home. As a beginning English teacher, I remember assigning my students a chapter of a book to read every night—just for my class. As an adult, I’m lucky when I have the time or energy to read a chapter of a book a day! When I first started teaching, my students had six other classes.

At one private school where I taught, we eventually held a meeting and decided to limit the amount of homework each teacher could assign to thirty minutes per night—still an insane, and perhaps impossible, amount of work. In the U.S., students are in school about seven hours a day. If that time is structured well (and usually it’s not), students should be able to learn, practice, and engage in projects with their peers during the school day.

The Need for College Prep

High school educators often argue that students need excessive homework so they can “manage their time” and “prepare for college.” But in college, students are only in structured classrooms for about 12–15 hours a week (based on four to five classes of three hours each). They have much more time outside of class to pursue their studies.

That said, I’d argue colleges assign an impossible workload as well. When we proposed our class at Brown University, we were advised by the department chair to assign one academic book a week so the class would be “appropriately rigorous.”

As a college student myself, I once took a class on the Victorian novel—we had to read a Victorian novel every week. Our professor graciously gave us two weeks for Bleak House, which is over 1,000 pages. I was taking four other classes at the same time. The unspoken rule of college is that you won’t have time to read everything, so you choose accordingly.

Today’s students have many more ways to take shortcuts via AI and Google—but we shouldn’t expect any of our students to take shortcuts as a way of survival.

Following Your Passion Rather than the Assignment

The research on the benefits of homework is mixed. Some studies show small improvements on standardized test performance—but aren’t those the students who are already motivated? And is our goal really to make students better test-takers?

We also need to consider what students lose when they spend several hours on homework each night. My high-school-age daughter loves participating in after-school activities that align with her interests—currently voice lessons and archery. My middle-school-age son plays soccer for two hours every day after school.

An admissions officer from Dartmouth once said that they aren’t looking for the “perfect student”—the one with straight A’s, all the right classes, and a long list of extracurriculars. They’re looking for students with a particular passion, who stand out, who excel in something specific.

That aligns with what I saw at Brown—admissions wasn’t seeking perfect students, but interesting ones. If we assign homework every night, when do students have time to become interesting? To practice the hobbies, sports, and arts they’re passionate about?

What Students Say About Homework

Most students don’t view homework as useful or helpful. In a study of 4,317 students, researchers Galloway, Conner, and Pope found that only 6 percent of students described homework as “very useful.” Here are some comments from students in the study:

“Sometimes I get assignments that just take up a lot of time and are hardly useful. These prevent me from getting as much sleep as I’d like, and I don’t even learn from them.”

“Some work that we are given doesn’t help us in life, and I start to wonder why we even are doing it.”

“I’m stressed because I have so many pointless, mundane assignments that take up large amounts of time without actually learning anything in class. I don’t mind working if I’m actually learning something.”

Students described their homework as “boring,” “uninteresting,” “futile,” “repetitive,” “redundant,” “tedious,” “mindless,” and “nonsense.”

This echoes Denise Pope’s book Doing School, which examines how much of what happens in schools doesn’t reflect “real-world” experiences but rather a closed loop of school culture. Education becomes a Möbius strip—an infinite, self-referential loop. Teachers assign homework simply because that’s what teachers do.

Giving Homework vs. Doing Homework

This brings us back to the question of what the difference is between giving homework and doing homework. First let’s look at the difference between the ideas of extrinsic motivation and intrinsic motivation. Extrinsic motivation comes from external factors—grades, praise, fear of failure. It’s doing something because the teacher tells you to, or because you want an “A.” Intrinsic motivation comes from within—doing something because you genuinely want to do it well.

Ron Berger’s idea of “beautiful work” captures this perfectly: when students take pride in what they create, they’re motivated to produce their best work—not because it’s assigned, but because it matters.

Creating Meaningful Learning

The key is to design projects, papers, or assignments that students want to do their best on. This is part of what motivated me to integrate theater into the classroom. Researcher Shirley Brice Heath talks about the need for adolescents to engage in activities that offer risks, rules, and roles. Performing for an audience provides all three.

The projects my daughter loves bringing home most are from her design class. She might not have time in school to finish them to her satisfaction, so she brings them home to keep working—doing homework, yes, but as a natural extension of authentic in-school learning. The teacher sets a due date for the project but doesn’t assign “homework” in the traditional sense of math problems or vocabulary lists.

Recommendations for Schools

To summarize, here’s what I’d encourage schools to consider:

1. Learn at School

Use classroom time to complete the core work of schooling. Move toward block scheduling (90-minute classes) so students can engage deeply during the school day.

2. Projects, Not Assignments

Design long-term projects instead of daily micro-assignments. Build routines and retrieval practices into the daily-life of classrooms rather than assigning as homework (see Holly Korbey’s The Bell Ringer for a deep dive into these).

3. Monitor Homework Time School-Wide

Develop a sensible, collaborative homework policy that respects students’ time.

4. Beautiful Work

Focus on helping students care about the quality of their work, rather than doing assignments for grades or compliance.

5. Authentic Audiences

Create opportunities for students to share their work with real audiences—their peers, families, or the wider community.

I hope to see my own kids never bring home another vocabulary word search or crossword puzzle. Let’s save that time for the kind of learning—and living—that truly matters.