Banner of a Zoom screen with caption "Low-Tech Zoom Success"

Low-Tech, Low-Prep Success with Zoom—new mini-course!

Having heard from lots of people with both thanks and follow-up questions on various presentations I’ve done about using Zoom as a teacher, I decided to make a little course in 10 bite-sized modules—under 10 minutes each—to share my experience and tips for getting a ton out of Zoom without needing to learn any other […]

Pick Your Health—The Stakes Are Incredibly High

This post is a personal reflection and a challenge on the topic of my teacher mantra video #3, which you can watch here or at the bottom of this page. During the last two weeks, I have had two physical and mental crashes—times when, due to poor self-care the previous several days, I spent an […]

Banner with colorful hammock in California backyard and hashtags #BuyInSwitcheroo and #MakeLemonade

Finding the Buy-In Switcheroo

I’m all about improving teaching and learning without creating more work for anybody. The most recent pair of videos in the Tuned-In Teacher Mantra series addresses two of my favorite techniques for doing just that—in both face-to-face and virtual teaching. I’ve described the Buy-In Switcheroo and Making Lemonade before (in this post), but I believe […]

Justin Slocum Bailey listening to the waves on a rocky beach in Boston

3 Mantras for Calm Presence in the Classroom

How students perceive our presence in the classroom has a huge impact on everything from their trust in us to their ability to learn efficiently. This is partly due to mirror neurons and partly because how we feel (or act like we feel) affects our communication, our enthusiasm, our attention to students’ needs, and even […]

Honoring curiosity & risk while keeping class on track

It’s great when students are curious. It’s exciting when students aim high. It’s rewarding when students make connections. It’s thrilling when students take risks. But what about those times when one of these can get the class too far off track, or when satisfying one student’s curiosity would lose the rest, or when a student […]

Do You Really Care about Human Beings?

Nothing is as important as human beings. Not ideas, not subjects, not institutions, not goals, not lessons, not information, nothing. This hit me harder than usual in the past week during some fraught threads on social media. I realized that I was drawn to some views more than others not just because of the overall […]