Join the Club

If You Always Call on the Fastest Hand, You Teach the Room Something The question is asked. A hand shoots up. Then another. The teacher calls on one of them, the answer comes quickly, and the lesson keeps moving. It feels efficient. It may even feel like engagement. Over time, though, the room begins to learn something that was never part of the lesson plan. It learns whose voice counts. It learns how quickly an answer needs to arrive. It learns whether thinking time is actua

One of the hardest things for a practitioner is watching someone struggle when you know exactly how to fix it. You see the student hesitate. You hear the silence after the question. You watch someone start down the wrong path. You know the answer, the next step, the better strategy. Every instinct says: help. That instinct comes from care. Care, though, can quickly become rescue. Difficulty alone does not build courage. Supported uncertainty can. The distinction is important.

A student completes a lesson successfully. They answer the questions, participate in the activity, and demonstrate the skill on the assessment. Then, a few days later, they encounter the same idea in a slightly different situation and seem unable to recognize it. Teachers are often left wondering: But we just learned this. The challenge may not be that the student failed to learn the skill. The challenge may be that the student has not yet learned how to transfer it. Transfer

When I used to observe sample lessons from teacher candidates, I always watched for something that was not written into the lesson plan. I watched for presence. Not performance. Not volume. Not charisma in the showy sense. Presence. Sometimes the lesson itself was not the strongest part of the interview. The objective might have needed tightening. The pacing might have been uneven. The materials might have been ordinary. Yet, there were moments when a candidate walked into th