Welcome back after Christmas. Here’s a story fit for the season: High school English teacher David Menasche is traveling the country to see how his teaching has affected the lives of his former students. Menasche is dying of cancer and wants to know if his dedication made a difference (which it obviously did) and this […]

As we encourage teachers to communicate more with the wider public, we need to be up front that it might involve enduring some uncivil blog response — we may sometimes get some cranky comments on what we have to say. This came up because Peter Smagorinsky sent us a lovely portrait of a great teacher […]

New data shows that American kids are moving up toward the top in international comparisons of reading achievement. We may not consider the standardized measures very meaningful, but since people do use them to criticize our schools, we should call attention when they’re more positive. So use this new info about U.S. 4th graders as reported […]

So read in this link to THE Journal (focused on technology in education) about how American teachers just like you win awards for outstanding projects using technology with their kids. And when you see what the projects are about you’ll realize that you and dozens of teachers you know conduct activities just as exciting as […]

Your blogger is back, contemplating Sandy Hook, which includes mourning loss yet celebrating teaching. The wonderful work by those teachers and the principal reflect education at its very best — promoting thinking and inquiring, while caring for the children and recognizing them as individuals, continually improving teachers’ practice even though they were already outstanding. We […]

Steve is still on break, but this is his colleague Harry with an article from The New York Times describing a great strategy from an inspiring Massachusetts middle school teacher, Ron Adams, for getting the word out about his wonderful classroom. When Adams meets journalists, senators, governors, mayors, school superintendents, and professors, he sends them annual […]

Dear Teachers Speak Up Readers– Your friendly blogger is taking a short break. When I’m back on line here, I hope to see some great news of teachers’ messages to the wider world.

Our latest podcast interviews are now available for your listening pleasure on the NCTE website. Harry Ross and I interviewed Kevin Hodgson, Massachusetts middle school teacher and member of the Western Mass. Writing Project. He explains the WMWP partnership with the local newspaper, the Hampshire Gazette, to feature teacher newspaper columns once a month. These […]

OK, let’s look at something new today: how workers in another field besides education communicate publicly about an issue. Let’s compare teachers vs female game designers. The issue is sexual harassment in the video game industry, and this story on NBCNews.com quotes a storm of Twitter feeds by women telling their harassment stories. And if […]

There are a great many ways to tell a teacher’s story so that the public can appreciate the value and the humanity in what we do. We just learned about a teacher, Jeff Kelly Lowenstein, who web-published a tribute to his own 4th grade teacher — an autobiographical piece following the teacher’s career and his […]