School of Practice

What’s your take on eliminating zeros from the grade book? Does your school have a no-zeros grading policy? Even if it doesn’t, you probably have opinions about it. 

Setting 50% as the minimum grading threshold is a well-meaning effort to more accurately assess student learning, but it can also create new—and frustrating—challenges for teachers and students.

In this episode of School of Practice, teacher and instructional coach Tyler Rablin explores the tradeoffs of eliminating zeros from the grade book. We’ll hear from teachers in our community with firsthand experience navigating the policy, and discuss exceptional strategies for building motivation and accountability without relying on numerical penalties.

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The end of the school year can feel like the best––and worst––of times. 

On the one hand, it’s a great stretch because “the routines and procedures are set,” and the kids have their sights set on summer vacation, says Kansas City-based middle school ELA teacher Jeremiah Kim. But the workload for teachers closing out the year can be intense. “We all just want to be done, but we still have these boxes to check,” he says.

In this episode of School of Practice, Kim joins host Kristin Leong to explore a toolkit of low-lift, delightful,  teacher-tested activities that inject celebration, meaningful reflection, and even some review into the last few weeks of class. 

Hang in there, teachers, summer break is just around the corner! 

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It’s a mistake to assume that good differentiation always means splitting students up into small groups, says Michael McDowell, an author, coach, and former teacher. 

A more effective approach, he says, is to design rigorous learning routines that unite the whole class—from fast finishers to kids who need extra support—with shared strategies, structures, and thinking moves. 

Think: Same surface, different deep problems, much more time in the “we do” space, and a big emphasis on high-quality classroom discussion.

In this episode of School of Practice, McDowell breaks down three low-prep differentiation strategies, explains how and when small groups fit into the picture, and makes the case for basketball over ping-pong question protocols. 

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Have you ever delivered a lesson and felt your students were acing it, only to revisit the same information a week later and realize hardly any of the new content stuck? You just came up against the forgetting curve—and lost.

Our brains are hardwired to forget things unless we take active steps to remember. According to research, nearly half of new information—if not used right away—is forgotten within an hour of exposure. And if you wait a week, up to 90 percent fades into the mist.

But that’s not inevitable. In this critical episode of School of Practice, high school teacher Cathleen Beachboard shares her top three strategies to help students remember what she’s just taught them. We’ll ask her how she weaves these strategies directly into the learning process as she works to “flatten the forgetting curve.”

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Can your students spot what’s real and what’s AI-generated on TikTok and Instagram? 

How about when they’re researching topics for humanities classes, gathering sources in social studies, and preparing for math assessments? 

In this super-engaging lesson developed by science teacher Katie Coppens and researcher and former STEM teacher Andy Zucker, students become digital detectives, analyzing a set of videos and websites to determine what’s real, what’s been altered, and what’s just pure misinformation. ⁠

The catch? They can’t just guess. They have to be able to defend their conclusions with evidence. ⁠

Join us for this unmissable episode of School of Practice, we’ll walk through detailed lesson instructions, explore the best strategies for zeroing in on digital misinformation, and share all the resources you’ll need to teach this 60-minute lesson in your own classroom. 

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Narrow, rigid math has “turned students off for generations,” says renowned researcher and Stanford mathematics professor Jo Boaler. 

Yet teachers often don’t have much choice when it comes to math curriculum—what’s mandated by a school or district is what they need to teach.

That’s where *rich tasks* can be transformative, Boaler argues, because they invite the type of reasoning and problem-solving that get kids digging in and taking risks. 

In this episode of School of Practice, we’ll chat with Boaler—who’s spent decades studying math teaching—about how to choose, adapt, and improve math tasks; the power of reasoning and visualizing math questions; and the impact of tiny tweaks, like asking students: “Can you prove it to me visually?”

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Getting scaffolding right—amid the messy reality of teaching 30+ students at different skill levels—is one of the toughest challenges in teaching. 

Done well, it looks like tactical magic: teachers seamlessly know how and when to support kids, then step back at just the right moment, building independence by removing the training wheels. 

In this episode of School of Practice, we get into it with Beck Alber, a former high school ELA teacher and UCLA School of Education instructor. She unpacks the evidence-based essentials of smart, timely scaffolding—both for new teachers, as well as classroom veterans (have you changed up your routines lately? No? Alber’s got suggestions for that). We’ll chat about how to determine if your scaffolds are working, what to do if they’re not, and what a strong scaffolding toolbox looks like. 

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Maybe you’ve seen it in your classroom: Students who zip through chapters but then can’t tell you much about what they just read. To move those kids from fluency to sense-making, you’ve got to teach them the habits of good independent readers.

In this episode of School of Practice, educator and literacy specialist Nina Parrish walks us through evidence-based strategies that keep kids focused as they tackle challenging texts—from pre-reading tactics that make vocabulary stick and activate prior knowledge, to active reading protocols that turn kids into engaged, metacognitive readers who are always asking themselves, “Did I really understand that?”

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Have you ever been shocked when your students bomb a unit test after weeks of seemingly locked-in learning? 

Veteran educator Jay McTighe has the ultimate research-backed solution: formative assessment. In the best-case scenario, it’s frequent, quick, and highly attuned to the content and your students. 

“You don’t want to wait till the end to find out, ‘Gosh, I didn’t realize the kids never understood this concept or had this continued skill error,’” says McTighe, an author and assessment expert. “Whatever you’re teaching, you should always be doing very quick checks to see how it’s working.”

Frequent pulse checks midstream are “potentially one of a classroom educator’s most powerful tools to enhance student learning,” according to David Marzano, a leading researcher. They’re also important tools for students to gauge their own progress. The key to getting the best outcomes is *how* you deploy them.

In this episode of School of Practice, we chat with McTighe about how to get the most out of formative assessments, how to choose the right technique for your content and students, how to insert them seamlessly into the flow of instruction, and whether or not they should be graded. Plus, Jay shares his “Vagoo Rule,” a mysterious yet very important tip that you won’t want to miss.

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Did you know there’s a strong connection between the hand and the neural circuitry of the brain? 

As students learn to write letters by hand, they also learn to recognize them more fluently. This letter recognition leads to greater letter-writing fluency, which leads to stronger overall reading development. Handwriting, the research reveals, is in fact a foundational tool for literacy. And as kids get older, the benefits continue, deepening how they process new material and encode learning.

Meanwhile, good handwriting instruction doesn’t require a huge time investment: Brief instructional lessons followed by frequent modeling and feedback for students can slip into all areas of the curriculum throughout the school day, says Brooke MacKenzie, a former elementary teacher and certified reading specialist. “Handwriting practice can and should be quick and dirty,” she says. “It’s not like you need a 20-minute lesson on how to hold your pencil.”

In this episode of School of Practice, MacKenzie chats with us about four fundamental handwriting skills. Plus, she shares her top instructional secrets—from using cursive to help students struggling with print to why Kindergarteners should “talk to their pencils.”

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