Malcolm Gladwell on Panicking and Choking: The Different Ways that Amateurs and Professionals Fail

Professionals, by definition, are more skilled than amateurs in any given field, but they both experience failure.  And to an average observer, they appear to fail in similar ways.   The practitioner is moving along nicely in carrying out his or her craft -- and then suddenly it all falls apart.  The golf ball flies off …

Michael Ignatieff: Epistemological Panic, or Thinking for Yourself

This post is an essay by Michael Ignatieff published in the most recent issue of Liberties.  Here's a link to the original. What he's talking about is independent thinking.  Universities are supposed to be places where we teach people how to think for themselves, he says, but all too often we teach people to think like …

College Teaching Is Better than You’d Expect

This is an essay that is published in my new book, Being a Scholar: Reflections on Doctoral Study, Scholarly Writing, and Academic Life. For years, I'd been thinking about writing a piece about college teaching  and I finally put it down on paper a couple years ago. Everyone complains about the quality of teaching colleges, …

Career Ladders and the Early School Teacher: A Story of Inequality and Opportunity

This post is a piece I wrote for the 1989 book, American Teachers: Histories of a Profession at Work, edited by Don Warren.  Here’s a link to a PDF of the original.  A slightly different version appeared as a chapter in my 1997 book, How to Succeed in School Without Really Learning.  I agreed to write the chapter a …

Walter Parker — Democracy Dies without Trust or Truth: Shore Up Civics in Schools

This post is a lovely op-ed by Walter Parker, which appeared recently in the Seattle Times.  Here's a link to the original.  Walter is an emeritus professor of civic education at University of Washington.  This essay draws on his forthcoming book, Education for Liberal Democracy.   The topic could not be more timely. Democracy dies without …

Larry Cuban — Kindergarten Teachers as Policymakers

This post is an essay by Larry Cuban about how educational policy is a mix of policy from above and the pedagogical orientations of individual teachers and the choices they make in the classroom.  Here's a link to the original.  Kindergarten Teachers as Policymakers Larry Cuban Watching a policy travel from the White House, a …

Teach for America and Teacher Ed: Heads You Win, Tails We Lose

This post is a paper I published in Journal of Teacher Education in 2010.  Here’s a link to a PDF of the original. This is a summary of the argument:             Teach For America is a marvel at marketing, offering elite college students a win-win option:  By becoming corps members, they can do good and do well at the same …

Larry Cuban — Timelessness of Teacher-Centered Instruction

This post is a piece by Larry Cuban, which he recently published on his blog.  Here's a link to the original. It's all about how some things never change in schools.  Despite the enormous disruption of Covid shutdown and Zoom classrooms, American classrooms remain in the age-old format of teacher-centered instruction.  SKIP TO C Timeless …

Larry Cuban’s Confessions of a School Reformer

This post is a brief promo I wrote for Larry Cuban's wonderful book, Confessions of a School Reformer, which was just published in Kappan.  Here's a link to the original.  They ask Kappan authors to recommend a book in every issue and this was my contribution.  You'll love this book! David Labaree recommends Confessions of a …

Nabokov on Student Exam Essays

This post is a piece by Vladimir Nabokov in response to answers that students wrote for the mid-term exam in his 1957 Cornell literature class.  It appeared in Times Literary Supplement last month with an introduction by Eric Naiman.  Here's a link to the original.   It's fun to imaging the great Russian writer grading undergraduate …