November 16, 2025 | Updated November 17, 2025 What’s the definition of a ‘good question’? We often say to one another, ‘That’s a good question,’ by which…
Read more The Difference Between A Good Question And A Bad Question – TeachThoughtNovember 14, 2025 | Updated November 13, 2025 12 Common Reasons Students Don’t Read & What You Can Do About It by Terry Heick Why don’t students…
Read more 12 Reasons Students Don’t Read & What You Can Do About It – TeachThoughtProtecting your planning period by shutting your door isn’t ‘backwards teaching,’ it’s a survival strategy. Source Terry Heick Source link
Read more Teaching Is Human Work. Systems Aren’t Built for That. – TeachThoughtby Terry Heick You care but it’s a tired cliche–limps out of your mouth, barely alive: “How was school?” You might use a slight variation like, “What’d you…
Read more What Did You Learn In School Today? 44 Alternativesby Terry Heick In his essay Two Minds, Wendell Berry, unsurprisingly enough, offers up two tones of thought produced by two kinds of ‘mind’—Rational, and Sympathetic. One is…
Read more The Two Minds Of An Educatorby Terry Heick Quality—you know what it is, yet you don’t know what it is. But that’s self-contradictory. But some things are better than others, that is, they…
Read more Teaching Students To See Qualityby Terry Heick As a culture, we have a thought crisis–namely, a harmful and enduring refusal and/or inability to think well and think critically. This is just an…
Read more Correcting The Deficit In Critical Thinkingby Terry Heick How can you tell if a student really understands something? They learn early on to play the game—tell the teacher and/or the test what they…
Read more 6 Domains Of Cognition: The TeachThought Learning Taxonomyby Terry Heick We tend to teach reading in a very industrial way. We focus on giving kids ‘tools’ and ‘strategies’ to ‘make’ sense of a text. To…
Read more Why Some Students Think They Dislike Reading | TeachThoughtby Terry Heick My wife is a schoolteacher, and recently I’ve been listening to her online meetings. And there have been a lot of them. Yesterday, I was…
Read more 8 Strategies Your Teaching More Enjoyable This Year – TeachThoughtby Terry Heick The first step in helping students think for themselves just might be to help them see who they are and where they are and what…
Read more Why Teaching Critical Thinking Starts With The StudentTeach Students To Think Irrationally by Terry Heick Formal learning is a humbling thing. As planners, designers, executors, and general caretakers of public and private education systems, we…
Read more Teach Students To Think IrrationallyCritical thinking is the ongoing application of unbiased analysis in pursuit of objective truth. Although its name implies criticism, critical thinking is actually closer to ‘truth judgment‘ based…
Read more 8 Of The Most Important Critical Thinking Skills – TeachThoughtby Terry Heick Grading problems are one of the most urgent bugaboos of good teaching. Grading can take an extraordinary amount of time. It can also demoralize students,…
Read more How I Eliminated (Almost) All Grading Problems In My Classroomby Terry Heick Every few months, I see an article making the rounds that critical thinking isn’t a skill and therefore can’t be taught. And because it’s also…
Read more Critical Thinking Is A Mindsetby Terry Heick Humility is an interesting starting point for learning. In an era of media that is digital, social, chopped up, and endlessly recirculated, the challenge is…
Read more 7 Ideas For Learning Through HumilityKnowledge is limited. Knowledge deficits are unlimited. Knowing something–all of the things you don’t know collectively is a form of knowledge. There are many forms of knowledge–let’s think…
Read more Some Thoughts On Knowledge And Knowledge Limits0 by Terry Heick The influence of Berry on my life–and thus inseparably from my teaching and learning–has been immeasurable. His ideas on scale, limits, accountability, community,…
Read more Wendell Berry And Preparing Students For “Good Work”A critical thinking strategy is simply a ‘way’ to encourage or facilitate the cognitive act of thinking critically. Critical thinking is the ongoing application of unbiased, accurate, and…
Read more 50 Critical Thinking Strategies For Learningby Terry Heick I first encountered the 40/40/40 rule years ago while skimming one of those giant (and indispensable) 400 page Understanding by Design tomes. The question was…
Read more Which Content Is Most Important? The 40/40/40 Rule
