Founder and CEO of thinkLaw, Colin Seale, recaps his time with the West Allis-West Milwaukee School District. The West Allis-West Milwaukee School District is putting …
When I first started teaching, my ELA classes had an ongoing discussion throughout the year about reliable sources. We kept an anchor chart with helpful …
"Give me 100 crates to stand on, but if I am still watching the game from outside of the fence, that's not equity."
In this powerful conversation, Colin Seale, Founder and CEO of thinkLaw, and Dr. Sulla at Learning Unwrapped, ask "equity for what?"
How do we unlock brilliance in our students? Colin joins Natalie Conway at Adventures in Online Education to talk about moving beyond compliance to build psychological safety in our online classes and engage all students with critical thinking.
In our blog post, "Teachers Never Have Enough Time: 3 Reasons You Should Prioritize Pressing Pause During Your Instruction", we talked about the importance of pressing pause to ask thinkers about their gut reactions and have them consider what questions they need to ask. This strategy is quick, simple, and powerful. Pressing pause is a vital real-world skill. But we also want to prioritize mandating joy in our classrooms, so here is a way to practice this skill while having fun!
At thinkLaw we like to play a game called “Informed Opinion.”
During our time in education, we’ve all received that email. The email where you can predict the content of the body just from the sender’s name and subject line. The kind of email you do not even want to open. These emails usually pop up at the worst time: a notification on your phone right when you sit down for dinner or when you want to go to bed. How do you respond? When do you respond?
In our article, "Teachers Never Have Enough Time", we explain the power of students Pressing Pause during instruction. But the reality is that the same thinkLaw strategies educators use in their classroom are also powerful for the adults to practice.
Recently I was driving through morning traffic with my two high school freshmen in the vehicle. Morning gab radio was on in the background when a story caught our attention. The DJs were interviewing a woman who claimed to have captured the call of a Bigfoot and the station was about to play the audio. I did what any good parent would do. I turned up the volume and told them to stop talking.
I am not sure what I was expecting, but it was not the sound they played. The call was extremely high pitched, more chihuahua than pit bull.
This small moment was the perfect time to practice a thinkLaw critical thinking strategy on the fly. We pressed pause.
We know that getting all the things on the supply checklist still matters. But in his article for Ed Post, Colin Seale argues that what matters even more is that teachers can collect the checklist of our children’s expertise, superpowers, interests, struggles, and joys.
