We can help — or risk harm — with the metaphors our syllabi embody, and so to serve students as best we can, we must choose our metaphors well.

In order for students to become public communicators, we must do away with closed platforms that purport to mimic open web functionality. Here’s why.

When we stop judging students they stop judging and censoring themselves. They begin to actually learn. Even in a STEM class.

It was time to open up the classroom. I was tired of doing class on my own. Tired of designing lesson plans that minutely mapped every second of my time together with the students. It was time for students to take ownership of class.

We have lots of definitions of “college readiness”; here are the ACT’s definitions [http://www.act.org/standard/] as well as the Common Core’s in Language Arts [http://www.corestandards.org/