The first great snowstorm of 2026 hit Kentucky last week and sent many schools either to pure snow days or Non-Traditional Instruction (NTI) days. So, I spent most of last week sitting at my desk, unshowered, unshaved, and low-key fiending for in-person human interactions.
Doing my best to keep spirits up, I put together a quick playlist with some of my late-70s baby post-punk/new wave goodness and shared it with my teachers.
The reviews were overwhelmingly positive.
The Eclectic Educator is a free resource for everyone passionate about education and creativity. If you enjoy the content and want to support the newsletter, consider becoming a paid subscriber. Your support helps keep the insights and inspiration coming!
Belonging is one of the most talked-about—and most misunderstood—ideas in education.
We often treat it like a feeling that students either bring with them or don’t. If students feel disconnected, we respond with posters, slogans, or one-off activities meant to “build relationships.”
Those things aren’t bad. But they’re not enough.
Here’s the shift that matters:
Belonging isn’t a feeling problem. It’s a design problem.
What the Science of Learning and Development Tells Us
Research on the Science of Learning and Development (SoLD) shows that belonging is deeply linked to learning. Students are more likely to engage, persist, and take academic risks when they feel safe, seen, and valued.
But belonging doesn’t magically appear.
It’s shaped by instructional choices:
Who gets to speak—and how often
Who gets choice and agency
Whose knowledge and experiences are treated as valuable
How mistakes are responded to
Whether feedback invites growth or signals judgment
In other words, belonging lives inside the work itself.
Why Posters Aren’t Enough
A classroom can say “You belong here” on the wall and still send the opposite message through its design.
If tasks are rigid, voices are limited, and thinking is narrowly defined, students quickly learn where they stand.
Belonging isn’t something we add after instruction.
We build it into it.
Designing for Belonging
Designing for belonging doesn’t mean lowering expectations. It means creating structures that invite students to participate meaningfully.
That can look like:
Tasks with multiple entry points
Opportunities for students to connect learning to their experiences
Structured collaboration where every voice has a role
Feedback that focuses on growth instead of compliance
When belonging is intentional, students are more willing to engage deeply—and learning becomes more durable.
A Coaching Note from the Field
When teachers ask how to “build better relationships,” I often start with lesson design.
Relationships grow when students feel their thinking matters.
Belonging isn’t an add-on.
It’s an instructional choice.
If this way of thinking resonates, I write a short weekly newsletter for teachers and instructional leaders focused on authentic learning, instructional coaching, and designing schools that actually work.
For years, we’ve treated engagement like something teachers should be able to manufacture on demand.
If students aren’t engaged, the assumption is often that the lesson wasn’t exciting enough, interactive enough, or energetic enough. So we add activities. We add movement. We add tools. We add noise.
And then we’re surprised when it still doesn’t work.
Here’s the hard truth I’ve learned as an instructional coach:
Engagement isn’t something you plan for. It’s something you earn.
Why Planning for Engagement Often Backfires
When engagement becomes the primary goal of lesson planning, we usually end up designing around surface-level behaviors:
Are students busy?
Are they moving?
Are they talking?
Are they smiling?
But none of those things guarantees learning.
In fact, classrooms can look highly engaged while very little meaningful thinking is happening. Students comply. They complete. They perform school.
And teachers feel frustrated because they did everything “right.”
What the Research Actually Tells Us
Research connected to the Science of Learning and Development (SoLD) consistently points to the same conclusion:
Engagement follows meaning.
Students are more likely to engage when:
The task feels relevant to their lives or the world around them
They have some sense of ownership or choice
The thinking required actually matters
When those conditions are present, engagement emerges naturally. When they’re missing, no amount of energy can save the lesson.
This is why gimmicks don’t scale—and why they exhaust teachers.
Shifting the Planning Question
Instead of starting with:
“How do I make this engaging?”
Try starting with:
“Why would this matter to a student?”
That single question forces a different kind of design thinking:
What problem is being explored?
What decisions are students being asked to make?
Who or what is this work for?
Where does student thinking actually show up?
When lessons are built around those questions, engagement becomes a byproduct—not a burden.
What This Means for Teachers
This shift doesn’t require abandoning structure, rigor, or content. It requires recentering the work on meaningful thinking rather than performance.
It also reduces burnout.
When students carry more cognitive load, teachers don’t have to bring all the energy. The work itself does more of the heavy lifting.
That’s not about doing less—it’s about doing different.
A Coaching Note from the Field
When teachers tell me, “My students just aren’t engaged,” my response is rarely about strategies.
It’s usually about the task.
Fix the task, and engagement often surprises you.
If this way of thinking resonates, I write a short weekly newsletter for teachers and instructional leaders focused on authentic learning, instructional coaching, and designing school in ways that actually work.
No spam. No gimmicks. Just clear thinking from the field.
I have a small whiteboard outside my office door. Being the inspirational do-gooder that I am, I change out the quote at least once a week. Sometimes the quotes are fun, sometimes more meaningful.
I though this was an appropriate quote for our first week back to class.
“I’m gonna go grab a Coke or something caffeinated, because it’s gonna be a long night.”
-Will Byers
The Eclectic Educator is a free resource for everyone passionate about education and creativity. If you enjoy the content and want to support the newsletter, consider becoming a paid subscriber. Your support helps keep the insights and inspiration coming!
I’m revisiting some of my everyday tools as we head into 2026. Why? Because… reasons…
Mostly, I’m thinking about how I move through my days and how I combine analog and digital tools to keep my monkey brain moving and productive.
Tool 1: I’ve moved away from Google Search. Face it, friends: it’s trash. Whether beset by so many ads you can’t find actual sites or that actual, worthwhile sites are pushed further and further down the page because of the ongoing enshittification of Google and other services, I’ve switched to Kagi.
I won’t go into all the details of why here (soon), but suffice it to say that Kagi just works like a good search engine should. Yes, I now pay for the privilege of decent web searches. Or, I ask ChatGPT for an awful lot of things before I try any searches at all.
Tool 2: I’m abandoning Notion for all but one thing, and that’s tracking my reading. I’ve got a database for all my books (read, TBR, and want to buy) in a Notion database and using a tool called NotionReads, I can easily add books to the database, pulling necessary data for each book.
I thought about just using a Google Sheet for this purpose, but Notion works well for this process. For my daily note capture and digital Zettelkasten, I’m moving to Obsidian. I’ve had it for a few years but initially went with Notion for note-taking. However, after dealing with more software bloat than I wanted and only seeing more of it on the horizon for Notion – why do we always want a tool to do everything rather than just doing one thing really well? – I’m jumping ship to Obsidian.
I’m still using Readwise to capture highlights from the web and the few remaining Kindle books I’ve yet to read – more on my shift from digital to physical books soon – and I can import those highlights seamlessly into Obsidian. I’m using Steph Ango’s usage strategy for setting up my Obsidian vault since it makes the most sense to my seeing-all-things-as-an-interconnected-web brain. More on how that progresses soon, too.
Pulling into the final year of my dissertation journey, there’s more to come from me this year. Besides, this year marks 20 years of publishing web content, so we’ll see what that brings.
The Eclectic Educator is a free resource for everyone passionate about education and creativity. If you enjoy the content and want to support the newsletter, consider becoming a paid subscriber. Your support helps keep the insights and inspiration coming!
New Oklahoma Superintendent Rescinds Bible Mandate: Oklahoma’s new superintendent, Lindel Fields, will not enforce the previous mandate to place Bibles in public school classrooms. This change marks a shift away from the former superintendent’s focus on culture war issues. Fields aims to improve the quality of education and student outcomes in the state.
Life: The First Few Levels – Traditional education resembles old computer games in its reliance on manuals and tests. Modern games teach players through simple, fun challenges that build skills and allow failure without harsh consequences. Education should be more like these games, using real-life examples to prepare students for the future.
“A life of dangerous adventures might seem worth it now… but one day, you will have children, and you will not want that life for them.” — M. L. Wang, The Sword of Kaigen
The Eclectic Educator is a free resource for everyone passionate about education and creativity. If you enjoy the content and want to support the newsletter, consider becoming a paid subscriber. Your support helps keep the insights and inspiration coming!
Illustrative Math’s CEO on What Went Wrong in NYC and Why Pre-K Math is Up Next – Illustrative Mathematics created a K-12 math curriculum used in many U.S. schools, but its rollout in New York City faced challenges due to implementation issues. The curriculum encourages students to think about problems before teachers explain solutions, blending direct teaching with student exploration. The organization is now focusing on early math by developing a pre-K curriculum to help students succeed from the start.
Mark Rober’s underwater search for a flooded Gold Rush mining town – (This is so FREAKING cool) Mark Rober used sonar and a small submarine to search for a flooded Gold Rush town under Folsom Lake in California. The town was covered by water after a dam was built in 1955. Despite challenges, the team found interesting shapes and objects on the lakebed.
D’Angelo: 14 Essential Songs – D’Angelo was a talented soul singer, songwriter, and producer known for his unique style and deep musicianship. He released three important albums blending soul, funk, jazz, and hip-hop, influencing the neo-soul movement. Despite personal struggles, his music remains powerful and full of emotion, exploring love, pain, and social issues.
The Eclectic Educator is a free resource for everyone passionate about education and creativity. If you enjoy the content and want to support the newsletter, consider becoming a paid subscriber. Your support helps keep the insights and inspiration coming!
I’ve been on a zine kick for a while now, and recently had the chance to walk teachers through making their first zine.
We worked on creating their own zines, which was fun and made many of them uncomfortable, which is perfectly OK. I compiled some quick links and information, and we discussed potential ideas they might consider and run with when working with students.
Oh, and here’s the zine I made during one of the sessions. Feel free to use it to introduce the idea of zines to your peers and admin.
A zine (short for “magazine” or “fanzine”) is a small-circulation, self-published work, often made by hand, that can take many forms—comics, essays, art, collages, instructions, etc.
Because zines are informal, tactile, and often DIY, they offer a low-stakes way for students to share voice, experiment with layout or narrative, and synthesize content in creative formats.
Zines are used in classrooms to teach skills such as media literacy, personal narrative, research synthesis, visual thinking, and more.
“Enshittification”: Cory Doctorow on Why Big Tech Sucks, Keeps Getting Worse & What to Do About It – Big tech platforms like Facebook and Google get worse over time because they focus on profit, not users. This process, known as “enshittification,” ensnares users and businesses, yielding little value for anyone except shareholders. To fix this, we need better rules and new kinds of platforms that serve people, not just profits.
The Post-Pandemic Promise of High-Impact Tutoring – Following the pandemic, numerous U.S. schools have adopted high-impact tutoring to enhance student learning outcomes. Successful tutoring programs connect with teaching and have dedicated managers to ensure they work well. Tutoring also helps inspire young people to become teachers and is gaining support and funding from states.
Red school boards in a blue state asked Trump for help — and got it – In Washington state, conservative school boards like Mead challenged rules protecting transgender students. They asked the Trump administration for help to avoid losing funding over these policies. This sparked a federal investigation and deepened local conflicts about education and student rights.
Numerous Billionaires Preparing for End of Society – Many tech billionaires fear that advanced AI could cause society to collapse. They are preparing by building bunkers and gathering supplies to survive. While AI might bring great benefits, these wealthy leaders are ready to protect themselves regardless of the outcome, which, of course, doesn’t involve any of us mere mortal peasants.
The Eclectic Educator is a free resource for everyone passionate about education and creativity. If you enjoy the content and want to support the newsletter, consider becoming a paid subscriber. Your support helps keep the insights and inspiration coming!
Collage time. I took an image from the most recent Wired politics issue from a Steven Levy article about the decidedly traitorous Silicon Valley denizens whom people like me used to look up to and thought were disruptors and fearless resisters to the status quo.
