About

I’m a teacher and school best prac­tices enthu­si­ast. I read basi­cally every­thing that comes out about behav­ioral and pos­i­tive psy­chol­ogy, man­age­ment and biogra­phies of all kinds.

I’m always on the look out for prac­ti­cal lessons I can share with my stu­dents. And, as a new dad, I feel dou­bly com­mit­ted to this mission.

For exam­ple, Daniel Gilbert writes in Stum­bling on Hap­pi­ness that peo­ple adapt to win­ning the lot­tery. The research says it most likely wouldn’t effect your hap­pi­ness or at least not for very long. This is called “hedo­nis­tic adap­ta­tion.” We quickly grow accus­tomed to changes. So if you win the lot­tery or lose the use of your legs tonight it will only take maybe a few months or a year until you’ve returned to your orig­i­nal level of hap­pi­ness and con­tent­ment. I love those kinds of insights. We each have a level of hap­pi­ness and sat­is­fac­tion with life that we live with. (This isn’t to say how­ever, that your level can’t be changed). I find these kinds of ideas fascinating.

So this is my per­sis­tent inter­est, to make sure I’m always grow­ing in my enjoy­ment of life and in my abil­ity to help other people.

I have trav­eled the world as a teacher (and some­times as a writer). I have worked on 4 con­ti­nents gath­er­ing insights, as we all do, along the way. I have 3 uni­ver­sity degrees, includ­ing a Degree in Teach­ing and an MBA. And I read, on aver­age, more than one non-fiction book per week –which helps me share the lat­est research with my students.

I really love my job. I feel very priv­i­leged that my job is to share ideas with a group of ambi­tious, hard work­ing teenagers and to help to pre­pare them for uni­ver­sity and, more gen­er­ally, for life as an adult.

My approach in gen­eral empha­sizes exper­i­men­tal­ism and sto­ry­telling. And I am pas­sion­ate about best prac­tices. I think I’m the only teacher I’ve met who inter­views his peers and takes notes on the tech­niques they say are work­ing the best for them. (I share some of those insights here).

As I teach in Busi­ness class, we don’t always know why some­thing works well, but that’s not always a prob­lem. Life (and being a stu­dent) is an art as much as a sci­ence. As long as we con­tinue exper­i­ment­ing and notice what works and what doesn’t, we can con­tinue improv­ing. This is as true for my own prac­tice as much as for my stu­dents’. And I feel that since I have taken on an iter­a­tive, self-reflective approach it has allowed me to improve my effec­tive­ness as a teacher by around 10% every year –some years much more than that. I also find that every year I teach I am more and more moti­vated to see them do better.