3 with Bri

3 with Bri Empowering teachers to transform drained classrooms into dynamic spaces of risk, energy, and renewed joy.

09/07/2026

🍎 THIS ONE CHANGED MY TEACHING.
Cooper wasn’t a puzzle I eventually “solved.”
He changed the questions I asked.
It’s incredibly easy — especially when we’re exhausted — to explain engagement through student characteristics:
“He doesn’t care.”
“She isn’t motivated.”
“They just don’t want to work.”
Sometimes students absolutely make choices we cannot control.
Engagement design isn’t magic.
But labeling the student doesn’t give me much instructional agency.
So I learned to ask different questions:
What is the entry point?
Where is the risk?
Who is doing the thinking?
Does the student have evidence that they can be successful?
Is the task intellectually meaningful?
Is there a pathway into participation?
What happens here when someone struggles?
Those questions don’t guarantee engagement.
They give me somewhere to ACT.
And that’s why I believe so strongly:
Engagement isn’t something we demand from students. It’s something we design for.
Tomorrow, get curious about ONE student who isn’t leaning into learning yet.
Not: “What’s wrong with them?”
Try: “What might their response be telling me?”
That question might change your year.

Want the framework for designing engagement instead of diagnosing disengagement?
Comment WEBINAR and I’ll send you the registration link to the next live free training.

I thought rest meant sleeping in.Then we got a puppy. 😂And somewhere along the way, my body apparently decided early mor...
09/07/2026

I thought rest meant sleeping in.
Then we got a puppy. 😂
And somewhere along the way, my body apparently decided early mornings were happening whether I agreed to them or not.

So this summer, rest changed shape.
It looked like caffeine in the backyard before the house woke up.
It looked like good friends, good food, and family gathered together.
Renewal looked like finding fringe hours to build something I care deeply about.
And rejoicing looked like watching my kids become more fully themselves—chasing their own interests, finding their strengths, and needing me a little differently than they used to.

That’s the thing I’m carrying into Season 2 of 3 with Bri:
Renew. Rest. Rejoice.
They aren’t destinations we finally figure out. They change as our lives change.

Some seasons take something away and hand you something else instead.
This one did. ❤️

🎙️ Season 2, Episode 1: The 3 Rs of Summer
On Spotify & Apple Podcasts - link in profile

As you look back on your summer:
What did you renew?
How did you rest?
And with whom did you rejoice?

I’d love to hear one of your 3 Rs in the comments.

And send this episode to a friend who’s learning to recognize rest in a new shape, too.

09/05/2026

Choice ≠ Agency
Choice can support motivation.
But not all choices carry equal weight.
Consider the difference:
🟡 “Choose your font.”
versus
🟢 “Choose which of these three questions you want to investigate.”
One changes the appearance.
The other gives students some ownership over their intellectual path.

Meaningful choice might involve:
• topic
• strategy
• sequence
• question
• partner or role when appropriate
• evidence
• method
• product
• position
And we don’t need unlimited choice.
In fact, too many options can create another barrier.
We can design bounded autonomy:
“Here are three meaningful pathways. Choose the one that makes sense for you.”
Structure AND agency.

Tomorrow, look at the choices in your lesson.
Ask: Does this choice change the student’s thinking — or just the packaging?
Comment 🟢 or 🟡 — was your last “choice” meaningful, or just packaging?

SAVE this for planning. Tag a teacher who will hold you accountable to rethink one choice this week.

09/02/2026

WHO is doing the cognitive thinking?
This is a humbling question.
Because teachers work HARD.
We explain.
We model.
We clarify.
We prompt.
We question.
We scaffold.
All of those things can be excellent teaching.
But sometimes our desire to help means we’re doing intellectual work students could be doing.
So here’s a tiny teacher audit:
After you ask a question, pay attention to what YOU do next.
Do you:
➡️ answer it?
➡️ rephrase it immediately?
➡️ give another hint?
➡️ call on the fastest hand?
➡️ fill the silence?
Or do students actually get enough space to wrestle with it?
The goal isn’t less teaching.
The goal is making sure our teaching creates MORE student thinking rather than replacing it.
Tomorrow, choose ONE part of your lesson and ask:
“Where am I answering a question I could instead ask?”
That’s a small shift.
But it changes who owns the thinking.
SAVE this for your lesson-planning audit.

08/30/2026

DAY 14 🍎 Don’t ask students to self-report what you can check.
“Does that make sense?”
“Everybody good?”
“Any questions?”
We say these with the best intentions.
But they often give us very little usable information.
And there can be a social cost to being the ONE student willing to say:
“Actually…no.”
Instead, build a tiny check for understanding.
📝 Write the next step.
✋ Show 1, 2, 3 or 4.
🧠 Explain your reasoning to a partner.
🎨 Sketch what’s happening.
❓ Identify what still doesn’t make sense.
🔍 Find the error.
📚 Give an example — or a non-example.
Now we’re collecting evidence instead of collecting nods.
And because EVERYONE responds, misunderstanding becomes normal information rather than a public confession.
That’s assessment.
That’s participation.
And that’s psychological safety working together.

Save this one — then eliminate one “Does everyone understand?” from tomorrow’s lesson.

08/24/2026

DAY 13 🍎 GROUP WORK ≠ COOPERATIVE LEARNING.
This is where the work of researchers and educators like Cohen & Lotan and Spencer Kagan gives us a much stronger way to think about classroom groups.
Two questions I want you to ask:
1. Is there genuine interdependence?
Do students actually NEED one another’s ideas, information, perspectives or contributions?
2. Is there individual accountability?
Does every student remain intellectually responsible, or can someone disappear into the group?
Without interdependence, we often get four people completing the same task beside one another.
Without individual accountability, we often get one person doing the task FOR everyone.
The goal isn’t busy tables.
The goal is MORE students doing MORE meaningful thinking because of the structure we’ve designed.
Before your next group task, ask:
“Why do these students actually need each other?”
If you don’t have an answer yet, keep designing.
SAVE this before planning your next cooperative task.

08/23/2026

DAY 12 🍎 Before explanation, try observation

One of the principles in my Invitation Framework is Observation.

Why?
Because “What do you notice?” gives students permission to enter the learning before they fully understand it.

Compare:
❌ “Why did this happen?”
with:
✅ “What do you notice happening?”

The first may require background knowledge, interpretation AND confidence that your explanation is correct.
The second opens the door.
And opening the door doesn’t mean we stay there.

NOTICE → WONDER → INTERPRET → EXPLAIN → ARGUE

We’re building toward sophisticated thinking.
We’re just not requiring students to leap there from the parking lot.
Students need a bridge, not a spotlight.

Try starting one lesson tomorrow with nothing but something interesting to observe and:
“What do you notice?”
Then see where their thinking takes you.

SAVE this for your next lesson entry.

08/22/2026

DAY 11 🍎 PREDICT BEFORE YOU EXPLAIN.
One of my favorite lesson-entry moves is also one of the simplest:
Ask students to commit to an idea BEFORE they have all the information.
Prediction changes students from passive receivers of information into people who have something to find out.
Try:
🔮 Which will happen?
📊 What do you think the graph will look like?
📚 What will this character do?
🧪 Which material will work best?
➗ Which strategy will be most efficient?
🌎 What do you think caused this?
📝 Which sentence is stronger — and why?
And here’s the important part:
The prediction doesn’t need to be CORRECT to be valuable.
The payoff is in comparing:
What I thought → what happened → what I understand now.
That’s thinking.
Tomorrow, find one place where you normally EXPLAIN first.
Could you ask students to predict first instead?
SAVE this one. It’s a tiny shift with a big payoff.

08/19/2026

DAY 8 🍎 Students need a bridge, not a spotlight.
This distinction matters.

Psychological safety does NOT mean:
❌ Nobody is ever uncomfortable.
❌ Students are never called upon.
❌ We avoid difficult questions.
❌ Everything is easy.
❌ Wrong answers don’t matter.

We want students doing HARD intellectual work.
But intellectual challenge and social threat are not the same thing.

Imagine the difference between:
“Explain your reasoning to the entire class. Right now.”
and:
“Take a minute to work through your reasoning. Jot down what you’re thinking. Compare it with a partner. Be ready to share something from your conversation.”

The intellectual expectation can remain high while the pathway into participation becomes safer.

That’s the distinction I want us thinking about this school year:
LOWER THE SOCIAL THREAT.
NOT THE INTELLECTUAL DEMAND.

Give students somewhere to put their first imperfect thought.
Give them time to develop it.
Give them opportunities to rehearse language.
And THEN ask them to take the bigger intellectual risk.
That’s not coddling students.
That’s designing access.

📌 SAVE this one for lesson planning.

And SHARE it with a teacher who believes rigorous classrooms can also be safe classrooms.

08/18/2026

DAY 7🍎 Stop letting speed determine who gets to participate.

Traditional hand-raising has an unintended side effect:
The quickest and most confident thinkers can dominate the intellectual space.
Meanwhile, everyone else learns that participation is optional.
This is where cooperative-learning structures become incredibly powerful.

Good structure changes the question from:
“Who wants to participate?”
to:
“How will everyone participate?”

Try replacing one hand-raising question with:
• Everybody writes
• Think-pair-share
• Simultaneous response
• Partner rehearsal
• Individual think → group consensus
• Each person contributes one idea

And here’s the important part:
Structure isn’t about making the lesson busier.

The goal is to increase the number of students doing meaningful cognitive work.

Tomorrow, count the hands you hear from.
Then ask yourself an even better question:
How many BRAINS did I hear from?

Send this to your teaching team and choose one all-student response structure to try this week.

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