What Teachers Can Learn from Decisive
Teachers make dozens of small, high-consequence decisions every day — how to handle a disruptive student, whether to change a lesson plan mid-unit, which struggling learner needs a different approach — usually with no time to deliberate and no second opinion in the room. Decisive is useful here because it addresses exactly this bind: how to widen a narrow in-the-moment choice, check it against real signals from students rather than gut instinct alone, and avoid deciding out of the frustration or fatigue of a hard class period.
The whole book, compressed
This edition works through 4 core lessons — take them one at a time, not all at once.
What's different for your conditions
Tap whichever ones sound like you. Nothing here is sent or saved — it's just for your own noticing.
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The core lessons, applied to you
Look past the two choices the moment hands you
When a student is struggling or a lesson is falling flat, the instinctive choice often collapses to two options — push through as planned, or abandon it entirely. Pausing to ask what a third approach might look like, even a small modification, usually opens up something better than either extreme.
A teacher notices a unit isn't landing and faces what feels like a binary — finish the unit as planned or scrap it and start something new — without considering a middle path like restructuring just the next two lessons around a different entry point for the same material.
When a lesson or approach isn't working, before deciding to abandon or push through, write down one modest adjustment you haven't tried yet and give it a single class period before deciding further.
Check your read of a student against more than one moment
A single tense interaction or one week of missed homework can create a strong internal story about a student that isn't actually representative. Before acting on that story, it's worth gathering a broader, more outside view — another teacher's observation, a look at the student's work over a longer stretch, or a direct conversation.
A teacher becomes convinced a student is simply unmotivated based on two weeks of incomplete homework, and starts treating them accordingly, without asking a colleague who has the same student in another period, or checking whether something changed at home.
Before forming a lasting judgment about a student's ability or attitude, check your impression against one outside source — another teacher, a parent conversation, or the student's own explanation — before deciding how to respond.
Don't grade the whole year off today's bad class
A single chaotic period or a rough parent email can trigger a decision — changing a seating chart, rewriting a rule, escalating a discipline case — that reflects the sting of that one moment more than a considered judgment about what's actually needed.
After an unusually disruptive class right before lunch, a teacher decides on the spot to eliminate group work for the rest of the semester, a decision driven by that day's frustration rather than a clear look at whether group work has actually been the problem.
When you feel the pull to make a lasting change right after a hard moment, write the decision down and wait until the next planning period or the next day to confirm it — most decisions lose nothing by waiting a few hours.
Plan for the lesson that doesn't land
Because no lesson plan or classroom strategy works exactly as expected every time, it helps to decide in advance what you'll watch for as a sign the approach isn't working, and to build in a natural checkpoint — the end of the week, the end of the unit — to honestly assess and adjust rather than waiting until a grade or a parent complaint forces the issue.
Widening your options and getting outside information both take time you don't have mid-class. The practical answer is to do most of this thinking outside the classroom — in planning periods and team meetings — so that in the moment you're drawing on decisions you've already widened and tested, not starting from scratch.
Name one thing, honestly
Think of a student or a class you've formed a strong opinion about recently — what's one piece of outside information you haven't checked that might change that opinion?
Good. Now look back at the "Try this" line under whichever lesson feels most connected to what you just wrote, and treat that as this week's actual assignment — not all 4 at once.
The practices from this edition
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Run this for seven days
When you feel the pull to make a lasting change right after a hard moment, write the decision down and wait until the next planning period or the next day to confirm it — most decisions lose nothing by waiting a few hours.