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writing by chris mcnutt

97 articles

Teaching in the Wreckage of the Real

The only antidote to a world of manufactured confusion is a shift toward making students builders of meaning, not consumers of it.

HRP Wrapped 2025

A look back at our most popular articles, podcasts, videos, and resources from 2025 and a look ahead at what's to come in 2026!

Student Voice Reimagines Professional Development

We're reimagining what's possible using student voice in our professional development.

Conference to Restore Humanity! 2024: Vision Into Reality

"There comes a point when some of the field's most basic models of learning no longer serve society well; we have reached that point."

"Success at Any Cost"

How schools' relentless focus on college and career readiness is harming student well-being and why we need to redefine what success in education means.

Building Bridges: HRP & The Kosciuszko Foundation's Invitation to TEIP 2024

Human Restoration Project is looking for teachers interested in traveling, teaching, and learning in Poland this Summer!

Human Restoration Project Awarded Education Innovation and Research Grant to Reimagine Education

Human Restoration Project announces Education and Innovation Research grant from US Dept of Education

Human Restoration Project Acquires Floop Edu

A partnership on feedback-driven learning.

Using AI Without Losing Ourselves: A Critical Media Literacy for the 21st Century

We must be proactive in teaching students how and when to use AI while taking a critical lens to how it works and its potential pitfalls.

Heaven, Hell, or Houston ISD

The takeover of Houston ISD sits at the intersection of so many issues impacting American education today: democratic backsliding and the rise of authoritarianism; the so-called “parents’ rights movement”; testing and accountability measures; poverty, racism, and charter schools. We would be wise to understand what’s happening in Houston as a canary in the coal mine.

Human Restoration Project and Learning InspirED Collaborate on "Students Leading the Way" Initiative to Transform Education

A big announcement from HRP in Ohio!

Why we need to change schools (right now).

A survey of the research documenting student and teacher crises in mental health and engagement, and the project-based, self-determination-oriented practices that evidence shows can address them.

More Human Than a Ladder or Pyramid: Psychology, Behaviorism, and Better Schools

A look at how Taylorism and behaviorism shaped American schooling through industry's lens, producing reward-and-punishment classrooms that manage compliance rather than nurture human development.

Sustaining Education for Today & A Lasting Future: Building the Interdisciplinary Subject

Bringing students into the conversation and building holistic communities of care isn't impossible. Let's start right now!

A New Era of Learning: Reimagining Conferences for Inspired Teaching

It isn't that education conferences aren't needed, but "I've heard this already" workshops and marketing ploys are a waste of time. Instead, our resources could be better spent expanding our professional understanding of related concepts to what we've already mastered.

This is why we should stop giving homework

The United States must examine the underlying inequities of peoples' lives, rather than focus on increasing schools' workloads and lessening children's free time for mythical academic gains that lead to little change.

Schools Can't Accept the Corporate Status Quo

Young people must become critical thinkers that are able to build a better world, which will involve challenging corporations that continually exploit humans, animals, and the environment for profit. If all young people believe that profit is the purpose, then our world will teeter toward collapse.

Fighting Back Against the Future

Why dystopian storytelling dominates our cultural imagination, and how solarpunk and critical pedagogy can help educators imagine and build better futures.

The Only Lasting Truth is Change

Like-minded educators can build friendly, hopeful spaces for young people to channel their energy toward creative rebellion against unjust systems, rather than falling prey to grifters and hate manufacturers.

A Brief History of Grades and Gradeless Learning

A history of how American grading practices emerged in the late 1800s, why reformers have pushed back for over a century, and what the research says about moving beyond grades.

The Culture War in the Classroom Continues: Unpacking the Battle

The moment where the majority of teachers no longer care, public education will be destroyed in the United States.

Enacting Change by Listening

Pressing forward and armed with this knowledge, we need to bring about a grassroots movement toward change.

A Day in the Life at Three Schools

Three imagined day-in-the-life vignettes, from a typical public school to a fully reimagined one, contrasting what schooling looks like at different stages of progressive change.

Review: Teacher & Child

This work outlines the day-to-day interactions teachers have with children, offering suggestions to solve the minute interactions that encompass most of this profession.

Empty Pedagogy, Behaviorism, and the Rejection of Equity

A critique of technique-driven, behaviorist pedagogy in 'no excuses' charter schools and how scripted classroom control dehumanizes students in the name of college readiness.

Unpacking "Neoliberal" Schooling, Part 3: Progressive Education: Enter the Matrix

Using Baudrillard's theory of simulation and hyperreality to examine why traditional critiques of schooling get co-opted and what progressive educators can do instead.

Oh What a Tangled Web We Weave: How the Testing Industry Manufactured the "Learning Loss" Narrative

An examination of how testing companies manufactured the pandemic learning loss narrative to sell schools more assessments, interventions, and professional development.

Review: Equity-Centered, Trauma-Informed Education

Alex Shevrin Venet's Equity-Centered, Trauma-Informed Education is a masterful work which inspires a systemic look at the injustices in classrooms, schools, and communities.

How Teachers Can Start a Grassroots Revolution for Better Schools

The Biden Administration offers a space for educators to demand transformation. But that does not mean that we can count on better outcomes coming from the federal government.

Binary Solutions to Systemic Problems

This year has highlighted that there is a continual issue with equity in education; and that there’s a serious problem with the way schooling in general is tackling the issues we face today.

Review: We Do This 'Til We Free Us

Mariame Kaba's collection of writings, We Do This 'Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice is a perfect encapsulation of understanding the carceral network, the importance of organizing, and counteracting inhumane systems.

100 Days of Conversations: Amplifying Communities to Reimagine Education

In our pilot, we explored a reimagination of this project as a result of the pandemic, while simultaneously recognizing that the American education system was already in need of change.

Learning from Games: Making Decisions for Others

Even the most well-intentioned changes can have horrific outcomes.

Review: Manufacturing Happy Citizens

Manufacturing Happy Citizens: How the Science and Industry of Happiness Control Our Lives by Edgar Cabanas & Eva Illouz provides a convincing condemnation of "positive psychology", the relatively recent scientific study of happiness.

One Teacher Can't Save the World

What is it about the world that is worth preparing students for, and are we dedicated to the work of building that better world alongside them?

Review: Radical Teacher, Academic Journal

Published by the University of Pittsburgh, Radical Teacher is a self-described socialist, feminist, and anti-racist journal founded in 1975. Since 2013, the entire publication is accessible for free online, double peer-reviewed, and filled with in-depth articles.

Liberatory Learning: Dismantling the Hidden Curriculum

This is a recap of our asynchronous professional development session, where we worked as a cohort to develop actions and solutions for equitable practices in our classrooms.

Endorsing Student Voice Through Virtual/Hybrid Activism

This is an overview of our August 1st Summit with Inspire Citizens (Donna Guerin, Steve Sostak, Kavita Tanna), Out of the Blocks (Aaron Henkin, Wendel Patrick), and Evan Whitehead!

Creating a Virtual, Liberatory Feedback-Driven Classroom

This past week, Human Restoration Project has had the honor of presenting this workshop on ungrading and liberatory pedagogy at Digital Pedagogy Lab 2020. Here's an overview of the activities we covered, what we learned, and resources to share!

Unpacking “Neoliberal” Schooling, Part 2: Teachers Pay Teachers

How the Teachers Pay Teachers marketplace commodifies lesson planning and substitutes shallow, compliance-driven activities for genuine student engagement.

Death and Teaching: COVID-19 and the Return to School

It's a grim time in the United States.

Review: “You Can’t Fire the Bad Ones!”

‘”You Can’’t Fire the Bad Ones!” And 18 Other Myths About Teachers, Teachers’’ Unions, and Public Education by William Ayers, Crystal Laura, and Rick Ayers provides a quick-to-understand, ready-to-read breakdown of the common assaults against public education and its workers.’

Review: The Art of Critical Pedagogy

The Art of Critical Pedagogy provides an overview of the concept of critical pedagogy, showcases why it is needed in urban contexts, and provides three case studies of what it actually looks like in practice.

Unpacking “Neoliberal” Schooling

An overview of how neoliberal market logic shapes common school practices, from gamified curriculum and standards-based grading to mindfulness programs used to prop up an unchanged system.

Review: The Right to Learn: A Blueprint for Creating Schools That Work

Darling-Hammond's work, which is nearly 400 pages with 200 citations, is a formative review of inner-working and issues within the United States education system, and perfectly captures the need for progressive policies.

Drop the College Board

An argument that the College Board's AP and SAT tests are inequitable, overpriced, and useless indicators of college readiness that schools should abandon.

Building a Student-Centered Third Place

Even though I don’t usually interact in these spaces, the feeling of being surrounded by other people and being apart of a greater societal culture is enlivening.

Simplification: School Policies and Practices to End During COVID-19

It is our responsibility as educators to ensure that all students are supported through this event. It will take proactive, decisive planning and decision-making by teachers to make this happen.

Review: The End of Homework: How Homework Disrupts Families, Overburdens Children, and Limits Learning

The End of Homework by Etta Kralovec and John Buell offers a succinct and researched account of why homework does little to actually improve academic performance, and instead hurts a family’s overall well-being.

Remaking Professional Development

Professional development in education is defective and I think almost everyone knows it...PD tends to promote fads, one-and-done workshops, and the latest district initiative that fails to make any long-lasting change.

Revisiting Disobedience Instruction as Classroom Structural Change

Accounted by Jonathan Kozol in On Being a Teacher, disobedience instruction is teaching students how to say “no” toward teacher authoritarianism or counter a teacher’s sweeping political statements.

Review: The Labor of Lunch: Why We Need Real Food and Real Jobs in American Public Schools

The Labor of Lunch by Jennifer E. Gaddis is a treatise on the United States school lunch system: its history, battle over nutritional quality, and those who are fighting to change it.

Review: An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States for Young People

An Indigenous Peoples’ History consistently poses questions that counteract misinformation about Native communities, specifically stories that are usually taught in elementary school.

Game Design, Classroom Design, and the Faux Use of Gamification

"Gamification" is a popular buzzword whether it be corporations wanting users to excitedly spend money or educators motivating students through extrinsic rewards. Consistently, well-meaning educators are seeking gamification to encourage students to meet their standards.

Review: Free School Teaching: A Journey into Radical Progressive Education

Free School Teaching: A Journey into Radical Progressive Education by Kristan Accles Morrison is an exemplar of what self-directed, progressive schooling looks like.

Review: We Got This: Equity, Access, and the Quest to Be Who Our Students Need Us to Be

We Got This is part personal narrative, part Paulo Freire critical pedagogy, and part comic book allegory. It’s a fascinating look at how a current public school teacher disrupts the status quo so his students have every possibility to achieve.

Death to the Acronym

Educators love acronyms. It’s the key to successful empire in the professional industry; developing a simple phrase to communicate adjectives in a catchy way. But they mean absolutely nothing.

It's time to stop using Kahoot as a whole class review tool.

For some students, this is a way to quickly recall information they may need to know, but this isn't justifiable for whole class review where most Kahoot sessions take place.

Review: The Book of Learning and Forgetting

The Book of Learning and Forgetting is a simple book in the best way possible. A 120-page, Q&A filled, assurance that students are learning all the time.

Reflecting on Rigor

Every year I struggle with this fact: when we run students through the "rat race" of perceived rigor by our endless assignments and high-stakes exams, are we actually teaching a student anything?

Review: Why They Can't Write

John Warner's message is clear in Why They Can't Write: we need to restore purpose to writing (and all curriculum) by removing antiquated "structure."

Review: The Inner Level

The Inner Level: How More Equal Societies Reduce Stress, Restore Sanity, and Improve Everyone's Well-being by Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson demonstrates a fundamental element to education: we can't fix the system solely by making schools "better."

I use evidence to inform my teaching.

There’s hundreds, perhaps thousands, of articles promoting progressive education. Research among child development psychologists overwhelming favors student choice and voice and experiential learning.

Review: A School of Our Own

Hearing a high schooler’s perspective, combined with the expertise of a post-graduate education specialist, is as interesting as it is informative.

At a Crossroads of Anti-Authoritarianism: Dismissing Far-Right School Advocates

Progressive education typically wants a plethora of schools and non-traditional experiences for children to choose from. However, I want to outline the differences of thought between some libertarian homeschoolers versus ours.

Making Them All Look the Same

It’s not enough that students are required to attend whitewashed, water-downed classes that the masses can distribute, but now they must have the same on their bodies.

Data: A New Conversation

In an era where standardized measurement is a given, and it isn't going away any time soon why don't we change the data measured?

Review: On Critical Pedagogy

On Critical Pedagogy by Dr. Henry A. Giroux inspires me to rally teachers and students and overthrow the government. Of course, that’s not realistic so I’ll start by overthrowing my classroom and work from there.

Neo-Progressivism

Experiential learning isn’t a packaged curriculum. Social and emotional learning isn’t an expensive workshop on managing stress in a classroom. Ed-tech isn’t meant to do what we already do “better.” Student voice and choice aren’t concepts sold in the latest book.

I’ve rarely discussed progressive education without this question. Yet the assumption always is that students, parents, and educators reject these ideas. I don’t think this is the case. Instead, it is a lack of understanding.

Wait, 20 is the perfect amount for a classroom?

Outside of the obvious logistic and financial reasoning for larger classrooms, I just couldn't wrap my head around why we would ever want 20 students as a "great number."

Review: This Is Not a Test: A New Narrative on Race, Class, and Education

This Is Not a Test: A New Narrative on Race, Class, and Education by José Luis Vilson heralds a personal, provocative story of doing what's best for children.

The “Fad Trap” of Progressive Education

Because these ideas are surface-level, wastefully rolled out, and so commonly a marketing tool rather than for actual teaching, they fall short, kids suffer, the school loses money, and teachers double down on traditional practice.

Finding Your Purpose in Education

Finding my purpose in education was born out of an immense frustration with education itself.

Review: The End of the Rainbow: How Educating For Happiness (Not Money) Would Transform Our Schools

This isn’t a critique as much as it is an inspiration for teachers looking to reignite their passion for the profession. It’s time we restore the purpose of education.

Escape from Reality: The Apathetic Adolescent

How can I possibly design a curriculum that conquers instant gratification? Especially when this content stands to be delivered no matter what (as it is a “standard”) and students have no choice in coming to the building?

Review: Timeless Learning

If the education system didn’t have over a hundred years of the status quo, what would it look like? If we examined real-world careers and passionate opportunities, how would we truly prepare students for them?

Being the Serious Teacher Who Doesn't Take Traditional Seriously

Educators face this scenario daily: by doubling down on progressive practice, their unwillingness to embrace the traditional delegitimizes their class.

Review: On Being a Teacher

Kozol’s unwavering stance carries a heavy weight throughout the entire book, demanding change, taking firm positions, and drastically altering how we view the classroom.

"We all do what's best for children.": The Banality of Educative Statements

"We all work everyday doing what's best for children." "We care about kids." "We work tirelessly for our students." Frankly, I'm tired of statements like these. It's the perfect copout to any argument, a safety blanket for failing at innovative practice.

Accepting the Status Quo: Teaching Without Bias

Frankly, to remain neutral is a single-sided story. One can’t teach without bias.

Review: These Schools Belong to You and Me

Students should want to go to school learning is fun, interesting, and natural but the more we accept our place under the dictatorial rule of standardized, government orders, the less our students will subscribe.

“Let’s get to work!”

Students love school the first day and begrudge it the rest. Teachers plan their beginnings to be engaging, then “get to work.” Isn’t it odd how easily this aligns?

Is the factory model a myth?

And this has bled into our current schools we’re centered around control, using a traditional structure to tell children what to do, how to do it, and then expect the same uniform result.

Review: Teaching to Transgress

Teaching to Transgress summarizes hooks’ viewpoints through a series of essays which manifest a strong structure for understanding, analyzing, and changing systemic issues.

Teaching at the Edge of Hope

Oftentimes we feel discouraged or hopeless as educators whether it be economically, socially, racially, an instance of intersectionality, or otherwise, many of our students (and teachers) are fighting an uphill battle.

A Superhero Teacher's Lament

Every passionate teacher enters the classroom with boundless, optimistic energy. They never think they’ll become the sarcastic, aloof, dismissive type. But, when push comes to shove it seems like it happens to everybody.

Get Out There!: Connecting to the Community

Authentic work is at the heart of any great classroom. When empowered, students will change the world they just need the opportunity to do so. Although many teachers are capable of fantastic projects and dialogue, the community beckons young people to innovate and serve.

What really is an "A"?

Grades are meant to be representative of a child’s progress. If a student is doing well, they receive an A or B, so on and so forth. Often overlooked is the actual measure of progress: feedback.

Review: Making the Grades

I always bite my tongue when I hear educators defend the testing industry, even if they don’t outright support it. “Standardized testing is just one tool in the toolbox!"

Gamification: Is it all just a ruse?

I was quickly swept up in gamification. Being a “gamer” all my life, the draw of “gamifying” my content seemed like a no-brainer.

The Path to Discovery: Providing Real Choice in Schools

As far as I knew, this was “great teaching” not only had I known my students “were learning” but often my lessons were engaging and at least better than what I remembered in school.

Why are we not taking happiness seriously?

‘Where’’s the alarm bells? Why is there no national call-to-arms for every educator to solve this problem? Why do our school systems value standardized test scores, GPAs, and attendance ratings over happiness?’

Review: Excellent Sheep

Our children spend shockingly little time figuring out what it is that they love to do.

Review: Where You Go Is Not Who You'll Be

Where You Go Is Not Who You'll Be: An Antidote to the College Admissions Mania by Frank Bruni lays out a remarkable case against the ridiculous nature of college admissions programs and the dangerous pathways it leads our children on.

Prepared for What? The Future for Graduates

“College-ready schools make an assumption that they are actually preparing students for college however is this an accurate sentiment? Moreover, what is the danger of always preparing people for the \”next thing\” without ever focusing on the now?”

PSA for Teachers: Teach to Get Fired

At almost any school you will find the lifeless, dead-eyed educator going through the motions, miserable at the sight of their students, administration, parents, or the education system at large.