Social Emotional Learning Concepts Foster Change Over the last few weeks, our school has been grappling with the issue of grades as Vermont moves to a proficiency based system. I’ll save that blog post for down the road but during these conversations one thing has become abundantly clear to me. Any teacher who has been teaching for any length of …
Student Involvement in School Change: Organizing
Student Involvement in School Transformation If you haven’t read my previous post on the 1st steps I took with regard to student involvement in the school change process, you may want to before continuing. During this second meeting with students, I asked them to consider all the ideas that they had brainstormed and categorize them; I directed them to identify …
Students Transforming School: Brainstorming
Envisioning the Ideal School Introduction and context: As the first task of my fellowship, I created a steering committee to help me with the work I would be undertaking next year. I chose several teachers and an administrator and asked each one of those people to invite two students to participate. Because my project is about personal learning ( and …
The Perfect Teacher Appreciation Gift
No gifts for teacher appreciation week I have a simple (or maybe not so simple) request for teacher appreciation week. I would like to be trusted. I was recently awarded a fellowship that offers both time and quite a lot of money for my school. At a recent dinner they planned to honor new and past fellows, I found myself …
7 Ways to Scaffold Self-Directed Learning
How Self-Directed Can Students Really Be? If I said that students should be in charge of their own learning, I wonder how many would tell me that, while that was a nice thought, students wouldn’t be able to handle it? I know I certainly considered that myself. As we planned our first self-directed learning unit last month, I kept responding …
21st Century Professional Development
As I have been engaging in research, collaboration and learning regarding personal learning and school transformation for the past year, I have continually encountered an irony that keeps nudging at me. We have discussed all the shifts in mindset that these changes will require. We have talked a lot about what will change for student learning. We have discussed at …
7 Ways to Start Talking Education Transformation
Starting the Conversation About Education Transformation If you have been around the education world for a while, you know that most change happens in the following way. Your principal or administrator makes a decision to go forward with an initiative. An inservice is provided and you are expected to implement the initiative. It’s no surprise that this doesn’t work. We …
My Teacher Told Me Not To Bother With School!
Should We Really Be Focusing on College? How would you feel if a teacher told your kids that they didn’t have to go to school to make a living or be happy? Or that they could make plenty of money without going to college? As a teacher and fervent proponent of education, this certainly makes me squirm a little bit. …
Save Time and Empower Kids
This post is coming from a convergence of an extremely busy week filled with planning a new unit, completing my paperwork duties, administering state testing, planning for summer projects, taxes and just regular life and work on top of that. Time is probably a teachers most common enemy. Meanwhile I was reminded of a funny video by The Onion regarding …
The purpose of grades?
Are we tapping? Our principal recently asked us to reflect on the purpose of grades. I have already done quite a bit of thinking about this topic. I have some very strong opinions about grades. I thought I already had an answer but then I realized that what he was really asking was about what the purpose of grades should …