It's exciting to see two of my colleagues embrace blogging in such a thoughtful way. I highly recommend you take a look at Susanne's and Jennifer's blogs, especially if you teach English. You will be glad you visited.
No Ulcers for Me
I’ve been having some great discussions about teaching and learning lately.
Our Head of Upper School and I did some planning for fall recently, and we talked about what we want teachers to think about before they begin to use technology in their classrooms. This was a natural follow-up to our end-of-year discussions about essential questions and curriculum, but it led into how to teach writing. And we realized quickly we had very different visions of “good writing” and how to teach it.
And then there’s Jeff, one of our AP history teachers who often responds to articles I send out to the faculty, and I love it. He emails with thoughts, questions, and mostly challenges to my thinking. We talk about student-centered vs teacher directed learning, rigor, creativity and collaboration, along with how technology can seamlessly enhance (or get in the way of) what happens in the classroom.
I am a big-picture person, and I love nothing better than reflecting on these ideas.
But after these discussions, I often find myself wondering whether my colleagues think my thoughts about education are out in left field. If I were to collect a stack of my favorite authors and thinkers, the names would include Dewey, Kohl, Kohn, and Holt. Am I a progressivist? A constructivist? I promote Understanding by Design and Problem-based Learning. And if I were able to live my life over again, I probably would have home-schooled my sons, giving them flexible learning opportunities.
And yet I love the classroom.
I don’t want to be the kind of person (reference to the image above!) William Brody discusses in his Johns Hopkins Commencement speech. Yet, I am passionate about wanting students to be engaged in the learning process, and I am always looking for opportunities to learn more about how to make that happen, even if the ideas make people (and me) uncomfortable. I like the way Michael McKinney ends his post:
Keep an open mind. He adds, “It’s OK to question ideas and beliefs other people insist are true.”
In the end, it’s all about the conversations and what we take away from them. We need to keep pushing and questioning each other as we search for best ways to help our students learn.
Image: ‘believe‘
www.flickr.com/photos/12023334@N02/2052931999
I Wonder….
Jeff Utecht has me thinking about this today:
“Do we encourage our students to wonder? I see it all the time in
Kindergarten classrooms, see it a lot in 2nd grade, not so much in 5th
grade and by 8th grade? I don’t think I’ve ever hear a middle school or
high school teacher say “I wonder…….”
Instead we ask students to make decisions. We as them to decide
between this answer and that answer. We ask them to decide between fact
and opinion.”
K-12 Online
Although this conference consumed most of my time for about two weeks last fall, it was so worth it.Plan to spend some time online this fall, and be prepared to LEARN.
Here is some information from the blog:
The K-12 Online Conference invites participation from educators around
the world interested in innovative ways Web 2.0 tools and technologies
can be used to improve learning. This FREE conference is run by
volunteers and open to everyone. The 2008 conference theme is
“Amplifying Possibilities”. This year’s conference begins with a
pre-conference keynote the week of October 13, 2008. The following two
weeks, October 20-24 and October 27-31, forty presentations will be
posted online to the conference blog (this website) for participants to
download and view. Live Events in the form of three “Fireside Chats”
and a culminating “When Night Falls” event will be announced. Everyone
is encouraged to participate in both live events during the conference
as well as asynchronous conversations. More information about podcast channels and conference web feeds is available!