It is sad, but perhaps not unexpected, that since I recently wrote about discouraged educators, I’ve spent a lot of time coaching a young teacher friend. She’s trying to find her way through an interaction with an administrator that has her questioning whether she belongs in public education at all. The specifics don’t matter because … Continue reading
I hope it’s just me, but I’ve talked to a lot of discouraged educators lately, and it is just September. Why discouraged? Sometimes new laws or policies make an already demanding job even harder. Sometimes schedules are crazy or ceilings drip or test prep eats up far too much time. Sometimes folks feel blamed for … Continue reading
They say that medical students spend much of their early training examining themselves for symptoms of every disease they study, no matter how obscure. The more they think about something, the more they find evidence of it in their lives. I’m finding something similar (although less frightening) happening to me this semester as I’ve taken … Continue reading
It seems questioning is in the air. Years ago, when I talked about helping students ask questions I was often met with “And when do you think we have time to do that?” stares. And given our educational climate, there were good reasons. But times shift. I’m told that my naturally curly hair is going … Continue reading
One of my favorite tools for helping students move from absorbers to questioners comes from Deborah Meier. She cites five Habits of Mind underlying Boston’s Mission Hill School, each of which can be framed as a question. Here, from Meier’s 2009 article “Democracy at Risk” are the five questions that she believes can define a … Continue reading
Questions. We ask them when we need directions. We ask them when we don’t understand. Sometimes we ask questions in outrage, other times we ask them in curiosity and wonder. Sometimes questions are rhetorical, other times they are urgent. If we want to help students be questioners, we need to help them understand the types … Continue reading
Questions are in the air, it seems. One of the most talked-about books this year is Warren Berger’s A More Beautiful Question. September’s issue of Educational Leadership focuses on questioning for learning. It seems a good time to think about the role questions play in creativity—and learning. Questions, it almost goes without saying, lie at … Continue reading
One of the key contemporary teacher-questions for the first few months of school is, “What kinds of data should I be collecting?” A perhaps unexpected answer comes from Mark Barnes and Jennifer Gonzalez. In their book, Hacking Education: 10 Quick Fixes for Every School, Barnes and Gonzalez suggest a number of education “hacks” to solve school … Continue reading
Recently in my mosaic class, a relatively new student did something that resulted in her exclaiming, “Oh rats, I did it wrong.” Without thinking, I found myself responding, “There are no mistakes that can’t be fixed.” Then I smiled, realizing I was repeating the mosaic teacher’s oft-repeated refrain. And while it may not be true … Continue reading
When I first started teaching, eons ago, the one piece of advice we were given for “setting the tone” in our classrooms was the infamous adage “Don’t smile until Christmas.” I don’t know anyone who actually tried to manage that feat, but I suspect it had a real impact students’ early experiences in classrooms of … Continue reading
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