Tag: teaching
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“I Wanted To Be Fed as a Teacher”: Day 3 #ncte17
My first session of the final day of NCTE was Clear Eyes, Full Heart, Can’t Lose: Helping Students Craft a Clear and Heartfelt Vision for Their Learning with Kate Roberts and Maggie Beattie Roberts. It was hard to say no to a presentation titled after Friday Night Lights (Coach Taylor!), but the real inspiration to…
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“I Feel Like I’ve Been to Church”: Day 1 #ncte17
Every year at NCTE, I look forward to the moment when The Paper Graders’ daily learning reflection pops up in my feed. It’s such a powerful way to capture and keep learning. Every year, I want to write my own, and every year I make excuses for how tired I am at the end of…
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What Do You Want to Be When You Grow Up? Slice of Life 14/31 #sol16
I wanted to be so many different things. Bus driver. Doctor. Paleontologist. Archaeologist. Librarian. Actress. Writer. Art historian. World traveler. Biographer. Bookstore owner. Innkeeper. Never teacher. I played school with my cousins, but Kelly always got to be the teacher because she was the oldest. I was cast as the teacher in the second-grade play.…
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Kindergarten Meets College: A Celebration of Coloring and Creative Mind Class #celebratelu
Ruth Ayres hosts a weekly celebration at her blog, Ruth Ayres Writes. I appreciate this invitation to reflect on the positives of my week. This week, the juniors and seniors enrolled in my upper-division Creative Mind class received an unusual homework assignment: color. I try to make it feel a little more like college by…
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Teaching Unplugged: Slice of Life #sol15 11/10/15
I am unexpectedly guesting in another professor’s classroom for a couple of weeks, teaching Macbeth. On my second day, we’re talking setting, and I ask students what a heath looks like. They stare at me and say nothing. Not sure if they’re quiet because they don’t know what a heath looks like or if it’s because…
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7 Trends in My Fall Classes
I am an inveterate creator and tinkerer when it comes to my classes. Usually all of my courses are pretty different, which keeps things interesting and fresh for me, but this semester, there are a lot of overlaps in assignments (though not in course content). I am more focused than ever on learning as exploration,…
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Digital Reading: What’s Essential Ch 1 and 2 #cyberPD
#CyberPD is an online professional development learning community where teachers read and discuss a common professional development text. Visit Reflect & Refine for more details and links to connect with the group. This year’s book is Digital Reading: What’s Essential in Grades 3-8 by Franki Sibberson and Bill Bass. After reading two chapters of Digital Reading,…
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Celebration: Learning and Unlearning #celebratelu 5/9/15
It has been a long time since I celebrated. I connected so strongly with what Tara wrote last week in her post returning to celebration after a time away. Blogging had been feeling like a chore to me. Weekends had been especially hard, and I knew something had to give. It seemed like an easy…
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Links I Loved Last Week: A Round-up of Online Reading 3/29/15
Rachel Cusk’s piece on Raising Teenagers is my must-read of the week. I also really needed Todd VanderWerff’s Genes Aren’t Destiny, and Other Things I’ve Learned From Being Adopted this week. I wish every parent with traumatized kids would read Jillian Lauren’s Why I Sing Loudly at Whole Foods. When in doubt, SING. Or talk about…
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Freewriting Without Tears: How to Build a Classroom Practice of Powerful Freewriting
Ok, so no actual tears have ever been involved with freewriting for me. But I did think about crying when I observed one of my student teachers mind-wrestling with her students in back-to-back classes over what they should do during freewriting. She read a picture book, If You’re Not From the Prairie, aloud to them,…
the dirigible plum 