I spent Monday exploring the concept of nonlinguistic representation with a group of middle school teachers I’ve known for years. We began the day discussing whether or not schools were killing creativity, and then we tore into piles of Legos, Play-Doh, and magazines in an effort to share out our greatest hopes for our students. I’ll admit: I was nervous about asking secondary-level teachers to use these materials, but I shouldn’t…
Yesterday, I had the opportunity to meet a fabulous group of seventh grade writers. Joe Cena teaches at Depew Middle School, and he invited me in to work with his students around word choice. These kids are embarking on a performance task which began with wordless picture books, is evolving into short story writing, and will eventually result in the publication of final products that challenge their use of FlickR and Moviemaker. This is the group’s first classroom exposure to…
Last week, Jenny Luca and I invited teachers and students from across the globe to join Working Together 2 Make a Difference, an online community where all of us can collaborate about our local efforts to serve different worthy causes. As our membership continues to grow, Laura and I wanted to provide a little incentive to those who post about their projects first! If you’ve joined us there already, please consider building out your pages…
Several years ago, I was invited to lead a regional deep curriculum alignment initiative that brought teachers from across Western New York together to define what was understood and what was not about the New York State English Language Arts standards and assessments. Charged with the task of creating a topologically aligned regional curriculum, our group worked collaboratively to accomplish much more than this, and in the end, it was evident that the product that we created…
Today is Blog Action Day, and I’ve been spending the last week or so trying to conceptualize a proper post for this event. There are a thousand or more ways to write about poverty and so much that can be done to battle it. Too often, the topic overwhelms me. It’s hard to know where to begin…..so I’m starting small. Conversations about poverty always leave me remembering my great grandmother, who traveled here from Europe all alone…
I spent much of last evening and this morning helping my daughter Laura reflect on what she’s accomplished as a blogger this year and what she would like to do next in terms of helping others and learning more. These last ten months have been an interesting journey, and we’ve discovered a lot in the process. Laura has learned a great deal about blogging, of course, and what began as a curiousity about the tool…
Twitter is quickly becoming my favorite social networking tool. I follow a wide variety of educators there, and much of what I share with teachers in schools comes from this constantly growing community that gathers there throughout the day to share resources, ask questions, and point out interesting paths to follow while navigating this very wide web we engage with. In recent weeks, I’ve invited the teachers that I work with to follow me there,…
This week, I had the opportunity to present literacy coaching as a professional development model, and in preparing to do so, I realized that like all good things in education, much of its value rises out of the fact that it simply makes sense. When I think about how I learn, it often looks a bit like this: The process seems to work the same way whether I’m attempting to teach myself how to cook a meal worth eating (I…
I had a lovely weekend. Saturday was spent with the writers and teachers of the WNY Young Writers’ Studio. Several new high school students joined us this time around, and we welcomed Pam Marchewka-Cornwell, a teacher from Alden High School, to the community as well. We used our time together to explore the ways in which we might gift others with our writing, which is a goal that we’re preparing for in anticipation of the…