Over the last several years, I’ve come to rely on the ARCS framework, created by Communities for Learning, for nearly all of my professional planning. I use it to establish a baseline assessment of the groups I work with, to determine entry points into our work together, to strategically plan, and to assess the influence of our efforts over time. This framework has also transformed the shape and structure of the professional learning experiences that…
I arrived at the Communities for Learning Summer Institute Sunday evening, just in time to welcome my friend and new fellow, Ellen Gray. I met Ellen earlier this year, and over the last few months, I’ve come to enjoy the perspective she lends to the work that I do as a professional and as a mom. Spending a week immersed in thoughtful planning and discourse with her and with all of the fellows who are…
Within moments of our arrival, the pace became something of an adjustment for me. Seriously. “This place feels so far removed from the rest of the world,” Wanda mentioned, and she was right. I imagine that we all had the opportunity to live a bit differently last week. I know that I worked differently as well. Far removed from the frenzy of our daily lives, we found time enough to wonder and plan and revise and share what…
Teaching can be such an alienating experience. I remember leaving the shelter of my undergraduate program and entering my very first teaching position. Suddenly, the expert voices that I had come to rely upon were gone. The friends that I shared my apartment and my student-teaching placement with had moved across the state. That first classroom full of students and my fabulous mentor-teacher? They became pages in a scrapbook……farewell cards tucked into a box that lives on…