The Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs for Beginning Teachers

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is a psychological approach to understanding how human needs must be satisfied before they can begin a journey towards doing/being what needs to be done.  Usually, it is explored in the context of education from the lens of a student.  For example, in the physiological needs, is the student eating on …

Outmoded definitions of assessment

I am a Fine Arts coordinator and with COVID-19 impacting performances, I began to wonder why it was affecting me so drastically.  Being a former Fine Arts teacher I knew what the impact of performances were on students, but I don’t think I truly understood why.  I stopped and began to reflect on how performances …

Coaching Teachers in a Pandemic Paradigm

First, let me say how proud I am of everyone in education.  We have persevered through one of the most challenging periods in modern education.  You are amazing teachers and we will come through this stronger, together. This next bit is really about some of the small things that I’ve picked up on during the …

Covid-19 Educator’s Lockdown Day 2

As I posted yesterday, below is the second day's email that I sent out to my faculty on Tuesday of this past week.  I hope some of you find this helpful. Email Day 2 - Suggestions Good Tuesday everyone.  For my second day of recommendations for engaging our students at home, let’s talk about interactive …

Covid-19 Educators Lockdown Day 1

So, since my campus was shutdown this week, I've been emailing my teachers in mass everyday with thoughts and suggestions on how to transition from face-to-face teaching to distance learning.  The more I thought about it, the more I realized that others might benefit from this as well. Email Day 1 Suggestions: Good Monday everyone.  …

Duality of Reason

So, it’s been about one year since my last post.  There are always a good reason for doing things, but in the end, they all come up as excuses.  For the past year, I have been teaching in the classroom again after being an instructional technology coach for six years.  It was daunting. I was …

Productive Student Struggle

So, I’m about four weeks into the new year after being out of the classroom for six years.  I can tell the honeymoon is over. As an Instructional Designer, I had noticed for years the Teacher aversion to including productive struggle into their lessons.  It wasn’t until now, that I understand why. Sir Ken Robinson …

Shifting to Situated Learning

In education, we are constantly being bombarded with the idea of Innovation; of shifting the paradigm from traditional classrooms to the new.  We've seen George Couros constantly write in his blog about shifting from a Fixed-mindset through a Growth-mindset to an Innovator Mindset.   One of his contemporaries, Katie Martin, writes about developing that mindset by …

Student Created Questions

Something that I have latched onto in my time in education (20+ years), is that students struggle with asking questions.  Everyone thinks they can ask a question, until they are put on the spot and required to produce a deeply thinking, open-ended, complex question.  Unfortunately, the vast majority of the questions asked by students are …

Building Trust with Students

So, it's the beginning of the school year.  How do we build trust with our students?  With peers, you talk chit-chat to get to know them.  When instructional coaches are working with teachers you take the 20-2 approach (2-minute conversations about non-work related items, 20 days in a row).  But what about students? This year, …