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, …