July 2016

Month

Students published their book “Reflections”

Facilitator Daniel Rymer with GCXN students

At the beginning of the school year, I wrote about Global Connections, a group of sophomore students at The Olympia Schools in Hanoi, Vietnam, and senior students at La Porte High School in La Porte, Texas, who initially began their interactions by studying Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (GCXN, Part 1 and GCXN, Part 2). However, as their familiarity with each other grew, they asked to take on a much more monumental project: to write a book that explores their cultural similarities and differences and that provides a platform for their voices to be heard. They were undeterred by our warnings that a project of that magnitude would take patience, focus, hard work, and stamina. Well, as anyone with any experience with teenagers knows, when they put their minds to something, they do it. And they certainly did! Continue reading “Students published their book “Reflections”” →

July 31, 2016 1

What teachers want from their principals

If you’ve ever had the unlucky experience of teaching in a school with a difficult principal at the helm, then you know the nightmare such a leader can create in a school. I’m blessed that I’ve worked for 14 years at a school whose leadership has always been supportive, engaged, and champions of the teachers and students who attend. However, I’ve also been witness to some school environments that are toxic to all, including the leaders who initially created the havoc. Continue reading “What teachers want from their principals” →

July 29, 2016 0

What does “college-ready” mean anyway?

Discussions in education have become a veritable Tower of Babel with enough acronyms to make any bowl of Alphabits soup a solid summary of every school’s August professional development. Amidst the calls to revise standards (CCSS), reduce the impact of testing scores on students and schools (ESSA, NCLB), or to eliminate standardized testing altogether in favor of more authentic and reliable means of gauging student learning, terms such as “college and career readiness” (CCR), “21st century skills” (21C), “EQ v IQ,” “critical thinking” (CT, HOTS, DOK), and “grit” (well, that one didn’t change) seem to lose their meaning for anything other than keyword Google searches and SEO development. Continue reading “What does “college-ready” mean anyway?” →

July 25, 2016 0

Educate the child

As we begin thinking about and planning for the new school year, consider the kind of teacher you want to be: one who medicates the dancer or one who plays the music for her?

July 21, 2016 0

Differentiating Instruction through Reading Choice

In my previous post Building a Culture of Reading through Choice, I discussed how teachers might create more avid and willing student-readers by offering multiple texts from which students may choose rather than one compulsory text read by the entire class. I received many emails asking how I implement this in my classroom, how I choose books, and how I facilitate student learning when there are several different texts. Since so many people were interested, I thought why not just write another post? As any teacher knows, if one student asks a question, there’s probably 8 or 9 others who were wondering the same thing but were too shy to ask. So–to those of you who emailed: I hope this helps; and to those who were too shy to ask: don’t be! (I know–completely unhelpful advice).

As I stated before, I don’t like being told what to read, especially if I’m told to read it because it’s a “classic” and “canonical.” On my own, if still a bit begrudgingly, I decided to read Moby Dick and David Copperfield because peer pressure still has some power and I had to see what Continue reading “Differentiating Instruction through Reading Choice” →