Sometime ago, a student came into my office and he spoke with passion about how he wished people would greet each other in the hallways. His eyes began to tear up as he described what I began to imagine was a community behaving in interdependent ways, each person having personal regard for others. What the […]
Today our community dug the first shovelfuls of earth on the way to build a new purpose-built campus. This building will give back to the city, absorbing enough solar energy to power our whole school year, with the produced energy throughout the year yielding enough to put back into the city at the summer’s start. […]
Teaching holds the tension between certainty and ambiguity. When teachers plan units and lessons, we draw upon our craft knowledge to design a series of experiences with logic, flow, coherence, and outcomes, to name a few aspects. And teaching is ambiguous at the same time because in the course of a lesson, students respond in […]
Now that another academic year is drawing to a close, it’s a worthwhile reflection to think about how we have used our time to focus on learning. It’s about time. A school year for an international school runs for an average of 180 days. That’s only 420 minutes of learning opportunities structured in a day, […]
Action plans have numerous practices that need to be implemented. Here’s a useful collaborative strategy for prioritizing implementation. I’ve used this with different schools including Canadian Academy in Kobe when I was working with Stephen Taylor and the CA faculty to implement creative inquiry. The Purpose of this Strategy The visualization of priorities using a […]
Self-directed change as performance of understanding In every unit of inquiry there is potential for student-generated assessment. As learning is a response to deliberately designed experiences, learning is a change in the learner’s skills, knowledge, understanding as well as post-unit decisions or actions. Action as a result of learning can be owned and led by […]
So a colleague and I kept chatting after the #IBChat on Twitter. As we reflected on the experience, I asked what my colleague’s most important takeaways were from the hour-long Twitter conversation. It was her first chat on Twitter, and she said it was at times overwhelming with the speed of the conversation and that […]
