Promoting a Spirit of Inquiry

Introduction I have just spent my 2nd of 3 days with Bruce Wellman of Mira Via in a Pro-D session tittled Developing & Facilitating Collaborative Groups. The first session had a focus on facilitating groups and my personal learning focus centered around two main ideas: 1. Being deliberate about when we use Discussion and when […]

Learning Conversations

Learning Conversation_ Part I It was refreshing to hear Maureen Dockendorf, our staff development co-ordinator, (Director of Instruction), speak at our Building Leadership Capacity (BLC*) series introduction. She encouraged us to become ‘intellectual companions’ that enter into ‘learning conversations’. The part I liked most about her talk was the direction of the conversation. She spoke […]

Numeracy & Problem Solving: Process Producibles

Math Professional Development day with Peter Liljedahl: Two sessions 1. Exploring Producibles: Getting the Genie Back in the Bottle. 2. Assessing Numeracy: How do you Photograph the Wind? One of my goals for this year is to make Professional Development Days more useful. Too often I gather great information from a session and then ‘file’ […]

Synthesize and Add Meaning

Going back to Time, (See Square Peg, Round Hole) Wesley Fryer’s ‘Moving at the speed of creativity’, refers to the Time cover story, How to Bring Our Schools Out of the 20th Century, in his post, 21st Century Education reform. In reference to this quote in the Time article: “In an age of overflowing information […]

“the use of blogs to learn not just to teach”

Will Richardson’s post Teacher Bloggers Not Blogging (Says Me) looks at the David Warlick article in EDTECH titled Blog Rules. Yet another reference I have found recently to Principal Dr. Tim Tyson and Mabry Middle. Will says: “Blogs are powerful communication tools. Blogs are powerful publishing tools. But blogging (the verb) is still much more […]

Square Peg, Round Hole

A composition of other people’s thoughts and ideas… with a theme. How to Bring our Schools Out of the 20th Century by Claudia Wallis, Sonja Steptoe, Time Magazine cover story Dec. 18, 2006 “For the past five years, the national conversation on education has focused on reading scores, math tests and closing the “achievement gap” […]