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Welcome to our community of educators. Read from other teachers and share your learning.
Welcome to our community of educators. Read from other teachers and share your learning.
Ideally, our students would have the capability to adapt to the Leatherman tool, the iPhone, or the 3-D printer, but we must begin now by making sure that we as educators understand that the end game isn't to have students master a set of blueprints that aren't adaptable to our ever-changing world.
It listens. The heart isn’t the engine. It isn’t in charge. The heart is a sensory organ. All of this thinking takes me back to Steiner’s larger point, “to improve and make true progress”.
That’s when I realized that this paradigm impacts the classroom. What kind of heart do you view yourself as a teacher? Are you the pump? The engine? Pushing blood out to the cells. Delivering nutrients?
Kimberly Mitchell, Founder and CEO, Inquiry Partners
Inquiry is, for me, the shiniest of silver bullets in a time of education policy gun slinging.
Rachel Sniff, Science Teacher and Chief Encouragement Officer (CEO), North Carolina
The root of all deeper growth depends on the ability to promote inquiry within the classroom.
Brooke Perry, 6th grade teacher, Gates TAC Member
You know that saying, “There are no stupid questions?” With kids especially, I see it as truth.
Shannon Treece, E-Magineer/Principal, Eminence Independent Schools, #SchoolonFire
Kids can change the world, if the adults are willing to allow the freedom of inquiry in their classrooms. It is transformative.
Christina Brennan, K-5 Teacher/Librarian
Student-Driven Inquiry through Genius Hour Research. What matters to students should matter in school.
If WE, as educators, call our experiences and classrooms, trenches and frontlines, how is the greater community supposed to understand our work?
If WE, view ourselves in a battle, how does that subconsciously impact the way we work with students?
If WE, see ourselves digging in, how are we supposed to inspire and uplift?
It has been four years now, since the release of the Common Core standards in Mathematics. We have sought to understand, to implement, to adjust to the shift in practice and expectation. But as Grant Wiggins points out in his recent blog, I'm not sure we have really put our collective minds around the true intent and value to our students.
I think this explains much of what happens in our schools and classrooms. How much of the “work” we do in education is about doing “tasks” that really just make us feel better about the heavy mental lifting that we never really get to? How much of our work is dedicated to “assignments” that distract us from the stuff that really matters?
In this new perspective there is some language I would like to advocate banning. Language that was intended to appeal to our basest needs, but through our enlightened conversations we interpret as the insults they were always meant to be. I apologize now if you still hold these terms dear.
This is just one voice from the 16,000 that ended up attending #ISTE2014, and I’m sure this will not be a popular sentiment, but I guess I just don’t get it. It’s not you ISTE, it’s me.
Innovation is sweeping through Education. Teachers, Principals, and Administrators are being encouraged to “remake” school. To knock down the walls. To expand the classroom. But what happens when we redesign the facade of school, but the interior remains the same? Are we in our rhetoric about changing the school experience for students not addressing a much more important component?
So, I’m stuck. I don’t feel like I’m doing great work, much less good work. I guess my real question is why in Education are the roles so delineated and adversarial? Why aren’t we all colleagues working on the same work?
