Community Engagement Project Reflection Time is a priceless commodity in the teaching and learning arena. If you ask any educator, there’s never enough time to do something, to teach something, to learn something, to create something. The l…
Service Learning Service-learning is an approach to teaching that connects students to their communities (Fitzgerald, 1997) with the purpose of making a positive contribution. Vanderbilt University defines service learning as “a form of experiential ed…
Creating a classroom environment conducive to discussions is the key…
The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those…
When I taught at a middle/high school, the 12th grade social studies teacher, who also used active learning strategies, asked to swap classes for a day so that he could experience middle school active learning. I assumed teaching 12th graders would be similar to teaching 7th graders, but with a bit more advanced vocabulary and […]
Evaluating the effectiveness of professional development can be time consuming, costly, complex, and inconclusive. An analysis of teacher development came from a report from TNTP “The Mirage” (2015) by surveying 10,507 teachers and 566 school leaders. Their conclusion was that “in short, we bombard teachers with help, but most of it is not helpful – […]
The title of my post is from W. Edwards Deming, and while Deming was referring to the business world, we
Continue reading“In God We Trust, All Others Must Bring Data”
As has been oft-discussed on this blog, as well as among communities of teachers since time immemorial, professional development (PD) activities are quite frequently dull, irrelevant, time-consuming, and centered around a single expert delivering one-size-fits-all content to a group of workshop attendees. This is not an effective approach to adult learning (or any learning, really), …
Continue reading “What if Professional Development Could Be…Fun!?”
