Assigning myself a learning challenge…CHANGEd: What If…60-60-60 #0

Last week, at the National Association of Independent Schools (NAIS) Annual Conference, someone I deeply respect and admire essentially expressed to me that I blog too much. She told me that I, and a few other educational bloggers, overwhelm her with too many posts in a particular period of time. That comment has been bouncing [...]

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“Fallor ergo sum” – St. Augustine, 1200 years prior to Descartes

Do we structure school in such a way that we truly promote and achieve that intricate balance between: 1) wanting to know and to understand and 2) keeping perspective that we have to be wrong quite a bit in order to gain deep knowledge and understanding? By the time you are 9 years old, you [...]

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Connecting Ideas – Action, Traction, Reaction

In Synergy, a non-departmentalized, non-graded, transdisciplinary, community-issues-problem-solving course, we use blogging as a means to communicate and collaborate on ideas as well as to reflect and to revise thinking. Currently we offer our learners an Action-Traction-Reaction prompt to spur their thinking, reflection, and writing. One of our learners offers this reflection that connects his thinking about [...]

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Embracing the Struggle – Students Wrestling with Real-World Issues

Late last spring, a team of Writing Workshop faculty took a very deliberate plunge into the commitment to “Do Different” (see last few blog posts for reference…if you need to). As a team, they redesigned the 8th grade course called Writing Workshop. In brief, they created a suite of courses from which students could choose [...]

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I had an idea…and I like hers better

I have been dreaming of the blog post I would write to encapsulate and synergize the remarkably superb experience I enjoyed – and more importantly grew from – last weekend. Like pre-visualizing an athletic performance, I was imagining the words, the letters, the images, and videos. The text and subtext. The intro and the killer, [...]

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