This past Sunday was Mother’s Day. I got to spend an entire almost two hours in the car driving to one of my favorite restaurants in Chicago to pick up brunch and bring it back home. It was absolutely glorious. Besides the anticipatory drooling over the amazing spread coming my way, for the first time
It’s that time of year where many educators (myself included) are preparing to meet with their administrator for the glorious summative meeting. Throughout my career, I’ve experienced a wide variety of these that have been anything from a short five-minute conversation to an hour-long meeting where I was required to bring a binder of evidence
It’s Wednesday. I’m sitting in my office with two students waiting for a third to arrive when one of them shares this epiphany. “I couldn’t stop Dr. Podraza. I worked on this problem the entire weekend. I looked up articles. I had my parents Google stuff. I got everyone involved.” “And I don’t think the
I’m writing this post as a question, not a statement for a reason. I’ve been thinking about it for a while and I’m honestly not sure. Writing this post is an effort to organize my thoughts. This struggle is mostly connected to the conviction I have that students are all individuals who have a variety
Teach with Fidelity. If you want to get me riled up, tell me I need to do anything with this as the standard. I remember when I first started teaching almost 20 years ago, I was told by a colleague that the first year we implemented a new curriculum we had to, “teach it with
I recently finished, Innovate Inside the Box: Empowering Learners through UDL by George Couros and Kative Novak. Full of inspiring anecdotes as well as thought-provoking ideas, the book is split into three sections: The Core of Innovative Teaching & Learning Characteristics of the Innovator’s Mindset You are the Change You Seek One of my favorite things about
I walked into a 5th-grade classroom Tuesday morning during our math block and almost walked right back out because I was sure the students were taking a test and I didn’t want to interrupt. The students were working fervently on a worksheet, pencil to paper, pausing periodically to reflect, erasing at times, and moving on
We were discussing data at an EC-12 meeting this week when one of my colleagues posed a question I had never really considered before: Would you rather have a culture of learning or a culture of inquiry in your building? He had recently gone to a training for a grant he was a part of
I observed a teacher this week who was doing a lesson on creating theories and finding evidence to support one’s thinking. She used a text from our curriculum called, The Mary Celeste: An Unsolved Mystery by Jane Yolen. It’s a great text for a variety of reasons, but one of the best things about the book is
I recently saw this tweet by Dr. Brad Johnson: I liked this post for several reasons, but mostly because it goes against what is frequently heard in education, that there is only one right way to teach children. I’m guessing this has stemmed from the No Child Left Behind era that we are all still
