Oh, Those Shoes! About a month ago, I was able to celebrate the 50th birthday of a good friend with a trip to Des Moines, involving some shopping. I took advantage of a sale at the Asics outlet store, and purchased two pairs of running shoes – a purchase I make annually. The theory behind … [Read more…]
I wrote about the importance of students being leaders of their own learning in October. At the time of that writing, I kept thinking about the parallel between students as leaders of their own learning and teachers as leaders of their own learning. And it’s pretty exciting to watch teachers take hold of that learning. … [Read more…]
Student Teaching Experience I completed my student teaching in San Antonio, Texas in 1996. I had the immense fortune of having Jane Zarate and Margaret Reynolds as my supervising teachers in my first placement in a fifth grade classroom. Jane and Margaret were pioneers – they transformed their traditional separate classrooms into one, joint classroom, … [Read more…]
Experiments Several years ago, when I was teaching 6th grade, I began experimenting with standards-based grading. I was actually running two experiments simultaneously: by myself in my 6th grade reading classes, and with my 6th grade team in our English classes (yep, we identified reading and English as two separate classes – uggghhh!), under the … [Read more…]