Reflecting & Storytelling About Teaching
Before my eighth-grade history students moved into online learning this spring, I had no idea about one student’s affection for Cup Noodles or another’s sweet way of talking about her 5-year-old brother. Perhaps I should have known, but I didn’t, and I wish I had. Distance learning has enabled these intimate glimpses… Continue reading
This has been one of the most difficult moments I can remember to encourage students to follow the news. As two 8th graders said recently in a Zoom chat:
At first I picked up Robert Caro’s memoir because the historian, journalist and teacher in me were curious. Caro’s The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York is the only 1,300-page nonfiction book… Continue reading
In its sophisticated checklists, grounded research, and illustrative classroom stories, Lindsay Portnoy’s Designed to Learn: Using Design Thinking to Bring Purpose and Passion to the Classroom will inspire you to fine-tune or jump-start your design thinking approach. While reading, I found myself appreciating the book’s rich… Continue reading
Rarely has it been so clear that a unit needs to be scrapped and started over from scratch. In my eighth-grade U.S. history and civics class, which has a lot of curricular flexibility, we focus on… Continue reading
Teaching via Zoom at my kitchen counter, laptop perched on coffee table books, is not the top way I would choose to interact with my eighth-grade U.S. history students. However, by the time we reach the end of each period, I find myself reluctant to say goodbye… Continue reading
Writing a book about teaching is not as hard as it seems. You don’t need an agent, and cold submissions can be very successful. In 2007, I had been teaching for almost a decade, always fascinated by curriculum design… Continue reading
Now more than ever, Trader Joe’s comforts my soul. And recently, it has also shown me how to be a more empathetic leader, to remember the humanity around us. But first, some history. For the past dozen years — as I’ve taught middle school, steeped myself in faculty administration, and mothered two boys — Trader Joe’s has been there for me… Continue reading
Here’s how my second meeting with one class started last week, when three students opened up a chat on Google Meet:
1:16 PM
can i go to the bathroom
1:16 PM
we didn’t have to turn in a current event today right… Continue reading
Writing a letter to a politician is about as “civic” an assignment as we can do within our classroom walls, and it feels especially relevant in our polarized political climate. For the first two years that my U.S. history and civics students wrote these letters, though, I didn’t quite… Continue reading
