I’m now completing my 29th year serving as a professional educator. Maybe it’s my age, maybe it’s my experiences, or maybe it’s my own emotional fatigue, but it seems to me that students are arriving at our school doors carrying heavier and heavier burdens than in years past. Feelings of detachment and despondency are becoming … Continue reading Five Tenets of Community for Powerful Student Care
I recently completed a six month mentor-guided course in public speaking, and in every session my mentor told me, “Your story is your superpower.” With that mindset, he encouraged me to start compiling a list of personal stories that I might include in presentations I make in the future, so that the presentations will have … Continue reading The Power of Storytelling
The Partnership for 21st Century Education (now part of the Battelle for Kids network) identified creativity as one of the essential transferable skills for students. While creativity as a topic is quite large, there have been a number of resources published to help teachers incorporate creativity into the classroom and build student skills. One article, … Continue reading Four Competencies for Creativity
In the late 1500’s, a group of academics, musicians, singers, poets, and dramatists gathered in Florence regularly to study the music, poetry, and theatre of the ancient Greeks in order to better understand the artforms and to apply their findings to their own works. The group became known historically as the Camerata, which is somewhat … Continue reading The Camerata Classroom
Students participate in a variety of communities and need opportunities to practice the skills associated with being a good community member. Classrooms and schools provide such opportunities on a daily basis. In their book All Learning Is Social And Emotional: Helping Students Develop Essential Skills for the Classroom And Beyond, authors Nancy Frey, Douglas Fisher, … Continue reading Supporting the Development of Community
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