My husband’s uncle lives in Melbourne, Australia and recently sent me a link to the works of a Melbourne artist by the name of Sam Jinks. I was immediately captivated by the sculptures that loaded to my screen. Sam Jinks, a hyperrealist artist, captures his subjects as they might appear in a photograph or viewed […]
I’m continuing my study of the book Focus on High School Mathematics: Reasoning and Sense Making. I’ve been going through the first four chapters again, just to get a second look at the material more closely. I found this incredible nugget in the first example on page 22, and I’ve used it with several teachers […]
Each time I walk through my front door I’m greeted by this: It’s one of my most favorite things and a guiding light for the way I choose to live my life. I delight in those things that might otherwise go unnoticed, and I admire individuals who walk the path of inspired simplicity. Recently I […]
The end of the school year is a whirlwind of activity. As a high school principal, these things were uppermost in my mind during the last few weeks of the school year: making sure all graduation ceremony arrangements were complete and that any seniors not passing were notified as were their parents; meeting with distraught […]
I believe that a tell-tale sign of a change initiative that has merit is one that quickly takes teacher conversation to the student motivation question. As in, “What do we do about the students who aren’t motivated to read, write, or otherwise delve deeply into our content?” For me, such a question indicates that teachers […]
When I was an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania, there were several members of the faculty who were wildly popular for their lectures: Among them were Nicholas Riasanovsky in Russian history, Alfred Rieber in European history, Martin Seligman, then a rookie in psychology, now renowned for his work in learned optimism, and Stuart Samuels, […]
In my last blog Are English Language Arts Teachers Ready? I address one instructional shift, Shift 3: Staircase of Complexity, ELA teachers will need to make in order to wholly address the Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts and attend to college and career readiness. I’ll continue that conversation by moving to Shift […]
