Partnerships. Local ones, international ones, public-private ones, online ones. Partnerships between schools, between teachers, between academic departments, between students, between teachers and students, between the school and students, between the school and parents, between the school and the community in which it exists. More and more the value of partnerships is finding its way into […]
TWO-FIVE-TEN: Guidelines for Establishing the Priorities of a Change Initiative
There are different types of priorities during a change process, and I have been thinking recently about how to make them manageable and understandable. For me, it makes sense to think in terms of TWO-FIVE-TEN.TWO: “The Non-Negotiables”I believe there is room for two priorities that are non-negotiable. These are the goals that, if not met, […]
Differentiated Assessment of Student Writing in an English Class
[In order to align myself fully with the vision of the school, I will need to improve my ability to differentiate instruction. As part of my self-reflection on this topic, not only am I thinking about areas where my teaching practice may be deficient (or more generously, ready for rethinking), but I am also thinking […]
Finding the Opportunity in Educational Technology: Breaking the Undertow
As part of an update to the Board of Trustees of Asheville School, I included this statement in 2006:“In the Academic Office we have been thinking about a number of challenging questions. For example, as a faculty we have noticed that students are struggling, more than in the past perhaps, with the vast number of […]
Ecclesiates 1:18 …Wisdom and Vexation, Knowledge and Sorrow: Bidding Farewell to An Essay Prompt
[In searching for some old documents related to our study of poetry in my English 9 class, I stumbled (can one stumble into an old computer file?) into an old exam question I used when I taught AP Literature. I like the question, and I used it in slightly varied ways over the course of […]
Designing a Course Around an Object: Thinking Locally as a Way to Think Globally (Part Two)
In my last post, “Designing a Course About a Point on the Map: Thinking Locally as a Way to Think Globally”, I described a course centered around a specific location. The spark for that thinking was a purchase I made at an auction recently of a large pottery five gallon churn made by pottery makers Kline […]