Today I am thinking about how to create a meaningful writing challenge for my students within the borders of an essentially artificial exercise–the semester exam. For one of the sections of the exam I plan on including a slightly unusual task for a fairly traditional goal–to ask students to demonstrate their understanding of A Raisin […]
The Talent Assembly: Evidence of the Ties that Bind Us
[This is a slight revision of a post that was originally published on the edu180atl blog on November 18, 2011. The rules for posts on the edu180atl site are that each post must be about something the author learned that day, and each post must be no more than 250 words.]Today we had a Talent […]
Revisiting Hamlet and the Writing Process
[Ten years ago, I was Humanities Chair at Asheville School as we transitioned to a Humanities Department from separate English and History Departments. One of our goals, in addition to incorporating art and music history into our teaching, was to improve our efforts to teach writing across the curriculum. During that first Fall as a […]
Thinking About Process Change (Part One): Contextualizing Technology Use in a Progress Culture
From Wednesday to Friday I attended, along with three other Westminster folks, the AASA Leadership Symposium in Boston, led by Alan November, and since we finished, I have been thinking about the cosmetic changes schools traditionally undertake versus the possibility of what November called process change. The conversation we had overlays my ongoing reflection on […]
“Aligning Schedule with Mission”: The Chance to do a Presentation on the Hawken Schedule
Excited enough that I am writing with my elbows pinched to my sides and my laptop angled awkwardly and wedged on my knees, I am flying back to Atlanta from Chicago where I had a great experience this morning speaking at the MSBP Heads Meeting about the Hawken Upper School Schedule—its genesis and its initial […]
School Transformation: Becoming a Progress Culture
When we talk about creating a transformative moment in a school, the goal is to move the curriculum and the culture to a new place. What is misleading about this kind of talk is that it sounds as if the place where the school lands will represent a new stationary normal. But in fact the goal is to transform the school into a progress-culture, in which normal will include the ongoing ability to reflect on and respond to a changing world.