Welcome to 2018! We’re thrilled to usher in a new year of teaching and learning with you. For the last three years on Corwin Connect, we’ve had monthly themes that guided our content. These themes were helpful for authors, giving them a focus and a lens to talk about their own work. But sometimes we felt we missed out on the possibility of covering other great topics that might not have fit our theme.
So rather than limit writers to one topic per month, we decided to open it up with one general theme for the year:
Engaged Learning for All
Let me break it down.
By “engaged” we mean active and striving. We mean taking on challenges, grappling with concepts, and moving forward. We don’t mean “entertained.” We mean moving beyond surface-level knowledge to deep understanding, and transferring that learning to new situations.
By “learning” we mean continually growing, expanding our knowledge and skills, constantly seeking in everything we do. We also see learning as a communal activity; we mean collaborating with peers and learning from mentors.
The last part, “for All,” is perhaps the most important. We see this theme and this mission as being for everyone. It’s for every student in every classroom everywhere. It’s for every teacher in any situation. It’s for school leaders and administrators. It’s for ourselves as publishers and professional learning specialists and authors and consultants.
We are all constantly learning, in everything we do. Whether it’s trying a new teaching strategy or finding the area of a rhombus or analyzing a character or learning the alphabet or trying a new classroom observation tool or building a makerspace—no matter what role we’re in, we can always be learning and growing and improving.
For our authors and contributors, we hope that this expanded theme gives you the freedom to write the important messages you believe are needed in education, no matter what they might be! The good news is, as John Hattie says, everything works. Every little thing we do can have a positive impact on students.
We look forward to learning together with you this year!
Ariel Curry
Acquisitions Editor, Teaching Essentials
Editor, Corwin Connect
