Consider this four-part collaborative inquiry process to guide our new normal. We have seen a significant strain on the education system. The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic has surfaced a wide-range of student needs requiring social-emotional supports, innovative approaches for student engagement and more impactful strategies
Innovation and transformation have always been part of education. Changing lives and making a difference are part of our work. We want things to be different, better, improved for our learners and society. However, innovation and transformation are often the ‘icing on the cake’ activities
Welcome back from hopefully the most restful, relaxing, and rejuvenating break you’ve ever had as an educator. You deserve it! These past two years have truly been some of the most challenging in my professional career and I assume yours, too. One bright spot I
As schools return to fully in-person learning, change is afoot. One noticeable shift is the number of new teachers, teachers working in new buildings, new districts, new subjects, or new grades. Even veteran teachers returning to classrooms have that déjà vu sense of things being
If you are among the many educators who have recently read Building Thinking Classrooms in Mathematics (Grades K-12): 14 Teaching Practices for Enhancing Learning, you may have been feeling excited, energized, and ready to start getting your students to think more in math when school started in the fall. And then it became sadly clear that COVID-19 is still with us and your school will likely look
It’s spring of 2021 and schools across the world are wrestling with the challenges of bringing students back to physical classrooms full time, all with the doomsday drumbeat of student ‘learning loss’ and a push to ‘double-down’ on addressing the achievement gap through a mandated summer school. This is a continuation of the ‘threat and rigidity response’ to
Listen to John and Jessica discussing what leaders should know about SEL on the Leaders Coaching Leaders podcast with Peter DeWitt! The coronavirus disease of 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has caused a great deal of reflection in our home. We have a 2020 high school graduate, a
Since the COVID-19 pandemic shut down schools around the world in March 2020, teachers, other educational leaders, and students have faced what may be the toughest and most challenging 12 to 18 months of their academic careers. In addition, parents, caregivers, and families were put
I do this work from a place of love and a place of pain. An educator of color who started her journey in education as a little black girl at a Title 1 inner city school, I was too often underestimated, second-guessed, confronted by racism, and surrounded
In this post from September 2020, education leaders Doug Fisher and Nancy Frey describe “simultaneous learning” as the situation in which all students in a class are learning the same content, together, but some are not physically present while others are.Those not in the classroom are generally at home on