These days, everything seems big. The problems are enormous, the exhaustion is shattering, and the challenges are endless. It’s no wonder I keep finding myself feeling totally overwhelmed. Whenever I realize that I’m sitting in an overwhelmed space, I’ve found that something that’s helpful to me is to break the enormity down into smaller pieces. […]
Questions Instructional Leaders Can Ask To Support Their ELA Teachers I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard or seen teachers complain about how they are expected to go to professional learning where the facilitators teach in ways that would never fly for classroom teachers. As someone who does an awful lot of facilitating […]
My beat this year is about taking care of the grownups, and well, this year that’s turning out to be even more of a monumental task than I could have imagined it would be. It doesn’t feel like there’s a lot that I can say about professional learning that would even scratch the surface of […]
A little while back, a dad took to social media to pat himself on the back about the lesson he’d taught his daughter when she wanted to open a can of beans but didn’t know how to use the can opener and the Twitterverse collectively cringed. In case you were lucky enough to miss it, […]
In my job as a literacy consultant, I work mostly with teachers and administrators, not students. While I sometimes miss the kids, I really love getting to serve the grown-ups in the system because we are all learners, and sometimes – heck, way too often – we spend all of our energy worrying about how […]
Continuing to write when the rest of the world felt like it’s on fire helped me to feel a little more like me. It helped me to keep some normalcy. And it helped me to reflect on what it means to be a teacher writer these days.
I’m finding that meaningful, unpolished support still looks awfully familiar to some of the same things I valued back when the world was normal.
Writing for an audience isn’t about having it all figured out. It’s about engaging in a community of thinkers and learning from the process.
When I started blogging for Moving Writers, I wrote mostly about my practice in the classroom. Since my role has shifted away from the classroom and toward supporting teachers, I spend a lot more time working on my own practice for adult learning. So most of what I blog about lately is about professional learning […]
When I first moved from teaching middle school to teaching high school, I brought my workshop practice with me. At first, I was worried that this type of instruction wouldn’t meet the needs of my high school students, but it didn’t take me very long to realize that it was exactly what they needed. And […]
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