Part of me wishes we could redesign our curriculum. Not mine, not any specific schools’, but all of it—by pouring jelly beans out on the table. I think maybe what we teach is as important question as how students will learn it. So some have the idea that mixing up traditional notions of “in school”… Continue reading Curriculum as Jellybeans
Category: essays
A time for courage
These are my own thoughts, written on time away from work. Some years ago I sat in a planning meeting with my colleagues—we all worked for a preK-12 school division in Virginia—and we were discussing the set of core values we would use in our next strategic plan. We’d done some work to identify our… Continue reading A time for courage
Florence
In college I took a music history course and it just so happened that our professor was an expert on the music of an Italian baroque composer named Claudio Monteverdi. We ended up spending a lot of time on early Italian baroque music and I can still remember the lectures about the Gonzagas, the Medici,… Continue reading Florence
Knowing by Doing
This past week I have been supervising the hand-out of new 1:1 technology to our students. It isn’t the first time I’ve done this, but this year I wanted to take a particularly strong hands-on role with the roll-out or deployment, as we call it, of devices. I did several introductions to high school students,… Continue reading Knowing by Doing
New Workflows (Geeking Out on the Phone)
You know the saying, “you can’t teach an old dog new tricks.” I’ve been using Adobe Photoshop since 1991 (version 2, I believe), when it fit onto a floppy disk. I really don’t have a need or desire to use another tool, especially when I feel I want complete control. Some years ago my mind… Continue reading New Workflows (Geeking Out on the Phone)