Wednesday, February 22, 2006
From the title you might expect that this piece will be about a group of people meeting to talk about books, but I have a different story to tell.
It’s Black History month, and I saved the Martin Luther King birthday issue of Time for Kids. This marks a departure from their usual self-selected “chapter book” [...]
Friday, February 17, 2006
It’s Friday afternoon, and I’m sitting at work with a pile (no, it’s bit bigger than that) of things to plow through, that promise little satisfaction other than moving them off of my desk. I have a kid to pick up in a couple of hours, so I’m finding things to do to keep [...]
Thursday, February 16, 2006
This summer in the science workshop I attended one of the exercises we did was to draw a scientist. Sometimes these types of exercises turn out surprisingly interesting and I take them with me to my classroom to use. This one, though, didn’t do much for me. I suppose the reason it didn’t is that [...]
Thursday, February 16, 2006
Common sense tells us that reading vocabulary and comprehension are linked. Using word definitions, though, doesn’t work as an instructional approach for improving reading comprehension. Effective vocabulary instruction should include metacognitive reading strategies such as determining the significance of particular words to the overall meaning of the text, assessing prior knowledge about a word and [...]
Friday, February 10, 2006
I spent the last two days in mandatory district sponsored professional development workshops. The 32nd Annual Bilingual Multicultural Education Equity Conference was in town and teachers from all over the state showed up. Typical of most large conferences I’ve been to, I had options throughout the day to attend various sectionals. I was able to [...]
Wednesday, February 8, 2006
Is self-directed professional development possible? This is the story of how I got pulled into Borderland. Maybe Graham can use some of this as validation of his plan.
In January of 2003, I saw a flyer for a course, “Multimedia for Teachers.” I was nervous about signing up for it because I didn’t know anything about [...]
Tuesday, February 7, 2006
Susan Ohanian has an article called The achievement gap between poor and middle-class black and white children, by Richard Rothstein, who is is a research associate of the Economic Policy Institute. This is a reasoned analysis of The Achievement Gap, and the logic behind it’s existence. Rothstein says
It seems plausible that if some children can [...]
Saturday, February 4, 2006
More convinced than ever, it doesn’t hurt to be reminded.
Thursday, February 2, 2006
As soon as this semester is over, I’m going back to studying important subjects like grains and yeasts, one of the more useful things I’ve ever learned about. When I started on my scholarly jag in 2000 to get a MEd+36 credits, I didn’t expect much out of it besides money-advancement on the salary schedule. [...]
