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Category Archives: curriculum

Hills to Climb

Sunday, August 15, 2010

Summer is over, and so is my unplanned break from blogging. Last week we had the kick-off welcome back session and we met our new superintendent. We had the introductions for new staff, brief recounts of summer highlights, and school-wide planning, planning, planning. Monday there will be more planning (presumably) and a meet-and-greet for teachers [...]

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Rethinking School Reading

Wednesday, April 28, 2010

With a little over 2 weeks of school left, we are finalizing things, making ready for the grand summer release. Today I asked my sixth graders to reflect on their growth as readers, and to write about what they’d learned (if anything) about themselves or books, based on what they read in school this year. [...]

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Notes from Alaska’s Common Core Comparison

Saturday, March 27, 2010

As everyone has heard, “Alaska and Texas are the only states that declined to participate in the [national] standards-writing effort.” Unreported, though (except here) has been the fact that the State of Alaska was planning a comparative review of the new standards with what we have in place already. And now, Megan Holland has picked [...]

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Howard Zinn

Wednesday, January 27, 2010

Howard Zinn died today of a heart attack. He was 87. The AP published a short biography in memorium. Published in 1980 with little promotion and a first printing of 5,000, “A People’s History” was, fittingly, a people’s best-seller, attracting a wide audience through word of mouth and reaching 1 million sales in 2003. Although [...]

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Critical Readings

Thursday, January 7, 2010

The Public School in Los Angeles is a school with no curriculum. Someone proposes a class, and when enough interest builds, a teacher is found to teach whoever signed up. The school isn’t accredited; there are no degree programs. It’s a project of Telic Arts Exchange, an organization that “emphasizes social exchange, interactivity and public [...]

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Owning the Change Process

Monday, October 19, 2009

Today was a professional development day, and as these things go, it wasn’t bad. One thing that helped, I suspect, is that the school district curriculum department piggy-backed onto the Alaska State Literacy Association 2009 conference, so we were able to take advantage of some fresh ideas that weren’t part of the local institutional orthodoxy. [...]

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An Ecology of Adolescent Literacy

Thursday, October 1, 2009

This post is tangential to a series of posts that Tom Hoffman has done recently, in which he eviscerates the new Common Core(porate) English Language Arts Standards. I don’t see category links on his blog, so maybe the best place to look for them all at this point is in the monthly archive. He summarized [...]

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Convergences: Catching Fire in a Deluge

Sunday, August 30, 2009

This is the first in a series of posts in which Dina Strasser, who blogs at The Line, and I correspond about our experiences using a workshop approach to reading instruction: Dina, I like your suggestion that we use our blogs to compare notes about teaching in reading workshop classrooms this year. I appreciate your [...]

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…Or Maybe Heaven After You’re Dead

Wednesday, August 26, 2009

This seems like a good time to call up this video narrated by Alan Watts, Life and Music, which Artichoke posted many, many months ago. I mentioned it to one of the other teachers I work with as an aside during a presentation on RTI at a staff meeting this afternoon. (AIMSweb is a progress [...]

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Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivation

Wednesday, August 26, 2009

Daniel Pink, author of the pop socio-psychology book, A Whole New Mind, which celebrates creativity and innovation as part of a supposedly new ethos in business management, takes up the problem of extrinsic vs. intrinsic motivation in a TED lecture. He describes an experiment exploring the problem of functional fixedness, first performed in 1945. Functional [...]

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