This is something I’m pretty passionate about and something I think most schools don’t fully understand yet. In a socially connected world where communities trump content schools need to continue to monitor and adjust where their community is moving to, what tools are they adopting, and what content they are creating, talking about, and using to connect to each other. […]
Back from a week in Northern Thailand where I took twenty-one 10th and 11th grade students on a week long journey into manual labor, teaching, and self-reflection. We arrived on Sunday afternoon and the first order of business after arriving at the lodge was to disconnect. As promised I made the students turn in all electrical devices. Cellphones, iPods, etc. […]
This coming week I’ll be disconnected from the world…and will be enjoying it. Each year our high school students take a week off away from the walls and classrooms and head out into the world to learn. Our Global Citizen’s Week (GCW) is a great opportunity for students to see the word, interact with others, and get to know school […]
“How many of you have done the 18 minute, right before class, copy and paste, plagiarized, bullet point, turn and read off the screen PowerPoint Presentation? Be honest.” Every hand in the room goes up. We know it as educators, kids know it as students. The presentation really is about finding information, putting it on some slides, add some transitions […]
My favorite part of the CoETaIL program that Kim and I run is coming up this semester. The 5th and final course for the certificate includes teachers having to apply what they’ve learned in the first 4 courses in their classroom. Last week I met with Donna Hurst one of our EAL and IB TOK teachers and we hashed out […]
I wanted to follow up on the reverse instruction lessons I’ve been working with teachers on.You can read the first blog posts here on the outline in English and U.S. History. Here’s a bit of the chat conversation: ‹Alex› what if there was no external validation? wouldn’t we all become crazy? ‹TK› we cant live alone isolated within ourselves ‹Holden […]
U.S. History has to be one of the hardest classes to teach at an international school. When at best half your students would be from America and at worse none…yet our U.S. based curriculum says we have to teach it. So how do you motivate students who for the most part have no buy-in into U.S. History? The teachers do […]
reverse instruction Today was our first day back to school after the holiday break and the first day of my little reverse instruction experiment with teachers and students. Jim Fitzgerald, who I’ve blogged about before, decided he’s be one of my guinea pigs….again. What is Existentialism? Every good student-led lesson starts with a guiding or essential question and here […]
So before I sign off until 2011 I wanted to stop and reflect on 2010…which in many different ways turned out to be a very good year.
It’s that time of year again in the international education world of contracts, decisions, and thinking about your future. Kim Cofino has a great post about finding the right fit…the right school. Whether you are an international educator or not it’s worth a read. International Teachers are different…we’re weird….we don’t like stability, we like change and challenge. We like travel, culture […]