Sharing from others

Thought I would share an e-mail from Amy about an important learning from the first week of school at TMS. I think I need to get a copy of the book. What have you learned that would be important for the other members of your leadership team to know? Sharing our experiences and seeking support and feedback are indicators of the professional learning community that we aspire to become.

I just have to follow up on our conversation on Wednesday. --If I had a blog, it would go on there. After going through classrooms on Friday, I had a whole new perspective on the internalization of using active learning strategies to "review learned information." I saw strategies we taught on waiver days last year or things I have modeled in almost every classroom I went into. It was an "ah ha" for me that I/we have taught active learning strategies as a way to review information. The next step is to teach active learning strategies to give information or have students discover information. One of my teachers also gave me a book to read "the Zen of Teaching" (takes less than an hour to read) which emphasizes the importance of the first day as an opportunity to bond with students and gives examples on how to do that. Next year, I am going to use pieces from that book to really set up the importance of first day. I need to find a way to help teachers realize that the "ritual" of going over all the rules and expectations in front of the class for the entire 60 minutes is a TTWWADI. Kids know how to behave the first 4 days of class, not going over the rules the first day won't change that.

While I know engaging activities will only bring us to Classroom 5, until we train teachers on integrating habits of mind/thinking skills into lessons, it at least takes us to a place where students will want to be in the classroom.


I also read the following today in the Blue Skunk blog that you might have heard me say a few times, though I have not yet reached the conclusion about burning it all. I agree that we need to be WILLING to, but I have faith that we can meet needs without this step. Teaching them to teach themselves is a fundamental shift that must be made for these young people to be successful when they leave us. I need to reflect on the concept of the learning lifestyle as opposed to lifelong learning, but it sounds and feels good.


The schools that I attended in the 1950s and ’60s tried very hard to teach me how to be taught. I believe that this is one of the shifts that we have to achieve as we try to retool classrooms. We need to do less of..
teaching kids how to be taught,
and instead,
teach them to teach themselves.
I think that the point is not that everyone is going to have 10.2 jobs between the ages of 18 and 38. Many of us will only have one job. But how many times will that one job change? 10.2 times? Perhaps not, but when it changes, who’s going to teach the new skills?
We need to stop teaching literacy, and teach learning literacy.
We need to stop teaching literacy skills, and teach literacy habits.
We need to stop thinking about lifelong learning, and instead, work toward every student leaving our schools with a learning lifestyle.
We need to be willing to take every piece of furniture our of our classrooms, clear the walls, burn it all, and start all over again. The world has changed that much.
Anything less is an insult to our children.