Here and Now: Voices from Teaching and Learning at ISB

“Wow, I feel like I’ve just been through therapy - thank you!” “I feel SO much better about things than I did two months ago.” “You are a really good listener.”  The purpose of the Teaching & Learning Coaching program at ISB is very clear: to maximize student learning. However, after five years of hearing comments like the above from educators I’ve coached, I have come to notice that coaching has a very common side-effect: improving teacher wellbeing. If you know me well, you probably know that I have developed a bit of an obsession with wellness over the past couple of years. I regularly listen to podcasts like Feel Better, Live More with Dr. Chatterjee , Unlocking Us with Brene Brown and Delicious Ways to Feel Better with Ella Mills, and more often than not I find myself reading the books of the authors they interview. During Spring Lockdown 2020, I took the Science of Wellbeing course by Yale professor Laurie Santos, and since then I’ve added her podcast The Happiness Lab...

Do you know how da Vinci became the Renaissance Man? Of course, genius is a large part of it but it was also his growth mindset to seek out information from those who knew better than him.  If you  take a look at his journals he actively sought out experts to learn from - he leveraged his renaissance learning network to its fullest.  I’ve told a version of this story dozens of times in my classroom and to my own kids. I was reminded of it as I was talking to a colleague about how over the spring break I’ve been watching lectures about blockchain and crypto currencies from MIT and learning from people, in this case the new SEC Chair Gary Gensler, that I would have had zero opportunity to learn from if I lived in a different time and place and I was commenting on how amazing it is to be a learner today.  Our conversation quickly turned toward the near future of education in an environment where access to information is no longer an issue as the traditional barriers ...

Bambi Betts, Director of the Principals' Training Center (PTC), once said to me that the only reason we do many of the things we do in our classrooms is "because we have 20 people in the room." In other words, NOT (or at least not necessarily) because it’s best for learning. I immediately knew she was right, but it is only recently that I have come to reflect on just how right she was. The courses offered by the PTC are going online this year and so, along with all the other PTC trainers I am in the middle of reshaping the course I teach each summer for an online environment. I am not a huge fan of online courses. While I have taken a couple that were excellent,  most are decidedly mediocre. A forced shift like this really makes you think, though. Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe talk about the ‘twin sins’ of education  - coverage, and activity-based teaching. I have to be honest and say that there are times when no matter how much I try to design learning experiences around...

Human language is insanely complex, which is why computers and robots have long done a terrible job at mimicking it, and even now, their attempts are often more amusing than authentic. However, artificial intelligence is improving fast, and computers can increasingly listen to and understand human speech, thus the explosion in recent years of personal assistants, like Siri, Alexa and Google Assistant. Similar technological advances have also brought lots of new tools that are super useful for language learners. In this post, I'm going to introduce a few, but the technology is developing fast! If you have a favorite tool that I haven't mentioned here, please add it to the comments below, so we can all learn from each other. 1. Google Tools These are tools that are built right into the Google apps that we are already using on a daily basis. Google Lens Language learners can use this augmented reality tool to translate text around them without typing it into Google Translate. So, ...

  One way I am trying to personalise learning in my classroom this year is through student-driven goal work. While not always easy to do, giving over control to my students has paid off big time. No matter if they are critiquing their own calculations and mathematical arguments or finding flow and fluency in problem solving students are developing game changing habits that will serve them inside and outside the classroom. Some students are working on remedial skills that they haven’t quite mastered yet or further understanding math vocabulary as an English language learner. One student just set a new goal in an area of strength. She found herself thriving in our last unit and doesn’t want to lose this newfound knowledge and understanding. How cool is that?! How often do students get to be in charge of their own learning? Not enough, in my opinion, and I am trying to change that! Much of school just happens to our kids. I firmly believe that the one doing the thinking (talking, tink...

Striving for Equity in my Classroom: Inspired by Cornelius Minor’s Imagination Protocol   I don’t know about you, but I was really inspired by our PD session with Cornelius Minor in January. Somehow he managed to make a three hour Zoom call engaging enough that the time flew by. Somehow he created a culture on that call that invited us to feel comfortable talking openly about topics like our values and beliefs, discord and racism. Somehow he made the work of bringing more equity into our classrooms feel tangible.  Cornelius left us with some work to do at the end of that session, and he gave us a powerful tool to get us started: the Imagination Protocol.   The Imagination Protocol:    Who is most often left out in my school community? (I know this because of grades, attendance, participation etc.)  What are they left out of? How might I reimagine that thing to give people more access? (Fix injustice, not kids.) How might I test my idea?  In this post,...