My favorite children’s book author and artist is Mo Willems. "Don’t Let The Pigeon Drive The Bus", "Knuffle Bunny", "Leonardo, the Terrible Monster", to name a few, are all brilliant. Yesterday, while reading with my youngest daughter, Olive, we picked up “Can I Play Too?”. We have read this book many times but yesterday it […]
As we slowly begin to reopen schools in full or part-time hybrid schedules mitigating the learning losses that occurred during the pandemic is of top priority. This is a tricky task because for many students there are virtually no gaps in their learning, while others are faced with a massive chasm that may prove to […]
“Liberating education consists in acts of cognition not transferrals of information.” Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed I recently listened to Dushaw Hockett’s TEDx Talk on implicit bias. If you have not watched his talk do yourself a favor, right now, and do so now. One thing stood out for me as he spoke, the […]
As teachers we are always modeling for students, it is up to us to decide what they learn. Parenting and Teaching If you’re a parent you know this all too well. Literally everything we say, but more importantly do, seems to be absorbed by our children and put into action. Parenting is like looking in […]
My education hero is Paulo Freire. Pedagogy of the Oppressed literally changed my life and turned my ideas and aspirations as a teacher on their head. When you engage with Freire you see the world differently. One thing he speaks of is praxis as the interplay between theory and practice. This is important because what […]
Simple, Shared, Classroom Routines During a school visit a few years ago I encouraged the staff to adopt common classroom routines to help their students be more successful. During my presentation to the staff, one teacher challenged me. He felt that committing to common classroom routines school-wide was “taylorism”. This particular teacher made it clear […]
I have the honor of speaking with educators around the country and for the most part, we’re a kind and decent brood. Even if we don’t see eye to eye, we usually let the person giving a talk at a training finish before interjecting. Usually… It was a warm spring day in Oakland, CA, I […]
One day after class, just before lunch, I overheard a colleague consoling a very distraught student. She was sobbing and as the tears raced down her cheeks, I could understand a little of what she shared. My colleague was her Primary Language Biology teacher, which was taught entirely in Spanish. From their conversation it was […]
Just as I realized in my K12 years (and undergrad for that matter), many students approach their education, with no plan. They have no strategy because they lack agency. If you’ve never sat in a classroom with that feeling that everything is going on around you, or happening to you, but you don’t quite understand […]
"Learning sometimes occurs because someone insists that you recognize the excellence in yourself." RIta Pierson In Part 1 of this article I shared the story of when I first believed I could be a successful student. This paradigm shift happened not because I earned an A on an exam or an assignment, or in the […]
