Short answer. Yes. Long answer. It’s complicated. There are pros and cons to eating in your schools faculty lunch room. Lets look at them Pros: You get to debrief with colleagues about your day and be surrounded by people who have roughly the same intellect and thirst for conversation that is NOT about One Direction. […]
Read more "Should you have lunch in the faculty lounge?"Have at least one meeting with no notes per week…just a conversation of ideas. Education has entered the world of big data and data driven education. Overall this is a very good thing for getting quantitative information about the performance of students (and in some cases teachers) in a wide variety of situation. The idea […]
Read more "Have at least one meeting a week with NO notes"Core Value statements need to change. Every time I visit a school, I make a point to look up what their ‘Core Values’ are. For those of you that might not know what core values are they are usually three to five words, or phrases, that encompass the ideals, aspirations and culture that a school […]
Read more "Core Value statements need to change."As educators, we tend to think that our students look at us as always have the answers to their questions. We often go to great lengths to research a unit so that we make sure we have the answers to all sorts of ridiculous and banal question that could possibly come up in class. I started my career […]
Read more "Why saying “I don’t know” is the most powerful tool a teacher has."In my class of 6th grade students I would always start the school year with a conversation and a rationale as to why I taught in a certain way. Then, over the course of the school year, I would revisit this rationale as I would walk them through what my thinking about a particular lesson or activity […]
Read more "Why you need to teach students metacognitive skills in middle school"Get faster at building content: Nuts and Bolts edition My last post was all about the basic of creating your first bit of content in Google Earth. Today I’m going to show you a few hacks to make the process a little easier. If you remember from my last post, the three forms of content […]
Read more "Nuts and Bolts of building content in Google Earth"The first time your create content in Google Earth it will be awful. I mean dreadfully awful. Sorry to break it to you but just like learning calculus or Roman History, it takes a little bit of time immersed in a thing to ‘get it’. Just like we tell our students, this about learning the […]
Read more "Creating your first Google Earth content is harder than it looks."This is the third post about teachers using Google Earth to enhance student engagement with learning. Students are put in charge of creating content to help build context and perspective about any topic they want to study. Before you as the teacher can start a project or lesson, it is important to learn some basic […]
Read more "Google Earth navigation hacks"This post will be broken up in to several different posts to get you started with the basics of Google Earth. There is a lot of information and it sometimes feels overwhelming but some there are only a few simple buttons and commands that you really need. I will illustrate each of them to show […]
Read more "Getting ready to teach with Google Earth"The case for Pass/Fail in Secondary Schools When my wife told me that most medical schools in the US are pass/fail, I was dumbstruck. “What do you mean?”, I asked incredulously. How could the smartest people in the country take their classes pass/fail? Wouldn’t they just start skipping class since there was no more competition? […]
Read more "What’s wrong with the A-F grading policy."
peter spiegel 