I believe in school improvement. If we are going to maintain relevancy in public education, we have to have continual renewal. However, we must make sure that we are actually writing plans which promote actual improvement which includes long term retention of learned material. Many of these SIP plans look […]
Author: admin
Out of the Box Lessons: Tying Flies, Maclean’s Montana, and the Works of Mark Isham
The soundtrack for A River Runs Through It is cinematic perfection, specifically the main title. When the fiddle begins to hum the familiar music, I am immediately taken to early 1900s Montana. It is a time when the modern world was growing out of frontier America. Mark Isham, the composer, […]
The Great Purge: A Supplemental(s) Story
Effective teachers have a broad bank of instructional materials to supplement lesson design and delivery. Some of that material is purchased by teachers, and some of it is just material that school systems purchased during past textbook adoptions. It is a vast and valuable library that is often found in […]
The Arts Embedded: How to Incorporate Visual Arts and Music into Your Classroom
Happy Friday!!! Our goal as teachers is to give all parts of the brain a good workout. I used to kind of look down on brain based research workshops, but I think there are some really good, common sense things which we can draw from brain based research. Music has […]
Pacing Guides are #@!%
Let them eat cake. It is a phrase associated with telling poor, starving French souls to go eat something even more expensive than bread(which they didn’t have). In other words, the queen was so out of touch, she didn’t even realize they couldn’t afford cake. To quote Britanica, “She was […]
Relevancy in the Age of Information: Montessori Instructional Design vs Data Driven Instructional Design
Our school system’s convocation years ago featured a man who noted that within just a few short years our public schools would be rendered antiquated relics due to technology advancing so quickly that schools could not keep up with it. He was right. In my previous post, I was critical […]
The Switch to All Digital was Poorly Planned
Sometimes, I just have to get things out of my system. The switch to digital a decade ago is one of those things. I mean really in my school system it was a total disaster, and I am not yet sure that we have that mastered yet. The digital platforms […]
Raising Courageous Young Men
How do we develop young men who possess the courage to stand up for what is right? Whew. That is not an easy answer. In our gender neutral society, I know it is unpopular to differentiate between the sexes. I am not going to bombard you with Bible verses which […]
What they really need to hear….
I can promise you that as educators that there are gonna be some days that break your heart. You are going to be left searching for meaning, and grasping for the right words to say. The heaviness of those moments will hang like a thick fog on a September morning, […]
Big Orange Fridays and Tennessee Football
As a kid, I remember listening to John Ward on the radio. His commentary brought the game alive. I grew up hanging on every word. Even today, I still go back and listen to his calls of Saturday gamedays. My first game (in person) was in 1980 against a loaded […]