Adventures in Administration

Photo credit: Flickr http://goo.gl/mI8NLQ This past weekend I attended  IntegratEDSF (#isf14).  Halfway through my morning session on day 1, my mind was already swimming with new ideas.  Then came the Key Note and look out, full mind explosion!  iSF is a very different type of conference as you only have two sessions in a day that are designed to be workshops rather than an hour of information coming fast and furious and then on to the next session with no time to process in between.  This was my first time attending iSF and I I will be back.  But that isn't why I am writing this post.  I am writing this post to reflect on some of the lessons I learned over the weekend... Failure to Communicate My morning session was facilitated by Pernille Ripp (@pernilleripp) author  and teacher extraordinaire.  The session was entitled: The Empowered School.  It was a fantastic conversation that caused me to think about when I say "yes" vs...

There has been a lot of chatter lately in the Twittersphere and at conferences about two ideas that seem to be slowly gaining traction in education:  1. Project Based Learning (PBL)--and you might as well include 20% Time in that conversation, and  2. the notion of schools being THE best place to allow our students to fail.   I have been ruminating on both of these concepts a lot the past few months.  In this post I am going to attempt to tackle both succinctly and intelligently Let's start with the first one: PBL/20% Time.  finally came to the realization that this is the way to approach learning at all grades.  And it only took my 7 year old and a talking bus to help me realize this.  After all, I'm a history teacher by trade so how exactly does one teach the French Revolution or the writing of the U.S. Constitution or the origins of civilization or the causes of WWI as a project?  I know that all you PBL evangelists are moaning at t...