Facilitating a learning environment unlike the one I grew up in

This week’s essential question:  How different is your current classroom from the one in which you learned when you were a student?   I haven’t been a classroom teacher in a very long time, in fact I only taught for one school year after college, so I don’t easily identify with being a “teacher” in…

Signing my work with excellence

How do you respond when people you meet ask about what you do for a living?  Regardless of career choice, most of these conversations revolve around the superficial aspects of the work. We might ask or be asked, “What exactly do you do?” “Where do you work?”, “What are the perks?”, “How did you get…

Student engagement runs on teacher innovation

Engaging students seems to be a fundamental aspect of teaching, yet, in their study of research about student engagement, Taylor and Parsons (2011) found that there are a wide range of definitions that educators use to identify engagement.  There were types of engagement such as “academic, cognitive, intellectual, institutional, emotional, behavioral, social, and psychological” (p.…