"What are those key phrases you hear from frustrated teachers in the staffroom during breaks? Or on those rare occasions, you get to meet up with teachers from other schools on training courses? For me it is the following: 'They give up so easily,' 'Where is their stickability?' 'Why do they fear making a mistake?'
However it is phrased, you get the gist, that pupils today have no resilience, they aren't prepared to keep going in the face of challenge or set back. They can't think their way around a problem. In discussions with staff within my own school (a large primary in an area of high deprivation in the north of England) I am frequently asked how we can help these children. As part of our school's SLT I have already supported staff to make daring changes to our curriculum but we still seem to be falling short of what we state in our vision; that we want our children to become resilient learners, confident individuals, critical thinkers and lifelong learners. (Traits that I am sure many schools up and down the land wish for their pupils to develop.) Why are our pupils struggling with 'resilience'? What opportunities can we, as a school, provide our children so that they develop these skills? After reading the blurb and the introductory pages, I was, as you can imagine, excited to delve further into this book to see if it could answer some of my questions."
"It's the end of the first week of term and it has been so positive. I have tried to spend most of my day being the leader I want to be, engaging the 'spirit energy' (see Peter Drucker). I spent summer reflecting on my values and vision, and I'm fortunate to have been handed the reins for the Curriculum in my school. To realise the vision, I've employed the help of a team of subject leaders, and today I met with them for the first time. I knew this was probably our most important discussion; my opportunity to engage them in the future (see Steve Radcliffe, Future Engage Deliver), and so I spent the week prior to this discussing and reflecting with SLT to ensure I was ready."
Great student-facing online curriculum for K-12 teachers to use to teach computer science across the curriculum! Supported with professional development and options of graduate credits from St. Catherine University. Great materials!
"I have always believed that reading has a significant impact on our understanding and appreciation of the world. As both a life-long passionate reader and an experienced English Language Arts teacher, I have witnessed first-hand the impact that reading has on the ability of learners in terms of comprehension, grammar, empathy, confidence, vocabulary and expression. This has however, only ever been phenomenological through informal observations in the classroom, and in an effort to incorporate sustained silent reading (SSR) as a regular, valid and essential practice, I have embarked upon this research in order to determine the impacts that daily reading has on middle-school learners, not only in terms of English Language Arts, but also across the curriculum."
As we make plans for how we will engage our students in their learning the decisions we make become fundamental to how they will grow to understand the purposes of learning. How our learners approach the curriculum and the disciplines is fundamental to the outcomes we may achieve for them. One path will set them up to view learning as the acquisition of information the other to see it as a process of asking and exploring questions of significance through the many unique lenses.
If you're a faculty member, you've spent the last few weeks preparing your syllabus for the spring semester. You've updated the document and added a little to it. This latest round of edits may have pushed your syllabus another page longer - most now run about five pages, though nearly every campus has lore of some that exceed 20.
Lamentations about syllabus bloat started emerging about seven years ago in moods ranging from nostalgia to bemusement to curiosity to irritation to full-blown ideological critique. Based on 20 years of serving on curriculum committees and working with academics across the disciplines on teaching, I agree that, yes, the typical syllabus has now become a too-long list of policies, learning outcomes, grading formulas, defensive maneuvers, recommendations, cautions, and referrals. As a writing-center director who has encouraged instructors to add a pitch for tutoring services, I'm complicit.