B.Y.O.T Bring Your Own Thoughts
The latest on all student-centered models, leadership development, strategic planning, teacher retention, and all things innovation in K-12 education. We answer questions before you think to ask them.
Blended Learning | Personalized Learning | School Districts
One of the best parts of my job is getting to see how teachers transform the learning experience for students. And one of the hardest parts for people considering doing personalized learning is imagining what it will look and feel like. I recently spent time talking to and observing a classroom in Horry County’s Myrtle Beach Middle School. I hope by sharing this here I can give others a window into what teaching and learning can look like in a more personalized classroom... As Jackie Kennedy sits with a group of 5 students reading near a Smartboard, an 8th grader jumps up from his seat on the other side of the room. “Ahh” he groans, “almost had a hundred! That’s an 88 though. Fifteen points.” He flexes in celebration - as one does in middle school.
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Curriculum Strategy & Adoption | Social and Emotional Learning
At Education Elements, we devote a massive amount of time and resources to helping our partner schools select digital content that will best serve the academic needs of their students. Whether the goal is to understand fractions, parts of speech, or the events leading up to the Civil War, our team has a knack for knowing right where to look in hand-selecting the best content for any learning goal. But we also understand that academic achievement is composed of many pillars. A student who has skipped breakfast, for instance, may have significant trouble paying attention in class. Another who is experiencing stress with a project partner may fail to turn in an assignment merely due to lack of communication skills rather than a lack of understanding. In more extreme cases, an otherwise bright student may severely underperform due to social exclusion by his peers.
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EE Summit | Innovative Leadership | Personalized Learning | School Districts
Yep, that’s me belting out “Roxanne” at our holiday party last December. Until a few years ago I swore I’d never karaoke and prefered singing to be something done in the my car or kitchen. But once I sang my first “Sweet Caroline” with a group of friends I was hooked. There’s something powerful about a group of people taking a risk together and attempting to follow along with “How Will I Know” (you’re welcome for that little Wednesday Whitney gift). It’s always rough for the first brave soul who steps up to sing, but it gets more fun and increasingly compelling as more people and voices join in. As Leadership Lessons From A Dancing Guy teaches us, “as more people jump in, it’s no longer risky...and that is how a movement is made.”
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Inspired by the articles on education models in Forbes and Quartz. Two of my middle school students hard at work into the evening at a 3-day entrepreneurship event, building a mobile app that is one day set to compete with Google calendar for the benefit of students, teachers, parents, and their learning community. I will never forget the time in my short yet sweet teaching career when I got to teach “morning math,” a series of 45-minute, optional classes that started at 7am on a school day. I had just begun teaching middle school math after spending numerous years in the petroleum and biotechnology industries as an engineer, and I was finding myself increasingly agonizing over how ‘boring’ my math classes were becoming… even to me, the teacher! The world’s fast-moving out there, yet here were my middle school students, suppressing all of their creativity in a math curriculum from that (tried but) didn’t provide them with connections between learning and what it can do in the real world. My students thought my background in industry was cool and often wanted to hear about my experiences; however, they couldn’t think on their feet about how they, too, might one day work in interesting fields. Their textbooks weren't made to spark their curiosity. I started thinking a lot about how to change this environment. When did I first find true love and purpose for learning subjects like math and science?
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