Looking to engage learners at the intersection of art, literacy, and human connection?On the Outside/On the Inside is a creative activity that fosters personal reflection, while simultaneously building background in vocabulary and concepts for talking about character traits.
“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”
“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” Maya Angelou
What’s your commitment in 2021? Mine is courageous creativity. Here’s why.
Watching the live reporting of the attempted coup on January 6th, 2021, I was thinking about two things: racial inequities in policing, and bias in the word choice used to report collective actions. This blog focuses on word choice, and how we can teach students to listen and read critically for bias.
In this blog post, I invite readers to back up from the K-12 context and reflect on how we connect and collaborate in our own lives. And in a pandemic, how we build connections that matter when we are miles apart and limited to digital tools.
This weekend something magical happened, I opened a box.
Enjoy a moment of peace and reflection- the moment a keynote speaker and writer unplugged from Pandemic fears, to reconnect with what has always brought her joy.
To get good observation data, we have to shift from traditional methods (like lectures and silent testing) to challenging, open-ended, collaborative tasks that actively engage students in processing and applying the new learning. If our learning is sit-and-get, there is nothing to observe but student behaviors of either compliance or disruption.
Literacy educator discovers her creative writing on a standardized test, and struggles to answer the comprehension questions.
Evacuated from my home the first morning of the Tubbs Fire, I found a charred page of the bible amidst the fallen ash. Here’s an erasure poem I wrote using that that page to express the devastation and find my way towards resilience. Share these strategies to create and teach erasure poems.
Problem I don’t draw. Seriously, this is what I’ve told myself for most of my life. Yes, this was the humbling realization I had when reading Carol Dweck’s book Mindset years ago, as in other parts of my life I feel like a walking example of someone with a growth mindset. I thrive on challenges, on learning from failure, and all that. I take risks daily to push myself beyond what…
Only two weeks into my poetry recitation challenge in a Title I school, I cannot walk across the playground without a student stopping me to share a poem. “Be forewarned. Reciting poetry is contagious.” In an unscheduled visit to one fifth grade classroom, I arrived to see students out of their seats raising hands to be the first to recite poems. They had begged the teacher to let them take their poems home…
