I spent three days this week at the Multicultural Teaching Institute at Meadowbrook School courtesy of my Director of Diversity, who invited me to go when we had an unexpected opening to send a teacher to the conference. If you have a chance to go to this conference, I would strongly encourage you to do…
Today marks the end of my first year leading the English department at my school. I have been department chair previously, but the circumstances were quite different. In that situation, I led a department with four other teachers, grades 9-12, at a relatively small Jewish school. My department this year included 14 people teaching grades…
NCTE is over. My brain is full. I have a few major takeaways: My students are not given nearly enough opportunities for independent reading. As in none, really. I am not going to go so far as to flagellate myself for malpractice, but I definitely need to bring in opportunities for students to select what…
I’m starting to get excited about the annual NCTE convention this year. I will be presenting Writing Workshop with two colleagues who are sharing their experiences with student blogging and online discussion forums. Here are our session details: I’m also looking forward to visiting all the Folger folks and seeing Julius Caesar at the Folger…
The post on chapters 1 and 2 has been up over a week with very little activity in the comments. I think folks are busy going back to school and perhaps don’t have the time they thought they might have to engage in an online book club. I have so much I must read to…
I apologize for not getting this first post up sooner. I have been having some problems with my blog. I just installed a plugin that I hope will help prevent some of the slowness and page load issues you might have noticed. However, I used a similar plugin some years ago, and it totally messed…
Thanks to my school, I had the wonderful opportunity to participate in a digital storytelling workshop with the Center for Digital Storytelling in Denver at the Lighthouse Writer’s Workshop. I will admit that I went into the workshop with a fair amount of hubris. I thought to myself, I’ve been teaching English for sixteen years….
I apologize for dragging my feet starting our study of Lehman and Roberts’s Falling in Love with Close Reading: Lessons for Analyzing Texts””and Life. I propose that we read the first two chapters this week and gather here to discuss them next Sunday, August 3. I know we’re butting up into the beginning of school…
I’m sorry for not posting this sooner, but my July is a little hectic. The final results of the poll are in, and it looks like Falling in Love with Close Reading: Lessons for Analyzing Texts””and Life by Christopher Lehman and Kate Roberts is the winner (by three percentage points, or just one vote!), so…
Every year during ISTE, a version of this tweet makes the rounds. It gets a lot of favorites and retweets. Students Don’t Ask for PD. #ISTE2014 pic.twitter.com/43oG7DzmO8 “” Sean Junkins (@sjunkins) June 28, 2014 I totally understand the spirit of the tweet. A lot of teachers don’t use a tool (or much technology at all),…
