This small group strategy shared by high school teacher Cheyanne Freitas gives secondary students explicit feedback on group interactions and helps promote participation and effective collaboration. Cathy Gassenheimer offers a summary and points readers to an Edutopia article where they can find all the details. Included: Links to tips for middle and elementary small grouping.
What school counselor Cortney McKinney learned during her year in the Powerful Conversations Network exploring relationship, responsibility and regulation “was a wake-up call for me,” she writes. The professional learning experience was “a call to action and a vessel in which I was able to navigate uncharted waters by talking to teachers about trauma-informed education.” Learn what her school is doing now.
Dr. Robbie Smith, Principal of Orange Beach Middle/High School in Baldwin County, shares a decade-long perspective on the work of Alabama’s Instructional Partners Network. IPN, she says, “is the type of training you want all your coaches and teacher leaders to experience. The networking and conversations that happen here do not happen anywhere else. It is an opportunity with one focus and one outcome – improvement.”
Creating lessons accessible to readers who resist novels and other long texts can enhance the learning experience for everyone – including those who read the whole book. Cathy Gassenheimer shares ideas from high school interdisciplinary teacher Ileana Sherry on designing literacy instruction with the “extreme user” in center focus. Extra resources included!
Enterprise (AL) assistant principal and former instructional coach DeAnna Miller remembers the geometry class of her teens as an unwelcoming place with low expectations for most students. She agrees with Stanford’s Jo Boaler that math can be a more vital and engaging subject when teachers help students adopt growth mindsets.
Learning to think upstream can help leaders “prevent problems before they happen or systematically reduce the harm caused by those problems,” explains Dan Heath in his bestselling leadership book Upstream. To introduce Alabama educators to the concepts of upstream thinking, ABPC created an online book study using Heath’s 2020 book as the guiding text. Find out how it’s going!
Despite an endorsement by favorite author Adam Grant, ABPC’s Cathy Gassenheimer admits she didn’t love reading The Sweet Spot: The Pleasures of Suffering and the Search for Meaning . Even so, she writes, “it got me thinking about Covid-19, the suffering we didn’t choose, and the opportunities our collective ordeal might represent for reimagining education.”
“I like Susan David’s practical approach to mindfulness in our work and lives,” writes Cathy Gassenheimer. The Harvard psychologist and author of Emotional Agility suggests four ways educators can find “a measure of peace and clarity in what’s already been one of the most stressful years ever,” Cathy says. Included: Susan David’s viral TED Talk and links to other resources.
Many teachers, especially in the elementary grades, say that writing is the subject they find most challenging to teach. Some cite their own perceived weakness as writers; others cite a lack of enthusiasm among students. Cathy Gassenheimer highlights a third problem – teaching writing as a stand-alone process – and offers a variety of resources that can strengthen writing instruction.
Educators are living in an unprecedented situation where they are very likely to feel powerless at times. Cathy Gassenheimer found organizational psychologist Tasha Eurich’s insightful suggestion – that we deliberately recall instances of great personal resilience and so reaffirm our true power – to be restorative. Included: Links to six recent leadership articles you might find helpful.
