Just as a record-warm February lulled us into a false sense of Spring, a snowy March swept in like, well, a snow storm. Two snow days and a two-hour delay later, some of my students lost over two and a half hours of Earth Science last week. The snow days arrived at the end of our unit on Rocks and Minerals. Initially, the students were destined for a rock lab and final rock and mineral lab quiz. However, as snow days erased instructional time from the calendar, I had to make adjustments. The new question became, “How do I […]

Context: The following conversation occurred at a rural public school in western New York, in a town with a relatively low average household income:

– “She wants to be a veterinary technician.”

– “Not a veterinarian?”

– “We have to be careful about encouraging students to pursue realistic goals.”

When a teacher and I had this conversation, I struggled to wrap my head around what he was trying to tell me. I thought to myself, “Shouldn’t we, as teachers, encourage all of our students to pursue ambitious career goals? Why would we encourage this student to become a vet tech, when she could be […]

As a preservice teacher, scanning the horizon for first-time teaching positions, I always seem to be refining my interviewing talking points. I began noticing certain buzzwords flitting into my speech. As I say words like, “multi-modal,” “engagement,” “technology,” and “collaboration,” I imagine administrators checking off boxes in the handbook of education catch phrases. Of course, all of these words have value–that’s how they became buzzwords in the first place. However, I find myself wondering how many education professionals define these terms.

I’d like to focus particularly on the term “collaboration.” What does this mean to teachers, administrators, students, parents, and […]

“Is it seriously mid-June already? What happened to the last two weeks of my life?” I’m pretty sure most of us in EDU 487 felt like this at some point during class. This week was crunch time for our Investigative Design projects and Christa’s face pretty much sums up our feelings about the workload… (Not that we’re complaining of course. It all turned out great, I promise!)For Tuesday each group wrote a rough draft of the final paper, prepared a first attempt at the presentation, and began their inquiry maps. Andrea kept us in good humor, and asked us […]