Last week I spent four days with interested, involved, vibrant and receptive primary teachers at Berkeley International School in Bangkok. I saw them learning and growing, and I also was learning from leading them. Over the four days, I met with each teaching team a few times, did individual coaching sessions, met with leaders, did…… Continue reading Lessons Learned in a Consultancy Visit

  This school year, as our school expands, I’ve been working on coaching and collaborating with some of the newer teachers to our school.  I have found a mostly receptive audience including some overwhelmed teachers.  To be honest, teaching is overwhelming. My job in these situation is mostly to help them see what to worry…… Continue reading Coaching Model and Questioning

I must admit that I lost track of blogging last school year. Great and not great things were happening and I wasn’t blogging about them. Everything else like going to meetings, writing plans, meeting with students, discussing ideas, etc. took a front seat; and I just let it got. I started a several blog posts and…… Continue reading Another Year…

One of my favorite things to talk about is actual pedagogy… not what are we going to do tomorrow, but why we do the things we do and the way we do things to help students.

In the next shift of my position as literacy specialist, I have changed many of the UOIs I support this year and am trying to push-in to 2 grades at a time. After a few years, we need to expand how and where we see language as important integration and not just focus on writing. In…… Continue reading Grade 2 HTWW UOI: the life of a push-in teacher and “teach the writer not the piece of writing”

  Ashley, one of our grade 3 teachers, has begun to make literature circles her own and is being very brave about giving up control to the students. How is this working? First, she’s had faith that they will be able to take control and enjoy reading using literature circles. Even very seasoned teachers have…… Continue reading Literature Circles: They Can All Do It

At Learning 2 conference a week ago, I attended a workshop where a teacher discussed making global connections through an inquiry lens.  He shared a few examples that he has used in his classroom like Skype connections between classrooms, co-writing texts with different classrooms, and a global teddy project. Not that I thought that he…… Continue reading Learning 2 and Beyond

How do I deal with this? Is it about time?  Is it about it being hard?  Is it about adults not understanding? We spent two days in the clouds (and some on land talking about how education is not keeping up with society, with the fact that we have an old idea of schooling attached…… Continue reading Backwards Progress and the Average

Welcome back to a busy school year! Last week was a crazy-wonderful week at ISHCMC. We had visitors all week from near and far.  The last two days were full of professional learning, education talk, reflection and more at the second annual 3E Conference.  For my part, crazy me, signed-up to do both a workshop…… Continue reading 3E Redefining School