Next time you’re in a classroom and want to initiate a quality conversation with either a student or a teacher, ask them the following five questions: #1: What is going on? #2: Why? #3: Why? #4: How? #5: What’s next? Try hard to say nothing but these words and that you really, really listen to their responses – pushing… Read More 5 Questions You Should Ask Students and Teachers When Observing
As one of my colleagues put it, You can ask each Mosaic teacher about what Mosaic is and what it isn’t and you’ll get different responses from each of us. No surprise or disagreement from me. Much has been written about Mosaic over the past three years. We’ve each contributed in our own way to… Read More Mosaic FNG – Of Supernovae and Vision
John Seely Brown, co-author of “A New Culture of Learning” – a must-read for anyone curious about modern education and the future of learning – recently delivered a 15-minute commencement address at Arizona State University. What follows are some of his thoughts and quotes that resonated with me, chief among them an analogy that compared the… Read More The “White Water World”
I was asked to respond to a question, which I will, but first a bit of a good old-fashioned soapbox style rant: When I think of popular movies like Good Will Hunting, Mr. Holland’s Opus, Stand and Deliver, Dead Poet’s Society, School of Rock, and a few others, I think of how these movies celebrate… Read More The Freedoms to Learn and to Question
My family went on a walk this morning and eventually found ourselves at the playground of a local elementary school. While there my son pointed out the Buddy Bench that had been installed. The bench was inscribed with the following message: When you feel a little sad And don’t know what to do… Just have a… Read More The Buddy Bench: Nurturing and Encouraging Ideas
Today was super fun … so I’ll share! Beginning with one of the following seed words: city, death, impact, or time, our students asked deep questions to investigate and answer. That’s what the Seeds portion of Mosaic is all about. Student spend most mornings working on their Seed questions and research, which they eventually share and present.… Read More City, Death, Impact, and Time
In response to Brian Aspinall’s succinct post about homework: If homework is defined as independent work assigned to students to be done on their own and then checked at school or submitted for “points or checks” then homework – at all levels – can seem a bit silly – especially while in elementary school. There… Read More On Homework (Briefly)
