"Critical Friend" Kevin

This year, our principal came up with a fun way for the administrative team to appreciate teachers. She purchased three different types of "pins" that principals can distribute to faculty or staff. We have pins to give teachers who make notable contributions to our PLC teams and we have pins for adults who go above and beyond for our students. In addition, we have an "apple" pin to give to teachers following a good lesson. We didn't make an official announcement about these pins. We just started distributing them, here and there, in November. As a result, faculty and staff have been pleasantly surprised when we have had something to share, aside from some positive words.  Earlier this month, I put an inordinate amount of time into a presentation. It was the type of presentation that did not require extensive preparation. In short, we had decided that students weren't taking our district writing prompt seriously. The sophomores who had to participate did ...

I became at father and a teacher almost simultaneously. In the same school year that I completed my student teaching (1999-2000), I began dating a woman who had a two year-old daughter. And while I didn't do a whole lot of parenting that year, the next year (as a first year teacher), I proposed to that woman and my parental role increased as we got closer to our wedding day. At the time, I didn't realize how much I didn't know about parenting or teaching, but it was not because I didn't have great examples to draw from. My parents were amazing and I had some incredible teachers, but the influences of each of these sets of people may need to be a future blog post. Today, I need to write about movies . Last month, my now teenage daughter had a hip surgery that left her relatively immobile. "Entertaining her," it turns out, was the excuse I needed to play more Monopoly and Risk in the past month than I have played in the other 19 years of her life. I also striv...

I had the opportunity to facilitate a workshop this week that I hope saves teachers dozens of hours this semester, and it's based on this quote by grading guru Ken O'Connor: "Don't leave students out of the grading process. Involve students; they can - and should - play key roles in assessment and grading that promote achievement." The workshop was designed to share a series of practical strategies that could be used to have students assess themselves and one another, taking some of the pressure off the teacher to be the sole provider of feedback in the classroom. For instance, one strategy asks students to assess their confidence while taking an assessment and then their preparation after seeing the scores of an assessment: Another strategy helped students to set "SMART Goals" for the assistance they will seek between assessments: Evaluating one's preparation before, during, and after an assessment was also encouraged: While...