From Queens Boulevard to Arajuno Road: Lessons in multicultural education
In 2009, I traded the concrete jungle of New York City, for my childhood home in Ecuador. I had just finished my service as a New York City Teaching Fellow and completed all the coursework for a Master of Science in Teaching at Fordham University.
Ten years later, I travel around the Amazon jungle (some parts aren’t so jungly these days—thanks, deforestation!) doing literacy work in rural public schools. A lot is the same and a lot is different. As an NYC Teaching Fellow, I
Mid-Year Teacher Check-In: How are we doing?
The middle of the school year is the perfect time to check in and see how you, your students, and your colleagues are doing so far. Reflection isn’t just about surfacing the things that need course correcting. It’s also about identifying and celebrating the good and figuring out how to grow upon those areas of strength. Throughout the months, it may be easy to slip into habits of mind and work practices that merely get us through the challenges of teaching, but chances are yo
The Emotions of Learning: Q&A with Yale's Marc Brackett, PhD
Social-emotional and trauma-informed learning and teaching are at the forefront of education research and study today. The National Survey of Children’s Health (NSCH) reports that nearly 50 percent of the children in the U.S. have experienced “at least one or more types of serious childhood trauma.” Therefore, ignoring emotions in the classroom can absolutely pose a barrier to learning. One group of researchers (Kautz, Heckman, Diris, Bas ter Weel, & Borghans, 2014) found tha
Engineering A Better School
Recently, in my bioengineering course, we were having a lively discussion about “ideation” - thinking of novel, crazy, outside-the-box solutions to problems in the world we saw as urgent. As I watched my students come up with solutions to their problems - a color sensor for burnt toast, a pressure sensor to detect fouls on the soccer field, low-cost motion sensors to detect speeding cars - I was struck with a question: Why don’t we do this type of “engineering design” more of
FRIDAY HUMOR: How Teachers Feel About Punctuation (In Gifs)
When a student turns in a paper full of appropriately used commas: See more at Concordia University-Portland's Room 241 Blog #gifs #funny #humor #punctuation #teachers #teacherlife #justforfun #FridayHumor