AUSSIE PD
Paragraph Six - Let Us Now Praise Freewriting
Pardon me while I pause to praise freewriting.
The topic has come up several times in past posts: as a way to respond to essential questions, as a phenomenon that liberated a middle schooler named José when he wrote, “Seeing is not believing,” as a vehicle for the unique poetry of her ninth grade mind when Jasmine wrote, “…a quiet, spacious room, reaching and stretching and acting….” It was Jasmine who went on to...
Paragraph Six - An Art and A Talent
I was facilitating a session at a retreat for the staff and a sprinkling of students from a Bronx high school. I was modeling the process of “open freewriting.” A teacher timed me while I wrote, for one minute, what came to my mind:
Go. What will I write? Blackbird. I saw one this morning. Blackbird, fly! And how many ways are...
Paragraph Six - The Golden Thread to the Teenage Brain
Here is the story of the wolf boy, who I will call TS for the purposes of this blog, continued from last week:
Having resolved that he wanted to go to college, earn money, buy a house on Long Island and work with wolves, he needed an action plan. His goals were shimmering in the far distance like a desert mirage. He needed to work on something short term, something smarter. (We all know about “SMART” goals, don’t we? Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, Timely.) So I conjured up from the magic lantern of my computer a...
Paragraph Six - The Golden Thread to the Wolves of Long Island
“These so-called ‘golden threads’ are very nice, and probably what education should be all about, but if I followed any in my classroom, I can guarantee my students wouldn’t pass the ________ (insert name of any high stakes test),” wail the skeptics. On the contrary, as we discussed in Paragraph Six, #15, students who make connections “across life,” as Judith Langer put it in her study of schools that beat the odds, actually do better on...
Paragraph Six - The Golden Thread Through a Can of Spam
Let’s pick up the string from last week’s blog post, and see where it leads, then. DaVinci’s exhortation to “realize that everything connects to everything else” is surely the answer to the problem of students who “set about forgetting” (as Sancho Panza put it) what they have learned. I made the claim that making the connections will lead us along the golden thread to the pedagogical version of Blake’s “Heaven’s gate” as opposed to the...
Paragraph Six: Flashes, Specks and Connections
Yes, I’m still hung up on the Zeigarnik effect. I feel its weight on my shoulders every day in the schools. What is our work coming to? A flash of light that fades almost before it’s lit in the short term memory of the students, or the building of a pattern that will serve the students for a lifetime?
Walt Whitman has a line in his poem “There Was a Child Went Forth” (also cited in my third blog post) that reads...
Long Island Schools
AUSSIE consultants are currently active in several of the Districts of Long Island and there is a great deal of enthusiasm amongst this team of AUSSIE professionals about what is happening in their schools. A recurring theme is the wonderful openness of the teachers, with whom they are working, to embracing new ideas and a keenness to learn new ways of working. The other great advantage is the...
The Ron Clark Story
How important are passion, innovation, and creativity to being an effective teacher? To hear Ron Clark speak, as I did last week at the National Title I Conference in Washington, D.C., they are critical—and he has the results to prove it.
Ron’s story is fascinating. After graduating from college, he became a teacher in a rural disadvantaged North Carolina school where he used his own nontraditional innovative approach to teaching to make a tremendous impact on his students. Test scores soared. His real-world applications caught the eye of...
