Flip2Facilitate

This year will be my thirtieth year in teaching.  Thirty years.  When I began teaching there wasn't internet, cell phones, or Miley Cyrus.  Hard to believe, I know. I entered the professions with a preconceived set of beliefs that have been chiseled and modified by experience.  I thought I would share the BIGGEST revelations with you here.  There have been many, but these are the most moving. 1)  Content is not as significant as delivery of content. I know I will raise some eyebrows with this little gem.  No matter how well you know your content, if you don't take the learner into account, that content will remain with you.  I had a GREAT education, but my most useful experiences came from learning about student engagement techniques. I also learned to trust my gut.  I learned to know my students and what could reach them.  I think we all know people who know their content, but do not know how to share that content. That is the key t...

"By better integrating academic, career and technical education, and work-based learning, the nation’s secondary schools can increase student engagement, boost student achievement, and provide students with more options after they graduate from high school, according to a new policy brief from the Alliance for Excellent Education." ---from Alliance for Education We all want to prepare our students for the future, a future we cannot see. We want our education to be work relevant and we aspire to make our assessments authentic. We are ever more aware of the push for this environment. In my state, Kansas, I am looking at multiple movements in this area: Kansas Common Core Standards and CTE (Career and Technical Education Pathways) . I, like many, find myself in this mix. Here's what I know. First, we need to look for methods (and tools) to help us shift accountability of learning from a teacher-based model to a student-learning based model. Please understand, I a...