Innovate 2 Educate

To serve as a professional educator is an honor and privilege.   Yes, I said serve.   I firmly believe that teaching in our nation’s public schools is not a job, it is one of the most significant roles in public service .   To my dismay, the respect the position of teacher once held in society has dwindled over the years.   I am a third generation educator and my grandmother and mother, along with many other men and women, entered the field of education to help others through providing learning experiences that form the mind, character, and ability of an individual.   Technically, it is the process by which society transmits its accumulated knowledge, skills, and values from one generation to another.     I choose not to pinpoint this dramatic shift in society’s view of our profession; rather, I choose to illuminate the many reasons why serving as an educator is invaluable to children and our nation’s future. I believe teachers are leaders and as such...

Standards, pacing, assessments, oh my!    Accountability is the wicked witch of education in that it has bullied its way into the walls of our institutions of learning and threatened to take away the joy of teaching.   While I am not foolish enough to think that accountability will go away, I am advocating for the death of accountability in so much as it has killed creativity in our classrooms.   Ensuring that standards are “covered” will only result in success on lower level standardized, multiple-choice tests; whereas, teaching standards that are integrated or taught within an interdisciplinary unit of study allows for students to go deeper into the content, to recognize the relevance for what they are learning, and to attain higher levels of learning.   Teaching should include opportunities for project-based learning and inquiry while incorporating critical thinking skills and problem solving .   While there is a place for benchmark assessments and pa...