Refugee Unit Page

Based on: 

1. Dojo feedback from my survey,
2. a catastrophic fall in web traffic (from averaging 300 individual hits / week to below 50),
3. the Google PD I shared with teachers last week during which I struggled to navigate the weekly lesson plans posted, on my own website, to find a material I needed to use as an exemplar,
4. some obvious confusion from my college students about their projects,
5. and some feedback about my lesson plans,
   

I am revamping the structure of our website a bit.

Within the next week, our unit pages will be expanded with much more abridged lesson descriptions on them, as opposed to having weekly descriptions and materials on the unit pages, and individual lesson plans and simultaneously redundant, and yet somewhat augmented materials linked in a variety of ways on the weekly pages.

Basically, the unit pages will soon be all we need.

Click the boots or the button to view our unit page.

There is an exciting new opportunity for my web visitors! You can take a Prezi-based tour of my real-life, physical classroom!

Click through the Prezi to the right and enjoy the sights of my classroom without the smells of post gym class teenagers. Also, read a little bit about the reasoning behind my Spartan design principles, and see how those principles work with some action shots of my students enjoying such a big, beautiful learning space.

I'd recommend continuing your journey with the links below:

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Our Shared,
​ Zen Classroom

If there is one thing I diligently study above all others, it's how to create a Zen learning environment in which all students and adults feel welcome to explore the farthest reaches of their curiosity. I read deeply both education and cross-curricular texts to achieve a Zen learning environment. You're welcome to join us any time. 

Our Lessons

Curriculum is the bread and butter of any classroom. On my lessons page you'll find descriptions of our "big four" eighth-grade units. Click any of the units and you'll see the unit overview page describing what we study on a weekly basis, the unit goals, and a description of the final project towards which we strive. Click any given week of a unit, and you'll find narrative lesson plans in plain text to learn what learning activities students and I will engage in on a daily basis. Every word that can be linked to a page or material, is linked to the page or material to which it refers. Enjoy!

Interdisciplinary Educator Blog

Years ago, I started writing a book about classroom management. It didn't work out well because every time I wrote a chapter, it was already outdated because I had learned something new through my extensive professional reading and reflective classroom practice. Documenting my learning in the field of education on paper is just too limiting. Soon, I'll document my learning in a blog.

If you have any ideas about a feature you'd like to see on my website, or if you have a question about anything you read here, feel free to contact me via my contact page. The one thing that matters most to me as an educator is to cultivate reflective practices that allow me to be a more effective teacher next year than I could ever be this year.