Why are we doing this?

A review of “The Ministry of Teaching, L. Martin Nussbaum” as reprinted in the ACSI Legal/Legislative Update, Winter 2007.
This brief one-page article recently crossed my desk and struck me as summarizing many of the things that we do as teachers that need our constant remembrance. The heart of a teacher can easily be forgotten [...]

Are Third Graders Real?

What kind of a question is that? Of course they are real. All we have to squabble over is the form of their reality. If you can teach Third grade, you can teach anything. Here are some observations that support that premise.
A. When they don’t know the answer to a question of [...]

So What is a Second Grader Like?

I think with the “behindedness” that I am experiencing these days, I should go to a form of writing I don’t like but that is much quicker for me. I will bullet out my thoughts from my Day in the Life of a 2nd grade class.
A. Even at second grade, I am finding the [...]

Teachers with drive

Another of Buckalew’s points has to do with being driven to stay current. I would twist this around to say that a teacher must be a learner. It is not acceptable to ever reach a plateau of knowledge, level off, and stop learning or you thwart the intrinsic ethos that makes a teacher [...]

Teachers as those who lead out…part 1

I just posted a whole list of things that Walker Buckalew had stated were characteristics of “teachers whose approaches are associated with high levels of student performance in moderate stress contexts.” In my own words, teachers who lead students to high performance without stressing them out. He is not saying education can be [...]

From “Teachers as Leaders”

I have been looking over some material from Independent School Management, Inc. (isminc.org) on Teacher Evaluation and development. Here is an interesting list they have put together on what makes the best teachers: (from “Twenty Principles for Teaching Excellence” by M. Walker Buckalew, pp. 39-40)
“Many of the most obvious characteristics of teachers whose approaches [...]