Shep's World

One saying that I have heard repeatedly over the course of my career is that "the pendulum always swings back the other way."  Well the interesting thing about a pendulum is that it swings to far before coming back down and it is that momentum that carries it too far in the opposing direction.  The trick it seems is to keep it somewhere in the middle ground.  Well fortunately (or unfortunately, however you wish to look at it) the middle ground in the field of education is always moving.  As our kids, schools, technology, etc. changes so does the middle ground.  In many ways this is especially true regarding access to information. Everyone of my and previous generations remembers the hours spent in libraries combing through a variety of sources looking for information to use in our schoolwork.  I always dreaded that research project because there never seemed to be enough hours in the day to complete my chores, homework, and then somehow convince my p...

As I sat in my car on my hour long ride home today I was thinking to myself how am I going to discuss teaching literacy in a Social Studies classroom.  Now ELA and Social Studies tend to mesh well together and as I reflect on my career and think back to how many times I've met with ELA teachers on my team to collaborate on specific assignments.  I've discussed how to help students construct thesis statements, how to support an argument with evidence, how to work on a conclusion, you name it I've probably done it.  Then it occurred to me that isn't what we are really talking about when we discuss literacy 2.0.  Literacy 2.0 seems to truly be about what I'm going to call creative learning.  As I come to this realization I also realize that I am currently listening to an episode of History in 28 Minutes on the revolutionary war on my way home from work.  This is exactly what literacy 2.0 is all about. Teachers, students, parents, really everybody today i...

This summer I had my first real "crisis" as an educator.  After working 12 years at a high school teaching World History and 6 years teaching AP World History I was voluntold that I would be moving down to the middle school in order to teach American History with only a couple weeks left in the year.  As you can expect I was not exactly thrilled and my real crisis was that after 12 years I had become a little to content and way too comfortable doing what I had been doing for a long time. In retrospect I don't know that I had grown much as an educator in the last 4-5 years and was probably well on my way to the dreaded condition of teacher burnout. Where are you going with this you are probably wondering.  Well after the move was finalized I had to begin to reexamine the way that I taught my students (or perhaps reflect on the fact that I mostly taught AT my students) and it was in this moment that I realized this move was just the opportunity I needed to jump into...

photo courtesy of:  http://www.lucidica.com/blog/how-to-guides/blogging-for-beginners/ I have a confession to make I never even considered blogging as a useful tool for education.  The idea of having my students surf the web endlessly searching for blogs filled with information from unvetted sources really intimidated me.  As I look back I am beginning to realize how wrong I was and in fact I followed blogs all the time and didn't realize it because I was following specific people based around a specific interest that I am on some level knowledgeable about.  I follow a man in Spain by the name of Arnaud Cousergue who is a high ranking shihan in my martial art.  I visited his blog all the time to pick up his insights on the martial arts and why I never bothered to even look towards individuals in my own profession now seems ridiculous at best or hubris at its worst. There is really no denying that the field of education is definitely in a major period...