Featured
Happy 2025! I hope that the year brings you health, joy, and laughter. For more than 2 years I have been absent from this blog and I have decided that 2025 is the time to recommit to this forum. The reason for being absent from writing here and the reason for returning will be explored…
Featured
It has been almost 30 years since Dr. Edward M. Hallowell and Dr. John J. Ratey wrote the seminal book on ADHD, Driven to Distraction. In ADHD 2.0 they review what we have learned about ADHD in the last 3 decades. It is an insightful and helpful review and relook at the way a specific…
Featured
Art work created by AISJ ES art teacher Richard Baldwin The last months of last school year were among the most difficult of my career. The tragic illness and passing of my dear friend and colleague Barbara Rynerson was both a personal loss and a loss felt throughout the international teaching world. She was a…
Featured
I recently participated in No Tosh’s Leading from the Middle cohort 2. The big take away is just do it! (to quote Nike). The course revolves around a design sprint. The intention is to quickly identify a problem of practice, apply some of their scaffolds to crystalize your thinking and draft an actionable next step. …
Featured
Snapshot of data As we worked to improve our Tier 1 literacy instruction discussed in my previous post, we also expanded on our data collection and data analysis procedures. We recognized that we were missing certain data points that could be helpful in tracking student progress. Most importantly, we needed to be more intentional in…
Featured
What are our Goals? At the start of the 2020 school year, despite the ongoing difficulty managing the changing COVID landscape, or perhaps because of the urgency to address the literacy needs of our students within that landscape of interrupted learning, we were determined to stay focused and move our work forward. As discussed in…
Featured
In the previous post, I discussed the questions and investigations we explored to consider our literacy progress and instruction. At the same time, and even starting the year before, our ES Learning Support team began to investigate our tiers of support and our referral processes. In this post I will outline that process and in…
Featured
Our school is about to start the second year of our focused work in rebalancing our literacy program and refining our Multi-Tiered Systems of Support. In this series of posts, I will outline and document the discussions, decisions, learning, planning, and implementation process. I know many schools are having these conversations and I hope that…
Featured
Finding the twinkle lights of joy in a dark year.
Tales of La Tortugita 