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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…
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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…
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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. …
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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Finding the twinkle lights of joy in a dark year.
In honor of Autism month, I am resharing this post I wrote many years ago on a previous version of this blog. As I reread it, it connects so much with the inspiring words of Norman Kunc and the Right to be Disabled that I wrote about in a previous post.
NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity by Steve Silberman In this comprehensive, well researched, thought provoking book on the history, legacy, and current understanding and hopes for Autism, Steve Silberman shatters the myth that there is an epidemic of Autism. By digging deep into case files, scientific and artistic history, and medical records of many individuals previously identified as childhood schizophrenics…
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“It is possible that persons with bits of these traits are more creative, or possibly even geniuses. If science eliminated these genes, maybe the whole world would be taken over by accountants” (p. 428) In honor of Autism month, I am resharing this post I wrote many years ago on a previous version of this…
Tales of La Tortugita 