"What Teachers Should Know and Be Able to Do"

Making Your Learning Walks More Meaningful

BY MIDDLEWEB · 05/15/2017

May is mental health month.There is an intersection of mental health for children with their experience in the educational system.  Now it would be easy enough to explore the issues for the 14% of children who have definable mental health diagnoses and are significantly symptomatic. Their school function is impacted at the cognitive, social, emotional, and behavioral levels. However, I thought we might turn to educational changes that have massively impacted the mental health of…

Now is a good time to think about how people are addressed and included when decisions are being made. How many decisions are made that leave dissenters behind? Think it takes too much time and energy to pay attention to those who are not supportive of you or your decisions?  How much time does it take to deal with the aftermath when their dissatisfaction translates into behaviors?  In a faculty when a change is made and not everyone was on board, doesn't it take time and energy to…

There are common advantages to having a leader who has been in a district for decades and bringing in someone new. There are common challenges as well. Why might some districts hold on to their leaders for the long run and others feel the need to reach out to new ones with regularity?  Do causes lie within the leader or the district or the board?…

 Okay, maybe they don't kill it. They simply try to prevent students from learning very much of it.

 In our public schools, knowledge is a déclassé citizen, an illegal alien, a leper.

 You might think that knowledge would be an axiomatic part of K-12 education. Not so. Our Education Establishment is obsessed with limiting the amount of knowledge to be found anywhere in the school. This has been the pattern since …

 Student discipline is defined in Codes of Conduct and lives within schools' culture. School leaders and boards of education with input from school attorneys and others develop Codes of Conduct. They reveal and inform the belief system of the adults responsible for supporting appropriate conduct of the students each and every day. Discipline begins in classrooms and, if necessary, progresses outward. In most districts, the discipline buck stops in the principal's or the assistant…

The political atmosphere in which we are leading reinforces a destructive belief... that there is one truth or alternative truths but there is no such thing a truth. How can that be? As sides polarize, heels are dug in, differences are heightened, and common ground becomes the treacherous ground that causes everyone to lose identity. As this occurs, belief in the honesty of the 'other' diminishes. For the work of educators in some areas there are absolute truths, in mathematics and…