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Continue reading →: Stories: About a boyAmazing educators, when you ask them, “What do you teach?”, they reply, “I teach kids!” Great teachers love kids. They love the students in front of them and they understand the sacred nature of their professional responsibility to nurture the academic and personal development of kids. Great teachers know that…
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Continue reading →: About kids and devices: Trying to find the answersAre there areas of your practice as a leader or teacher that you haven’t figured out? How are you modelling your learning? How can we be transparent about the process as we learn new things and try to find answers to life’s essential questions?
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Continue reading →: About school: We can make it specialrincipals and teachers can create singular moments for kids everyday. Like the Brooklyn Nets, these are our schools, classrooms, hallways, gyms, and cafeterias. We are in charge of these settings. We can do extraordinary things to create lifelong fans of learning and of our schools.
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Continue reading →: About Work / Life Balance: So much to learnIt can be difficult to describe the magic of the Ed camp model. It’s liberating to cast off the formalities, restrictions, and passivity of conventional educational contexts (read: SCHOOL) and embrace a mode of learning that elevates choice, participation and sharing. When I’m asked to give an example of the…
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Continue reading →: About reading: You’re not aloneFor every adolescent who encounters fear or conflict or love, there is a person, real or fictional, whose life is described in words and whose experiences can help them realize they aren’t the only one. When kids read books, they come to recognize that the world contains innumerable thoughts, feelings,…
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Continue reading →: About cooking: You can eat your mistakes@DMGately at Nathan’s Famous 4th of July. It was the Fourth of July. I was doing what I love doing in the summertime, using my barbeque smoker to make pulled pork sliders for dinner. I woke up at 4:15am to get it started so that we could have dinner in…
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Continue reading →: About hope: We can’t give in, can’t give upWhen Sandy Hook happened, I was certain that something would change. Six and seven year olds! If as a nation we were not willing to do something to address gun violence in our schools following the deaths of six and seven year-olds, I told myself, nothing would ever change. How…
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Continue reading →: About Feedback: Good enough is not good enoughIf you’re going to have a single job for a long time, the two jobs you would do well to consider are classroom teacher and middle school school principal. Both of these are dynamic roles that are constantly challenging, you can never be bored. The jobs of the principal or…
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Continue reading →: About school climate: You might control the weatherWe cannot control the weather, but there are so many things that educators do control. It’s about intentionality. Everything we do as educators should be done with intention, not because that’s the way were were taught, not because it’s what “feels” right, or what’s easy for us; we must always…
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Continue reading →: About middle level teaching: Nobody wants to be the Junior Varsity*Actions follow our beliefs. If there is one piece of advice that all middle school teachers must follow it is this, “Middle school kids are different, don’t expect to succeed with the same strategies that might work with elementary or high school kids.”
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In the middle of learning - by Donald F. Gately 
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