SPEAKING
In nearly 200 keynote speaking occasions, I have accumulated a broad range of experiences to a wide variety of audiences. From the White House to rural Iowa, from commencement addresses to policy forums, from teacher educators to elementary students, I have enjoyed and learned from every opportunity. While I tailor each talk for the audience, these are some especially popular titles and topics.
- Riding Mistakes Out of Mediocrity: How We Must Re-Think Getting Better
- Are We Asking the Right Questions? Creating Cultures of Learning
- The Let-Go That Gets More: Shifting Learning Agency
- The Perfect Mess: Finding Our Best Teaching Selves
- Writing the Poetry of Our Profession
Selected Topics
- Creating classroom cultures of learning
- Common Core implementation
- Teacher leadership
- Productive failure
- Creating thinkers; teaching analysis
- Learning related to literacy
- Instructional coaching and administrators as instructional leaders
TEACHING
In order to meet the needs of each school or organization, I will plan ahead with you to insure the learning design meets your needs. I offer workshops in the form of breakout sessions, half-day, full-day or multi-day experiences.
- Creativity Through Constraint: Creating Projects that Enliven
- Focus on Writing: It’s All Recursive
- Learning to Think: Empowering Students to Become Learners
- Unpacking Layers: Teaching Analysis and the Whole Class Novel
- Frame by Frame: Turning Mistakes into Teacher-able Moments
- Pathways to Careful Reading: Getting Clear on Close-Reading and Text-Dependent Questions
- Teaching, Leading, Learning: Empowering Teacher Leaders
Selected Topics
- Using video to become a more reflective practitioner
- Finding and capitalizing on learning moments as part of observation
- Project-based learning
- Common Core
- Empowering teacher leaders
- Teaching analysis
- Enhancing student engagement through constraint
- Instructional coaching and administrators as instructional leaders
I have also started to offer a unique experience that offers teachers a special insight into the implicit cognitive work teachers do. After presenting a lesson plan to a group of teacher-learners, I teach a class(es) of their students in their school. During this time, teachers collect important evidence of learning moments. We then use this lesson and their observations as the foundation for our continued learning. What has become most valuable about this approach is the way we can have a very honest, very transparent inquiry about the in-action decisions teachers make and determine how that reality impacts the professional growth of teachers.
CONSULTING
As a consultant, I have learned to collapse the walls of my experiences to coalesce into the kind of perspective, questions, and clarity necessary for moving forward. I have collected a variety of experiences:
- Curriculum designer and writer
- Programming developer and implementer
- Advisor for non-education organizations
- Coach and trusted resource for administrators and education service providers
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