I climbed the hill leading up to one of my favorite coffee shops in Seattle this morning to enjoy a coffee while taking in a phenomenal view of the city on this beautiful day. As I took a seat on a bench, I noticed there was a woman on a conference call sitting on the bench next to me. She'd put the conference call on speaker, so I could hear everything being said. My attention wavered between appreciating the gorgeous day and listening to her conference call. It didn't take long for me to realize that the woman's call was among educators participating in what sounded like a virtual staff m ..read more

I was encouraged yesterday by a few tweets I saw from some education leaders who wondered aloud about how various stakeholders in public schools might come to work together more collaboratively in the wake of COVID-19. What if we could find ways to get outside of our us vs. them mentality when it comes to the divisions that often exist between classified, certificated and administrative staff; the union and district administration; community members and schools; or even individual schools and the district. Is there some way we could all let go of long-held disputes and just work together to ..read more

The term equity is being used a lot these days in education circles, certainly more than when i began teaching in 2006. On the surface, that seems like a good thing. A lot of us would like to prioritize equity. But, the more it gets thrown around, the more it seems like it's being used in ways that are so superficial that they actually perpetuate inequity. Understandably, some folks, having seen this happen over and over again, are beginning to lose hope for the possibility of equity to move us in the direction we want to go, namely the direction of justice. In this blog post, I'd like to at ..read more

It first happened to me about ten years ago. I was beginning my third year of teaching in a new school in Washington, DC. Social studies teachers were sitting at a department meeting, and the assistant principal assigned as our department head was explaining to us why standards-based grading was going to close the achievement gap. "This is all very interesting," I said, "and I'm happy to get on board, but besides standards-based grading, what other legitimate grading practices are out there?" "Well, whatever they are, we don't practice them here. Standards are about raising expectations, and ..read more

Thousands of years ago, along the coast of a great ocean, there lived a small community of people. One day, early in their history, they gathered to discuss a fascinating question: What’s on the other side of the ocean? For as long as they could remember, nobody had ever sailed to the other side, and they were immensely curious. So they created a plan. They would build a ship and sail. It was a dangerous experiment, and many generations of people failed at first. Eventually, a group of explorers from the community discovered ways of building ships and sailing that took them across the ocean an ..read more