Posts by Susan Davis
Personalized Learning
Getting Out of the Way of Learning
I have learned from implementing design teams with students the importance of stepping back and letting students learn for themselves. Some teachers think of this more in terms of letting go of control. I think of it more in terms of getting out of the way.
Personalized Learning
The Laptop Used Around the World
My challenge for you is to find a child somewhere who has slipped into the crevices of the digital divide and make a difference by putting a working device in that child’s hands. If you don’t know someone who can deliver your device personally, as I did, ask around at your child’s school, at your church, or at organizations you can trust. Surely, someone you know will know someone who knows someone who is making a journey somewhere children are in need.
Personalized Learning
Word Nerds Get Digital
You definitely know you’re a word nerd when you fall hopelessly in love with an essay called “The Joy of Sesquipedalians,” by Anne Fadiman, from her collection Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader. Fadiman begins her essay with a panegyric to Wally the Wordworm, the dictionary devouring invertebrate…
EdTech
10 Teacher-Tested Tools for Flipping Your Classroom
Stripping away all the hype and trendiness of “flipped classroom” movement, we must take a moment to acknowledge that it has brought two important changes to the way many of us think about education and instruction...
Leadership
Who Owns Our Professional Learning?
My professional learning this summer has pushed my thinking and helped me grow tremendously. I hope to be a better teacher and a more helpful colleague as a result.
Personalized Learning
Teaching Reading in the Digital Age
What does it really mean to teach reading in a digital age? It means teaching both ways and also in new ways. It means going back to school and learning to read along with our students, in a world in which we are surrounded by text from which we must derive meaning.
Personalized Learning
Why I Haven’t Flipped…Yet: Reviewing Essential Questions
Though I needed a year of immersion in a new school and a new program to think things through before I flipped my classroom, I didn’t hold back from turning my students on to the idea of flipping for learning’s sake.
EdTech
Lessons Learned from Reinventing the Research Project
Researching on the Internet for traditional educational purposes can be tricky for students, which led Susan Lucille Davis to explore self-directed research assignments.
Personalized Learning
What Teachers Really Want
If teachers are to transition to the kind of blended learning that has been found to work best for today’s kids, we need trust, time, and trained mentors to work out what what we need to do.
Personalized Learning
Brush Up Your Shakespeare!
No one could be more surprised than I was when one of my sixth-graders said, after we had slogged through Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 29” at the end of our poetry unit, “Hey, this is fun. Shakespeare ought to be an elective.”