Hello world!
June 14th, 2009 by readysetgoWelcome to Clairvoy Individual Blogs. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
WHY BLOG: “The best measure of a blog is not how many people it reaches, it’s how much it changes what you do. Changes your posture, your writing, your transparency, your humility. What blogging has done for me is made me think. I get to think about how the outside world will understand something I’m trying to do, for example. This means, of course, that you get almost all of the goodness of a blog long before you have a lot of readers.” http://joshspear.com/item/speartalks-seth-godin/
HOW TO BLOG: Teacher both talk and blog in a certain way. They communicate mainly in a simple structure I call “CSRs”: Challenge, Solution, Result. For example, “C: I have a kid who doesn’t capitalize the first letter of the first word in sentences. S: So I told him he had to circle any that he didn’t capitalize. R: Now he goes through and erases and draws in a capital instead, and his grades have gone up 10 points on average.”
Simple, standard, teacher talk. If you listen for it, you will hear teachers talking in CSRs all around your building. It also makes for wonderful teacher blog posts as well.
Every time you or anyone working with you has a success, you can document it in your blog in three sentences:
Challenge: What is it you are trying to teach or fix. What is specific to the challenge you face in this one instance or lesson.
Solution: How did you intervene and adapt to meet the challenge.
Result: Document the success with as many number (scores going up) as you can. Most times it will be anecdotal, that’s OK.
We all have success, or learn from our failures every day.
If you document these successes in short three sentence blog posts, you will have after a while a wonderful log of successful teachable moments to use going forward. Such a log will help other teachers.