Solicitations & Guest Blogging

On solicitations & guest bloggers

I appreciate your interest in my blog, and am honored that my content resonates with you.

Please be aware that I seldom (closer to never), accept unsolicited product trials or guest bloggers. If I believe your product might be of value, and fits with my goals for this blog, then I will contact you. Should you not hear back from me, it is because I am not focused on the product you are trying to sell at this time.

Goals of my blog

I typically write about what I'm learning. I am passionate about empowering others and creating learner-centered classrooms, schools, districts, and environments. 

The main purpose for creating my blog was originally to help me organize my ideas, and reflect on what I was learning. Over time, my blog became a resource for educators. It was basically a reference guide to professional learning or questions that individuals asked me. 

Those goals are still true today.

The bottom line is, if the answer to this single question is yes, then it is an idea worth blogging:
Is it in the best interest of the students?


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Quality Blogging and Commenting Audit Meme

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Striving for Higher-Order Thinking and Depth of Knowledge

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A little over a year ago, I read Higher-order thinking is the exception rather than the norm for most classrooms on Scott McLeod's blog, Dangerously Irrelevant , and have been mulling it over, wondering if our school district is any different. Over the past year, our teachers periodically collect data with their teams on the types of questions/tasks they ask students. One teacher records teacher questions and the other records student responses on a shared Google Doc ; then teams sort through their own data, plotting teacher questions by Bloom's Revised Taxonomy , and student responses to those questions/tasks with Webb's Depth of Knowledge (DOK) . The 2012-2013 data showed we were not very different from other districts; therefore, our teams set their own goals for higher-order thinking and depth of knowledge. The data so far for the 2013-2014 school year shows questions asked of students are up and down the Bloom's ladder, equally distributed (with a little
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Craft and Structure, Deeper Thinking, and Tech Integration

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