I'm going to be spending much more time this year focusing on supporting teachers with writing. While I don't have an extensive background in teaching writing outside of most classroom teachers, I am a writer. After a 1,000 blog posts, a few "traditionally" published articles, nearly 50,000 tweets, 100+ podcasts, 100+ videos and thousands of...

A month ago, I participated in a unique and powerful event called Unplugd. I've posted bits about it and will likely refer to it often in the future as it offered some outstanding experiences that have a direct impact on how we learn and how we do school. The product we created was a book on What Matters Now. We're releasing each chapter a week at a time in...

Perhaps my greatest accomplishment this summer is that I did a lot of nothing. My July was unusually quiet, void of the summer gigs at conferences that have kept me in presenter and work mode. Outside of my PLP commitments, I played a lot of golf and took the odd nap, read a little, wrote very little and hung out with family and friends. I needed that.  In the...

For this school year, I've been asked to support teachers in the writing portion of the English Language Arts Curriculum. I'm not a writing teacher by speciality but I'm a writer and a teacher so that's start.  As I scan the list of concepts and issues I've been asked to support, I continue to wonder about the relevance of these ideas for...