Here's a scenario for you: You have a headache for a week. You keep taking aspirin to relieve your symptoms, but the headache continues to stay. You refuse to see the doctor because you think you can get by just fine, that if you tough it out, eventually it goes away. It doesn't. The headache stays for weeks, then months, and you have it for years. Other symptoms spring up, so you take drugs for those, too, but you still feel miserable every day. In fact, by this point you have become dependent… Continue

It’s the Wednesday before Thanksgiving and goodness, gracious do I need to give me some thanks for this ning. I mean wow! It’s changed my professional life.

Last Thanksgiving, I am not sure if I even knew what a ning was. This Thanksgiving, I am pretty resolved at this point to not even bother to write any more professional development books (even though a host of publishers are asking me to do so right now) simply because I am pretty much scratching every “write a book of professional developm… Continue

There comes a tiredness with having attended a big conference, a sense of exhilarated exhaustion that inevitably catches up to almost all attendees that do not live in the host city.

However, it’s the good kind of “spent”, the kind that comes with having tapped into a host of personal reserves.

For me, the draining derives as a result… Continue

As we enter Thanksgiving week it really is a time for me to recognize how much my students mean to me. I truly am a better human being because they are in my life.

They make me smile, laugh, hurt, angry, and tear up. They also make me proud, ashamed, hopeful and fearful.

And sometimes they do this back to back to back as if it's all ha… Continue

Being at NCTE once again proves the point that mandatory conference attendance and professional development needs to become a prime focus if we are really going to elevate the performance of our schools.

I can't even begin to cover the amount of dynamic, sound, invigorating and readily appli… Continue