Last year in a faculty meeting, I listened as a senior administrator denied the importance of content as part of a high school education in today’s world. It was August of 2017, only days after the events of Charlottesville, Virginia and the subsequent debates about the meaning of the Confederacy and its leaders in the contemporary era.

This administrator explained how he needed no content base to understand the white nationalist rally or the counter-protestors or the emerging...

“The teacher’s role in this journey is to ‘model advance learning’. They are there as a mentor, a guide, a coach, and most importantly, a co-learner.”  –  Glenn Chickering

Our environment should be important to all of us.  It is after all where we live.

The Green School in...

Do you remember learning to read? I am a very lucky girl – I don’t.

What I do remember is lying in bed with my Read it yourself Ladybird Book, reading to my mother. I was so intrigued with the images of Cinderella. They were different to the usual ‘soft’ images. They were almost digital (in a pre-digital time!). I grew up in a house full of books and enjoyed reading stories about The Famous Five, Mr Twiddle and The Faraway Tree……

I remember my kindergarten teacher writing a...

One of my favorite parts of history class as a high school student was participating in simulations. Role-playing, mock trials, fake battles – replaying any moment in our nation’s past inspired me as a student and made history come alive. I remember once in AP US History being assigned roles as Confederate and Union leaders in the early 1860s and told to prepare for the oncoming war. We spent a week strategizing troop movements, building economic policy, writing speeches and organizing our...