Preamble

This blog is an opportunity for me to clarify and share my thoughts about school improvement. Mostly. There are two other projects that I’ve been working on — one for high school biology classes about how science happens and another for elementary school teachers about learning from images — and I expect I’ll write about those projects too.

A bit of background. Five years ago, I retired after nearly 40 years in schools. I was a junior high school and high school science teacher, a computer lab manager, a program evaluator, facilitator and change-agent in a district office, and a site administrator. Since then I’ve worked, very much part-time, as a consultant, mostly to principals whose schools were in Program Improvement.

For years, I’ve thought about school improvement and worked to make school better and now I talk to principals about school improvement. I want to use the blog as a fairly informal way to write about and therefore to think about the issues and the strategies that I talk about with principals. These mostly address problems and confusions that they have about what to do to improve their schools.

In addition, I seem not to have lost completely an old fascination with science. Before becoming a teacher, I abandoned a potential career as a research scientist (zoology) and left graduate school. I taught general science and biology for many years, but moved out of the classroom for the most part in 1980.

About five years ago, in the middle of various controversies about evolution and intelligent design, I decided that the real issue was not that argument specifically, but a more general confusion about how science works, what scientists actually do and how they decide what is and what isn’t true.

I tried to convince my wife, who writes and illustrates children’s books, that she should do a book about how science works, but she has her own ideas about what’s important and has been busy with other books — science books even — while ignoring my idea. (Hard to believe, no?)

Last fall, I finally realized that I didn’t have to wait for her and could go ahead with a how-science-works project of my own and will probably be writing some about that here as I work to make it happen.

In the meantime, my wife and a friend produced a science book of their own, Living Sunlight: How Plants Bring the Earth to Life, which was good enough to win an award from AAAS as the best science picture book of 2010. Last summer, several of us created a teachers’ guide to go with Living Sunlight, but I have never been quite happy with it and would like to rework it this summer.

In part, that reworking will involve making clearer how teachers can use the illustrations in Living Sunlight to help students learn how to “read” the images, so that the illustrations help them understand the text and the text helps them understand the illustrations. I will need to think about that and some of that thinking is likely to appear here.

There may be other things as well.

In any case, if anyone at all finds this blog, I would be delight to hear comments, suggestions, etc.