Learning to Unfold: Nourishing Our Students Back to Life

Greetings English Teaching Colleague!
I've recently left my classroom behind after teaching English at American High School in Fremont for 35 years. The only thing I enjoy more than spending time with teenagers is spending time with teachers. In this next phase of my career I'm looking for opportunities to train and mentor teachers as I write about what 35 years with sophomores in our English classes have taught me about how we can design our students' learning differently. All educators are welcome here, especially if you want to teach people of any age to read, write, think and converse more fulfilingly.

In our Thursday evening gatherings here on Meetup, classroom teachers and friends meet in online or face-to-face conversation to support and inspire one another in our work serving the young people in our classrooms.

Here are some initial thoughts:

Aims:

• We want to build a place for newer, mid-career and veteran teachers to chat with colleagues who know how it is to teach in today’s mandate-heavy schools.
• We want to help one another navigate our own surviving and thriving as we support our students’ learning and growth.
• We want to share approaches and strategies that help teachers guide students to learn beyond standards -- to more fully understand themselves, others and the world.
• We want to support teachers in asking and researching their own questions about teaching and learning in their classrooms, if it means flying under the radar.

Offerings:
In our conversations, we want to strike a balance among:

• Troubleshooting classroom challenges with colleagues
• Sharing helpful strategies and resources
• Sharing new approaches
• Providing collegial support

Invitation:
At each meeting we’ll see who shows, introduce ourselves, and have a friendly opening conversation. We’ll start with an open-ended discussion on what a group like ours should be about and how we should operate. Then we'll open up the conversation to what's on people's minds. Classroom management? Writing instruction? Reading support? Project-based Learning? I look forward (what other way?) to being of any assistance I can be.