Leading From The Heart

by Tracy Rosen, teaching & consulting since 1996, blogging about it here since 2007. All views are my own and you should take them with a grain of salt, I do.

Category: News

  • The tao of teaching in ambiguity

    image: Shadowed Crones by Rudha’an, found on flickr and offered under a creative commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 license.

    What I love about keeping a blog is the insight I glean from those in my blogging community. The other day I published a post called Understanding the Machine and in one of Christopher‘s comments I found a pearl:


    …but until I know who I’m going to be teaching, and how many, I’m stuck at an exploratory stage.


    This describes how I feel each time I prepare for a new group, whether they be elementary school students, high school students, university students, or any of their teachers and support staff. In fact, I feel that I am always at the exploratory stage and as soon as I feel I’m not, well, it’ll be time to change gears and start teaching something new.

    It also pretty much sums up the foundation of socio-constructivist approaches to teaching and learning like Differentiated Instruction.

    I was always amazed at teachers who were able to create detailed course outlines at the beginning of the school year. I remember asking a colleague how he could do so before he spent some time with his students and he answered, “Simple – there are 32 chapters in the text book and 4 terms in the school year. I just do the math.”

    I can’t see it as simply as that. Even for content courses with standardized testing (like Secondary IV Physical Science or History of Quebec). Until I get to know my students things are somewhat ambiguous because they make up most of the meat of anything I teach.

    My job is to continuously replenish my toolkit so that I have as many options as possible to explore with my students so that I can be sure the strategies I use mesh with the way they need to learn.

    I think that part of the magic of teaching is learning to live with ambiguity, yet to do so with inner authority and compassion, allowing course design to emerge based on community (classroom) needs. Oh, and to keep learning learning learning about as many different strategies as possible so that, as I create my courses (an ongoing process), I can say, wait – I know what might work here, let’s try this!

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  • Getting to know us bloggers :)

    Kevin has ‘tagged’ me in this blogger ice breaker ;)

    I like the idea of getting to know the people in my blogger community as people and not just bloggers.

    Copied straight from Kevin who, in turn, blatantly and defiantly ‘ripped’ straight from Graham’s post:

    Kevin has tagged me so here goes. Cut and paste and insert my
    facts. I like [Graham’s] alteration to Rule 3 – so the same applies
    here. (I won’t leave a comment informing of the tag. If you’re one of
    the lucky 8, you can read it here or in your choice of aggregator.)
    First, the Rules:

    1. Post these rules before you give your facts
    2. List 8 random facts about yourself
    3. At the end of your post, choose (tag) 8 people and list their names, linking to them
    4. Leave a comment on their blog, letting them know they’ve been tagged

    Eight facts about Tracy Rosen

    1. When I was 5 my family moved to New York City and I changed my name to Harmonica Goldfish. Some people still call me that.
    2. I am a bit of a school junky – I have a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Art History and Painting from Concordia University in Montreal, a Bachelor of Education in Elementary Education from McGill University in Montreal, and a Master of Arts degree in Human Systems Intervention from Concordia.
    3. I recently got a new bike and I love it so much it is in my living room :)
    4. I will eat food that is still (technically) alive but please don’t give me any green peppers.
    5. I lived in Ichon and Seoul, South Korea for 2 separate years and in Beijing, China for 6 months.
    6. I have been studying kung fu (sil lum hung gar) for the past 15 years and started when I was 24…do the math if you like :)
    7. I recently became an aunt to twins. Unfortunately they live in San Francisco while I live in Montreal.
    8. I like to listen to very random types of music in the same sitting (Eric B. and Rakim followed by Neil Young followed by Gotan Project followed by Matisyahu followed by Amir Diab) and dance and sing to them all as if no one is watching

    Here are my 8 … tag! You’re it!

    1. Keren Fyman
    2. Scott McLeod
    3. Barbara
    4. Dennis Harter
    5. Marg O’Connell
    6. Topher
    7. Joey
    8. Allison Rosen

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  • The resilience of teacher culture

    Image: Crystal by louisa-catlover made available on flickr by a creative commons license.

    I found this little video (link at bottom of post) through Dr. Scott McLeod’s blog dangerously irrelevant

    It is a speech given by Dr. Richard Elmore and it is a sobering description of a present reality in today’s schools that cries out to me in strong terms the need for change, for structural change, in the way we do things.

    Here is Dr. McLeod’s commentary from his blog post of July 02, 2007:

    “One of the reasons Dr. Elmore’s speech speaks to me so much is that it raises quite vociferously the issue of misalignment. In my work with schools and districts, I see numerous examples of misalignment, including:

    • classroom pedagogy that fails to regularly employ high-yield instructional strategies to achieve optimal results;
    • professional development plans that are based on teachers’ preferences rather than students’ needs;
    • staffing plans that fail to put the best teachers in front of the students who need them the most;
    • intra-organization funding decisions that fail to put resources where they are most needed;
    • a lot of wasted instructional time;
    • and so on (I’m guessing that you can add to this list!)…

    We say that we want results. We say that we want high levels of achievement for all students. But we are not doing what it takes to achieve the results that we say we want.”

    The comment I left in reference to this post was:

    I appreciated listening to this speech and reading your comments. They are very much in line with my own thoughts on the matter.

    I am discovering, in working with different school communities, that in order to shift the incredibly resilient teacher culture towards a culture that makes sense for student learning I need to access individual teacher’s values and passions around teaching, around caring and helping. I need to make their own learning make sense for them.

    The Resilience of Teacher Culture

  • Up for a challenge, anyone?

    here, by accident, at a Physics blog by teacher Dean Baird. I’ve bookmarked it.

    Hmmm – I like this kind of a challenge!

    Helping educators become more supportive of
    students is critical, but doing so produces more significant
    improvements in student learning when combined with high expectations
    and rigorous instruction.

    The challenge
    now becomes how to create the conditions that allow such solutions to
    flourish together and how to get them into the communities and high
    schools that need them the most. High school reform is achievable. But
    if reformers are to be successful, they must leave very little to
    chance.

    from Surprise — High School Reform Is Working By Thomas Toch, Craig D. Jerald, and Erin Dillon, Phi Delta Kappan, Feb. 2007

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  • a special place closes

    Private Weston School closes after 90 years

    RYAN BERGEN,
    The Gazette

    Published: Friday, June 22, 2007

    I worked at Weston for 5 years – almost 4 as their high school resource coordinator and teacher, and about 1.5 as a substitute teacher when I was back in school myself. It was a special place where everyone strived for excellence in one form or another. Its closing is a great loss.

    At the closing ceremonies, last Thursday evening, a student, who entered the school in Grade 7 as a shy girl who was virtually disabled by her dyslexia, won one of the school’s top awards. She is entering CEGEP in the fall in Child Care Studies. I shed quite a few tears at that closing ceremony….

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