It has been a long time since I’ve written a blog post, almost a full year. 2021-2022 was a great school year, but it was a heavy-lift managing the pandemic and adjusting to the changing educational landscape. We rescheduled our high school three times throughout the year in order to keep up with changing government regulations and supported our students on a daily basis as they handled the stress of the pandemic on top of the typical stresses of being teenagers and high school students. It was rewarding work, but it left less time for writing.
This year, I’m excited to get back to the blog as a way to tell our story to the Lincoln community and anyone else who finds this site. I’m also excited for the work we have planned for this year as we strive to be our best selves as educators. We’re back on campus already, and we kicked off the year with a two-day (plus homework) workshop from the IBO on inclusive teaching practices. Our entire middle and high school faculty participated, and we explored ways we can effectively reach all students by creating more equity in the classroom and across our campus. We talked about identifying and embracing learning variabilities, physical variabilities, and the myriad other ways that students come to us as individual learners. As Ted lasso would say, “All people are different people.” It was a great training that sparked challenging and hopefully ongoing conversations about differentiating instruction and engaging our entire community in our efforts to increase diversity and better our inclusive practices for a more equitable school.
I’m also super-excited for our plan to focus on student-centered, instructional practice this year. Each month, we’ll identify research-based, powerful practices that transcend individual subject areas and emphasize student ownership of the learning process. We’ll begin in August with a big-picture view of what it means to be student-centered as defined by Lincoln and how we approach learning and teaching as an active process. We’ll talk about how we can categorize those practices in various “buckets” and begin building a common vocabulary for ourselves and ultimately, our students. From there, each month we’ll focus in a different area. Our faculty meetings will include workshops led by teacher-leaders that provide teachers with an introduction to a specific instructional strategy and an opportunity to practice its implementation together. Our weekly newsletter to teachers will include examples of specific strategies. Each month, our teachers will implement new strategies in our classrooms, share their successes, and reflect on their learning in our annual goal-setting process. Finally, we’ll build a menu of strategies together to help define what it means to be a teacher at Lincoln.
Together, our efforts to improve instruction and inclusion will support each student learn, grow, and become their best self.
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