Exploring Ways to Include Blogs in Classroom Instruction

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Within my professional learning community, my colleagues and I have been having a lively discussion about the purpose and value of blogs. So I was looking over the blog I created on Blogspot, the precursor to this website, which I inaugurated on November 18, 2012. In the little over two years since I started my first blog, I have published nearly 300 posts. To date, I have attracted over 24,889 page views. I’ve been told this is pretty impressive, so I thank all my Blogspot readers! I love to write about great teachers, and I hope that my posts and books will inspire respect for educators, and also reinforce a passion for the profession from current practitioners.

Even though my favorite thing to write about is remarkable teachers, it seems that the posts that garner the most response are the ones that offer tips and hints about how teachers can build upon their own practice. So this post is an offering in that vein.

As you can expect from teachers, most of the conversations I’ve had with my colleagues have revolved around how blogs can be used productively in the classroom. There are so many possibilities to use blogs as an effective instructional tool! Some of the purposes we discussed include providing opportunities for educators to personally reflect on teaching experiences, to provide tips and strategies to other teachers, to record lesson plans and other curricular materials, and to explore issues and topics important to the profession. You can use the platform to keep parents informed of your instructional program. You can create an online book club for your students, or post assignments, writing prompts, or online readings for students to react to. You could showcase your students’ writing, art, and projects. You could build a class newsletter and record your students’ activities, posting photographs and videos of them in action. Using blogs, students can express opinions about class readings or current events, complete class writing assignments, put together an online portfolio of their work, or showcase products of their project-based learning, all for a pre-determined audience: just the members of the class and their parents, groups of students in other schools, or even the world at large. This real-world application of the technology falls in line very nicely with Common Core State Standards—which is a genuine benefit.

I’ve included here a ten-minute YouTube video to help you further explore the practice of classroom blogging. If you are not yet using blogs in your instructional program, I hope that now you will feel confident enough to give it a try!

Let’s Celebrate Our Nation’s School Counselors

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TeacherAppleTN1[1]This week, February 2-6, is National School Counseling Week 2015. The purpose of this celebration is to focus public attention on the unique contributions by professional school counselors within American school systems.

National School Counseling Week highlights the tremendous impact school counselors can have in helping our students to achieve school success. Day in and day out, these dedicated professionals labor tirelessly to help ensure the academic success, personal achievement, and emotional well-being of our kids.

On the campus where I work, their commitment to the success of each student starts with their very first interaction with students through their eighth grade outreach programs, and continues with assisting the freshmen with their graduation requirements plans, one-on-one meetings with English-language learners, counseling students who are failing classes, helping students who are lacking credits with strategies for credit recovery, and making sure seniors are on track to graduate. In between all this heavy-duty work, counselors help students find scholarships to fund their post-graduation education programs, write letters of recommendation, judge senior projects, and attend IEP meetings. And as if all that wasn’t enough, they also organize small group counseling sessions to help students deal with such issues as bullying, smoking-cessation, teen parenting, or bereavement. When the inevitable quarrels between students arise, they serve as competent conflict resolution facilitators, and they have even been known to mediate the occasional dispute between a student and a teacher. And then, just to top it all off, if—God forbid—some tragedy such as a fatal traffic accident or a suicide strikes, school counselors quickly mobilize into a highly-effective crisis management team.

Phenomenal, aren’t they? Chalkboard champions, in the truest sense of the word.

Slam Poetry Artist and Educator Taylor McDowell-Mali

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Taylor-MaliThere are many talented educators who have earned accolades in fields other than education. This is true about Taylor McDowell Mali, a teacher who has also earned fame as a slam poet, humorist, and voice over artist.

Taylor was born on March 28, 1964. His father was H. Allen Mali, a manufacturer of pool table coverings, and his mother was Jane L. Mali, a recipient of an American Book Award. In 1983, Taylor graduated form the Collegiate School, a private boys’ school. After his high school graduation, he enrolled in Bowdoin College, earning his bachelor’s degree in English in 1987 and his master’s degree in English and creative writing from Kansas State University in 1993.

Taylor Mali spent nine years teaching English, history, and math, including stints at Browning School, a boys’ school on the Upper East Side of New York City, and Cape Cod Academy, a K-12 private school on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. He now lectures and conducts workshops for teachers and students all over the world. In 2001, Taylor Mali used a grant from the New York Foundation for the Arts to develop the one-man show “Teacher! Teacher!” This show explores the combination of poetry, teaching, and math. He is a strong advocate for the teaching profession, and in 2000, he set out to create 1,000 new teachers through “poetry, persuasion, perseverance, or passion.” He finally achieved that goal on April 1, 2012.

Taylor has earned numerous accolades as a slam poetry artist. A slam poetry contest is a competition at which poets read or recite original work. These performances are then judged on a numeric scale by previously selected members of the audience. As a slam poetry performer, Taylor has been a member of seven National Poetry Slam teams, six of which appeared on the finals stage, and four of which won the competition.

Additionally, Taylor is the author of What Learning Leaves and the Last Time as We Are. He has recorded four CD’s. He is also included in various anthologies, and is perhaps best known for the poem “What Teachers Make.” The popular poem became the basis of a book of essays entitled What Teachers Make: In Praise of the Greatest Job in the World, published in 2012. He appeared in Taylor Mali & Friends Live at the Bowery Poetry Club and the documentaries “SlamNation” (1997) and “Slam Planet” (2006). He was also in the HBO production Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry, which won a coveted Peabody Award in 2003.

The Celebrated Music Educator Joseph Edgar Maddy

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6923752_124979199529One of the most talented teachers of music education in American history was the celebrated educator Joseph Edgar Maddy.

Joseph was born on October 14, 1891, in Wellington, Kansas, the second son of two teachers. Joseph never graduated from high school, but as a young man, he attended the Wichita College of Music in Wichita, Kansas, where he studied violin. Later he became a member of the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra. In 1918, he became the first music supervisor of instrumental music in America when he accepted the position in Rochester, New York.

After a short time in Rochester, Joseph was encouraged by Will Earhart to take a job at Morton High School in Richmond, Indiana, to revive the outstanding school and community music program Earhart had developed there some years earlier. Joseph remained in Richmond for four years. In 1924 Maddy was invited to Ann Arbor to become the supervisor of music in public schools and the chairman of the Music Department for the University of Michigan. There he developed one of the few conducting courses in the country, and he also conducted the Michigan All State High School Orchestra. While teaching in 1925, Maddy organized the first National High School Orchestra to play for the Music Supervisors National Conference (MSNC) in Detroit in 1926. In 1927, Joseph was invited to bring the National High School Orchestra of over 250 High School musicians from 39 states to the MSNC in Dallas that year.

While in Ann Arbor, Maddy also pursued other approaches to music education by developing teaching materials in collaboration with Thaddeus P. Giddings for a radio teaching program.The radio program taught band and orchestra instrumentation with instruction books distributed by NBC. By 1936 their radio program aired five times per week, and believed to have reached 225,000 student listeners. It was sustained until 1940, and employed professional musicians to help with technique demonstrations.

In 1928 Maddy formed the National High School Orchestra and Band Camp, incorporated as the National High School Orchestra Camp on July 6, 1927.The camp exists today in Interlochen, Michigan, as the Interlochen Center for the Arts and has generated several complementary entities including Interlochen Arts Academy, Interlochen College of the Creative Arts, and Interlochen Public Radio.Joseph also published and collaborated on a number of instructional materials and courses for elementary band and orchestra including the Universal Teacher, Tritone Folio, the Willis Graded School Orchestra and Band Series, and the Modern School Graded Orchestra Books.

He was a member of the Epsilon Chapter of Phi Mu Alpha Sinfonia, and a recipient of the Charles E. Lutton Man of Music Award. He was a National Patron of Delta Omicron, an international professional music fraternity, and he received an honorary degree from Earlham College in 1965.

This pioneering music educator passed away on April 18, 1966, at the age of 74, in Travers City, Michigan.

Twelve Stories of Heroic Teachers Presented in Marzell’s New Book, Chalkboard Heroes

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Marzell-2I am happy to announce that my second book, Chalkboard Heroes: Twelve Courageous Teachers and their Deeds Valor, has just been released. This new volume presents inspirational life stories about some of America’s most amazing teachers. These educators were not only talented teachers, but they were also pioneers, trailblazers, and social reformers influential in America’s history.

I love to tell stories about outstanding teachers. There are so many phenomenal stories that could be told! I believe that teachers represent the best our country has to offer, and, as a group, they are among the most dedicated, hardworking, and talented people anyone can know. It fills me with joy to be able to share the stories of just a few of the amazing individuals who have made such significant contributions to the lives of so many. And it fills me with pride to know that, every day, talented educators all over the country are making significant contributions to the lives of their students.

You can order Chalkboard Heroes from amazon in print now. Simply click on this link be taken to the page where you can order. The e-book versions will be ready, I am told, in about three weeks. Enjoy!