I am getting back to my blog. I haven't stopped thinking about teaching this summer. I took a course about how to help students with their online course. I will be teaching a hybrid online Reading and Writing course in the Fall for the first time. A book I picked up in preparing for this class is called Design for How People Learn by Julie Dirksen. It is a very interesting and useful book, geared towards technology but useful for everyone. Advice such as follow/shadow your students to get ideas about what works, information about memory and how it works--and I am still reading it. 


The book and some other discussions I have had with colleagues made me want to write about a wonderful experience I had as a member of a Faculty Inquiry Network. The kind of collaboration that went on in that project was amazing. People shared ideas around the inquiry/research we were doing on  teaching and what worked. We not only observed each other and made suggestions and worked on bettering our lessons (originally modeled on the Japanese Lesson Study) but our coaches who were leading the overall project came into our classrooms and made observations, helping us hone our research.


I feel that classroom research for teachers, like action research for students, is a very effective form of professional development. One of the things I liked about Julie Dirksen's book is her insistence on "context" in the broader sense of the word as learning environment and in particular, as relevance to the student's interests. Another aspect I liked is her use of examples and stories to anchor all the theoretical ideas. 

The idea of teaching and learning as active, changing, living and growing processes is most important.