Featuring engaging narratives, this how-to book delves into reflection as a concept and provides specific, replicable tools for professional practice. Each chapter draws on a particular school situation demonstrating the value of teacher reflection and describing the nuts and bolts of the process, including protocols for handling many different circumstances. Written by public school teachers who offer lessons learned and strategies that work, this volume: provides insights to help teachers build reflective practice with their students, including protocols for classroom problem solving; presents scenarios for individual students, their parents, and teachers to talk together about a student's performance, including protocols for conducting family meetings; shows what can happen when teachers come together to share stories of their daily lives, including protocols for conducting a focus group; and offers advice for reflecting alone and with a group, including protocols for both types of reflection.
Where Storms are Beautiful is a personal narrative of Grace Hall McEntee and her husband, two teachers, who commuted in a small boat from their home on an island to their work on the mainland.Grace and Matt live on the edge. Their home sits at the top of an embankment facing north. Like harbor seals and goldeneyes, they are migrational creatures; seasons and storms shape their travel on the water. Where they live and how they travel has changed them. The island is their place to dwell as well as their place to grow and thrive.Storms is the story of their experiences and their learning. Each day they launched themselves into an adventure, through which they gained practical knowledge and understanding. On the water they maneuvered through fog and ice. On the island they engaged in communal problem solving. In the process of traveling on the water every day and living in their island community, they discovered that storms are beautiful.
Tossed and Shaped by the Distant Sea: To Live and To Love is a collection of fifty linked stories and poems about life, love, loss and challenge. Set on Harmony Island, most stories emerge from the island itself. You will read a personal narrative about the challenge of crossing from mainland to island in a small boat on a stormy winter night. Two stories explore the event of an elderly neighbor's wandering away into the woods and the community's response. “Without Him” captures in poetry the rhythms of a CPR rescue. “She Talks to Flowers” is a whimsical poem about a life-altering relationship with plants. Once, the author and her husband missed the signals that a storm threatened: “Hurricane Jeanne” tells of their struggle in wild seas to save their boat. A few writings are set elsewhere: Paris, a classroom, a child's room. A friend wrote: “What stays with me is…that the book is really a love story –– of you and Matt, the island, what grows on it, the community… and the sea.”
What is it like to live on an island without a bridge? For some, the commute over Narragansett Bay by ferry is a daily reunion with island neighbors. For others of us, piloting a small boat challenges our skills and surprises us with unexpected adventure. Separation from daily life on the mainland breeds a unique culture. Here on Prudence Island we have our own lingo and our island ways. Our language is sprinkled with references to wind direction, temperature, tides and time. We savor night walks on the beach, a run on a dirt road, and stopping to talk to a turtle. Kids and adults build relationships, unique friendships that leap barriers that ordinarily separate us from those who might become our friends. Home at Last emanates from Prudence Island an island without a bridge the place where we live.
Featuring engaging narratives, this “how-to” book delves into reflection as a concept and provides specific, replicable tools for professional practice. Each chapter draws on a particular school situation demonstrating the value of teacher reflection and describing the nuts and bolts of the process, including protocols for handling many different circumstances. “At the end of each chapter I was dying to go back to the classroom and adapt a new idea into my practice. But probably more importantly, I saw my own practice in a new light as I read these engaging accounts of the work of other teachers. They ring true and honest to what schooling is about and how and why good teachers never give up—and why they love their work.” —Deborah Meier, Co-principal of Mission Hill School and author of In Schools We Trust “Typical professional development fare will rarely take us close to the particulars of our own practice. . . . As I read through these chapters, finally, it’s that sense of thoughtful becoming, that possibility of action in the midst of uncertainty that, at the end of the day, is the promise of this book.” —From the Foreword by Mike Rose
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