Interested in #STEM, #Enviro, or #MakerEd? #Travel ideas with a side of #parenting real talk?. This month, I'm formalizing my writing habits and publishing 30 more Atomic Essays as a part of @Ship30for30. Topic requests welcome!. Follow Along:

Wishing a wonderful #break to all the teachers who get to break from routine this week!

Kicking off this #thanksgiving week in the US by practicing some #gratitude around the office and with my team. How have you seen or been a part of gratitude practices at work?

More #Canva tonight with a little bit of #AI. Do you have a favorite way of taking many photos and converting to a watchable #slideshow or #presentation? I'd love to know!

#canva has been an awesome addition to my #teacher #toolkit this year. It's visually captivating and makes everyone an instant designer of quality work. Who else is using it and what have you loved about it?

#winterstorm headed for the #GreatLakes this weekend - how do you make the exit out the door in the morning a little easier? . How is everyone doing getting your kids, and all their snow gear, out of the house on time?

It will start to look and feel like learning we all wish we could have had more of, when we were kids.

I would encourage everyone to take an assignment, project, experience, idea, and reframe it to focus on the nonlinear process. Uphold the power of mistakes, iteration, and individualization.

the more we can normalize messes.the more we can individualize. the more we'll have done what we set out to do, when we signed our name on the line to work in stewardship of these kids, their minds, and their futures.

the more we can reflect on how students feel empowered - instead of productive. the more we can support do-overs, tangles, frustrations, and even start-overs. the more we can award iterative process over product. the more currency of time we can offer.

But when we really want to develop a learner, to develop a person, and have faith in what students can do, we are looking for thinking routines, we are looking for ways to empower, we are looking for lots of different in- and out- roads to build their future selves.

I'd like to think that the work I'm most passionate about leading now, helps lay down myelin around skill, not vocab. There are times when we need to teach a specific tool in a fab lab - and for those times, predictable kit projects are great.

But teaching naturally gives us a schedule to reflect on our work (summers. ) think about what we're really doing well, what was in alignment with broader goals. It puts us next to creative people who think differently than us, and we engage in conversation about our practice.

I'm in the game of building brains. I'm not in the game of storing information in someone else's head. I've been teaching more than 20 years in some fashion. For a lot of that, I was storing information.

Thinking in terms of cloned experiences, that are sequential, a little tidier, and return similar outcomes- this teaches how to use tools, not processes. It teaches how to work with a material, but not build with it. It teaches how to follow directions, but now make up our own.

I was so wrong. The winning work is highly individualized, it's nonlinear, it's unclear until it's done, and it's messy.