Safe & Secure Environments For Students

It's vitally important in today's learning environments for learners to feel safe and secure if we wish to maximize learning potentials and outcomes. Educators at all levels play integral and key parts in ensuring the learning environments promote and sustain safe and secure practices at all times. Preventing violent actions is one component of ensuring safety however, close attention also needs to be given to social and emotional realms in support of strong mental health among all learners.

Learning Environment Factors

In authentic learning environments there exist many factors which can influence learning on a variety of levels. The factors increase dramatically when moving from individual environments to collaborative learning environments due to the needs of learners involved. Understanding the varieties of factors and being aware of them can dramatically increase the effectiveness of learning facilitators as they seek to structure the learning environments they lead in. The list of factors impacting learning environments can be exhaustive so I've chose two factors to focus on here as I see them impacting not only the learning environments I engage in, but also many of the learning environments I seek to impact as a learning facilitator.

Budgeting Challenges

Interviewing the person primarily responsible for the budget in the school where I'm doing my
internship as a leader provided interesting insights into the challenges faced on an annual basis. The budget is often provided to the school in the early spring and consists of pre-determined amounts by the district. The school is then responsible for itemizing out the budget by making decisions around where the funds will be allocated to have the greatest impacts.

Administrative Blogging For Communication

Working towards administrative licensure in educational leadership has provided me the opportunity to reflect on how school leaders can use blogging as a communication tool for their school communities. I've had a fairly broad experience with blogging over the past few years in a variety of contexts and am looking forward to spending more time back on my own blog. Finding the time to blog can be challenging given the amount of roles and responsibilities educators need to maintain on a daily basis. One of the most important components of successful blogging is finding a consistent time frame in which to construct and share thinking and learning regularly.

Supporting Teachers with Creating Magic

Education has faced recent criticisms from all angles and stakeholders and for good reason. Students in many schools speak of boredom, disengagement, and lack of learning.  Parents have also chimed in expressing dissatisfaction about student preparedness for college and the 21st century workplace.  Why is the typical education for most students, and specifically those in public education, not meeting the needs? Why do schools continue to operate in a traditional sense regardless of changes to the world and its societies?