During the first two years of my Ed.D. program, I focused much of my research on the concepts and practices of service-learning and global citizenship education. Arising from this research, I proposed a high school, one semester course, intended for seniors, at my school, the International School of Kigali. The course was rooted in the Global Citizenship standards put forth by UNESCO in alignment with UN SDG #4. I then proceeded to pilot the course with a small group of students during the 23-24 school-year. Then in the following school-year, we implemented as a required course for all seniors.

I plan to write a few different blog posts about my experience with this course. In this post, I’m just providing the syllabus so that readers can get an overview.

Till that word can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?

These lines appear near the end of a novel that I recently reread by C.S. Lewis called, Till We Have Faces. It’s a creative retelling of an ancient Greek myth involving Cupid and Psyche. These lines are spoken by Orual, the main protagonist and narrator of the story, shortly after she’s had a mysterious encounter with the gods.  The “they” to which she refers – “why should they hear… how can they meet us…” – are the gods.  If you know this book and you know C.S. Lewis, you know that he’s working on a theological theme with these lines. But in rereading the story recently, I was struck by the significance of the face. Lewis is drawing on the sense that our face is where our true selfhood is expressed and it’s where we see the unique personhood of others.

Two key phenomena marked the 2022-23 school-year in my mind: one, the release of ChatGPT and two, season three of Ted Lasso, a show beloved by a lot of teachers. So it is that as the ISK Class of 2023 walked across the graduation stage, and I was honored to give the graduation speech, I thought it fitting to address these two phenomena in the words that I delivered below.

In this post, I've simply copied and pasted a piece that I've written and included for my course syllabi for next school-year. This requires a few words of explanation. First, my school, as mentioned previously, still uses the traditional normative grading practices of percentage grades, averaging, letter grades based on percentage ranges, and GPA calculations. My school is initiating a process of reforming grading practices, but, at least for next year in the high school, the traditional system will remain. As a result, what I've explained below is an attempt to assess, score and report using criterion-based grading within my own classroom despite the larger structure of the school. As a result, not every aspect of it is exactly as I would most prefer it. Second, it's important to note that I haven't actually implemented this plan in this exact way yet. It's possible that I'll have to return to it at some point and refine it once it faces the realities of actual practice.

In previous posts I’ve mentioned the problem with traditional grading practices. I’ve explained that they’re normative grades that aren’t referenced to any predetermined set of criteria.  This brings us to an alternative to normative grading, which is criterion-based grading.  In short, criterion-based grading means that the grade reflects the extent to which the student achieved the criteria for that assignment, unit, or course.  Other terms that could be substituted for “criteria'' could be, “goals,” or “objectives,” but the point is that the criteria is set from the outset, and is transparently clear to both the teacher and the students. 

In this post, I'd like to finally dive into the actual practices of grading. I've found myself teaching at a new school this semester, where traditional grading practices are still the norm (though, to the school's credit, it has embarked on an assessment and grading reform plan). My daughter has also found herself navigating traditional grading practices at her new high school this year. As a result, issues around grading have continued to occupy my thinking. In this post, I'd like to dive into the issue of grading by starting with a critique of traditional grading practices.  I should note that these are traditional grading practices in an American education context, and have influenced grading practices in K-12 schools in other parts of the world as well.  Though not identical, I will also note that these practices were very similar to those used in my Canadian schools growing up.   Of course, that does not mean they're universal.

In preparing to teach the topic of social science research methods in my IB Business Management course last year, some questions occurred to me. To what extent was the job of the classroom teacher when it comes to student assessment the same as that of the researcher doing primary data collection? As a teacher, when I create, assign, collect and analyze student assessments, am I not collecting primary data? Is not this part of the teacher's job the same as that of the researcher? Am I not collecting data for the purpose of gaining some sort of information about my students, such as how much they've learned of a given topic?

For a number of years while I was teaching at ICS in Ethiopia, I was the high school track & field coach. I loved coaching; the new track & field season was something I looked forward to each year. As a teacher, I knew that what I was doing as a track & field coach was a model of differentiation, but I struggled to then translate that into differentiated learning in my classroom. This past semester I took a course called "Differentiating Instruction." I felt a little validated when differentiation guru Carol Ann Tomlinson also made the connection between good coaching and differentiated classroom teaching.

Dear Student,

My name is “Grade.”  You know me from that report card you received yesterday.  I was sitting there glaring at you from the box next to the line for your History class.  I fear that my presence there was a disappointment to you; in fact, I fear that my presence in your school life has been a source of frustration for many years. I wanted to write to you directly to clarify a few things.  I want you to know who I am and what I truly stand for.  I also want to express to you my frustration at being often misused by teachers, including teachers that you’ve had throughout your school life.  I’m not what you think I am; I’m not that thing that causes you anxiety and keeps you awake at night.  I’m not that thing that triggers a grounding from your parents, who take away your video game console each time a report card comes out.  Rather, if I was better understood for who I really am, I could be meaningful to you, and I could even support your learning.

There is a movement to consider happiness and well-being as measures of development instead of just traditional economic measures like GDP. Concern for human happiness and well-being is also the realm of the field of Positive Psychology. In this post, I explore the idea of making student happiness and well-being as central goals for K-12 schools.

Today -- Friday, May 21 -- here in Addis Ababa, state-aligned media and various political actors have called for protests around the city against, what they are calling, foreign interference in Ethiopia's domestic affairs and state sovereignty. This comes in response to a few different issues, including statements from the United States and the European Union on the upcoming national elections here, but it's primarily in response to the situation in northern Ethiopia in the region of Tigray. Weighing into the history and politics of this conflict is not my intent with this post. Instead, I'm reminded today of a class I had with my 9th grade Social Studies students back in November, where we were learning about the historical thinking concept of “Perspective.” That lesson seems pertinent today.

Though there are exceptions, for most adolescents, full-time online learning during the Covid pandemic has been tough. It's not only been tough for learning, but also from the perspective of mental health and overall wellness. In this post, I have my students specifically in mind as I write. I want to outline a few scientific, research-based strategies for improving well-being. These are strategies that one can pick and choose from and implement pretty quickly and easily. Studies demonstrate that these strategies can provide a pretty immediate boost in one's sense of well-being, and, when put into regular practice, can provide long-term well-being benefits.

In this post, I set out a potential model for service-learning from the subject area classroom side of the service learning relationship with CAS within the IB Diploma Program.  The model I present is specifically from the perspective of the IB Business Management course. As I touch on below, I also believe this model is about more than meeting an IBDP requirement; rather, I think it’s about improving teaching and learning more generally within the IB subject area classroom.

I was privilege to be selected by the graduating class of 2021 as their speaker for their graduation ceremony. I was selected in part because I too was closing out my time at the International Community School of Addis Ababa. I've been doing a lot reading this semester related to the field of positive psychology for a PE class I've been teaching called "Personal Well-Being". This reading, together with my own experience of life-transition, mixed all together with the reflections that come from a year of a global pandemic, contributed to the below speech: Reflections on the Disney Pixar Movie, Soul.

In 2nd semester of the 2019-20 school-year, I was assigned to teach a one semester economics course. In the fall of 2019, youth-led action on climate change protests garnered a lot of attention globally. On my school's campus, students organized a class walk-out and march around the campus to draw attention to the need for more climate action. In the follow up of that, a group of students and teachers started meeting to explore ways in which the school could take more action, and a student and teacher committee was formed to explore the school's carbon footprint. In view of this student attention around climate action, I decided to focus the economics elective course on the economics of climate change.