Welcome+to+the+Sticking+Point

What do you get when you combine

An urban myth + WOW + UbD + Duct Tape? Hopefully you end up with engaging learning experiences for students. The current buzz term is STICKY LESSONS.

We'll use STICKY LESSONS as the launching point for a site to discuss and suggest designs and tools for building lessons that make learning experiences meaningful, engaging, and enjoyable for students. You'll see a great deal of Schlechty, Marzano, Schmoker, Reeves, and Wiggins. But we'll keep the theory to a minimum and the application at the forefront of our efforts.

The name of the game is CREATIVITY. But where do you start? There is so much research, so many great books, thousands of superb lesson plans, and now this whole new world of the Web 2.0. Frankly it can all be a bit intimidating. What's needed is one place where teachers can drop in from time to time and update their Tool Belts.

This site is meant to be PRACTICAL. Research and theory will be at the core of the site, but hopefully brought out in ways that are applicable without having to sort through all the technical details to get to the essential attributes needed to build effective lessons.

Obviously, being posted on the web as a wiki should be an indication that discussion and input are encouraged and welcome. The beauty of THIS tool (the wiki) is __**collaboration**__. Please make yourself familiar and comfortable with this site. And please contribute any input that can help us build engaging and meaningful learning experiences for our students.

As we add TEACHING TOOLS, consider, if you will the TOP TOOLS OF ALL TIME:



=Standard Bearers= posted 6:30 pm Nov 14th ==

Dr. Waddell speaks about STANDARD BEARERS. He relates the concept taken from a practice in the Civil War (and actually much further back than that) which is crucial to the movie GLORY. If you've seen the movie, you know that the standard bearer carried the flag into battle. If one standard bearer was killed, another picked it up and progressed forward. More often that not, most standard bearers were killed [a la the movie Glory when they storm the fort], but the point is that they were so committed to the cause, they were willing to die for it.

==

Ok...maybe just a wee bit overstated.

[By the way, hang on to your sense of humor - you're going to need it...]

While no one is going to be killed carrying the Green Shamrock of Shannon into a battle, the analogy holds if we understand the committment to a cause. In this case, the cause is a committment to attempting to learn how to design meaningful learning experiences for all of our students. My hope is that we do this together - we become a Standard Bearing School that leads the way rather than follows others.