Pure Manaʻo

  With all this time at home in the midst of this pandemic, I would have thought that I had more time to read, and the direct opposite has happened. Not sure why this is happening to me, but I am trying to push through and get back to a reading and writing schedule by starting with small articles and small posts. Source:  My daily reading queue is over a year long, so I started with this brief coaching post by Elena Aguilar (July 20, 2017), brightmorning (I think it is a blog post that turned into a pdf in my email). Gist: This is just a reminder that in order to be an effective coach, practice talking less.  What is Sacred: When training mentor teachers, I often have to first make them aware of the continuum of "coaching" so they are aware of moving from consultant (lots of talk from mentor, lots of "you should. . ." or "I would. . .") to true cognitive coaching where most of the talking, problem solving and ahas are done by the person being coached.  If

Na wai ke kupu o ʻoe? Whose sprout are you? Whose child are you?     As I prepare to start  fall semester in a few weeks, I go through the same motions that I have for the past 28 years. I create my syllabus, gather my resources, go over my notes from the year before, create my semester plan, my units, my day one lesson. This rhythm is familiar. But there is nothing familiar about this school year. In this year of pandemic, the new normal is that there is no normal. When our leaders shut the schools down at spring break, when planes stopped flying, businesses closed, when all we had was each other on the other end of a Zoom call to understand that there was a world outside of our house, we were just playing at normalcy because the end of the tunnel was summer when schools would be out, when we would flatten the curve, when we could start opening up again. As long as we could see the light at the end of the tunnel (June 1, July 1, August 1. . .) we could talk ourselves into the idea tha