Services

Administrators all desire to observe their teachers, but many get overwhelmed with day to day activities that crowd their schedule.  Administrators want to give teachers open and honest feedback, but this is difficult.  Your school functions best when it works communally, and this means that hard conversations often do not take place.

Even if they do take place, you likely will not have a chance to circle back and see if changes have been implemented.

This is where I come in.  Contact me to observe teachers.  After my observations, my outside presence makes having hard conversations easier.  I will provide full writeup of my thoughts that can be used at your discretion.

The teaching profession brings with it exhilaration and exhaustion all at once.  Young teachers especially will experience major shifts in their lives if they embrace their role.  Administrators often hope to find mentors among the current staff, but all of your other current staff are busy!  Thus, young teachers often have little to no support.

I can meet with teachers on a weekly or bi-monthly basis, helping them process their experiences and providing counsel where appropriate.  A supported teacher is a successful teacher, and I want to help make that happen.

Contact me today.  I can meet with teachers either in person, phone, or video chat.

In my experience, teacher training week can frustrate administrators and staff alike.  Within a few days, many different priorities compete for time in the heads of staff.  Some want more community building.  Some seek more high level discussions.  Others want something practical they can use when students roll in just days away.

I believe I can provide a unique teacher training experience, drawing material from my book and from my seminar talks.  My approach combines theory and practice fluidly, and can include communal activities, such as games drawn from history classes.  Teachers will see their vocation in a fresh way and have a biblical symbolic framework from which to draw on throughout the year.

Contact me today if you have an interest in me running part of your teacher training week.

The Patterns of Creation

Good teaching requires meshing the classroom with our experience of reality, but our industrialized educational model pushes back against reality constantly.  We cannot change our environments, but we can subvert them.  Doing so requires understanding that reality manifests itself primarily in patterns, and these patterns present themselves even within our insulated settings.  This seminar will show you how Scripture, traditions, and the life of civilizations as a whole reveal the structure of reality.  Understanding this structure will enable us to recognize and apply appropriate patterns in the classroom.

What is a Teacher?

Teaching brings many challenges and not a great deal of money.  Despite the challenges of teaching, many pursue their craft with dedication and passion.  Yet, many well intentioned teachers lack a true understanding of the nature of their job.  This seminar explores this question.  We find that a teacher is primarily neither a counselor or mentor, nor are they mere dispensers of information.  Rather, at root, a teacher functions as a mediator for students as they seek to unite Heaven and Earth through the material they study.  This seminar seeks to help teachers explore together the essence of their shared calling, a question teachers rarely explore.

Forming the Core

Students enter the classroom with their minds in a variety of places, and teachers need a quick, simple, way to establish a common point of attention.  Certainly teachers need to develop skills in adaptation, and at times they need to tack with the prevailing winds.  The Core is not the place for such things!  Here we learn what kind of order to establish in your classroom, and how to establish it in a natural, accessible way for your students.

Navigating the Fringe

After a teacher successfully orients the attention of the students, what comes next?  Too often, teachers hold on to student attention and monopolize it for themselves.  Experience teaches us, however, that we learn many of our most important lessons outside of the cozy, predictable confines of the “Core”/home.  In this seminar, we learn to identify the “Fringe” and understand how to use it in your classroom to enrich the student—and teacher—experience.

Channeling Chaos

Teachers need to create order in their environments, and so fear the unexpected as a threat to their order. When teachers have order and quiet, they naturally assume that all is well.  This seminar helps teachers recognize chaos as fractured attention in the classroom, and this can certainly happen in quiet environments.   More importantly, we’ll see how the presence of chaos actually offers significant regenerative possibilities for your students.  Managed rightly, chaos can bring new life to your classrooms.