Why This Blog?

The purpose of this blog is to provide online visitors with my perspectives on teaching and learning, in particular, during the run-up to the November election, in which I am a school board candidate for District 4 in the Monroe County Community School Corporation. If elected, I plan to continue this blog as a way to share ideas with constituents and other readers.

Central to my philosophy of education is a simple equation. It appears under the blog title: Teachers + Students = Learning. It should be borne in mind that "teachers" and "students" are broad designations. Parents, of course, are their children's first and lifelong teachers. And at whatever age, I hope, we can all be students, whether in the formal sense of attending classes or merely through self-study. The result in any case is learning.

My own perspectives on learning are informed, first, by being a parent. My partner and I have a blended family of six (now adult) children and four grandchildren (to date). Several years ago we hosted a foreign student from Germany, who spent his junior year of high school studying here in Bloomington. This year we are hosting another German teenager, who is spending his junior year here.

The earliest segment of my career was spent as a classroom teacher at the junior high school level of the public schools in Sheboygan, Wisconsin. After eleven years I took a two-year leave to teach for the Department of Defense in an American high school on a U.S. Airbase in Germany. When I returned to Wisconsin, I taught at the high school level for three years before moving into the district office to coordinate the school system's language-based programs: English language arts, reading, foreign languages, English-as-a-second-language, and bilingual education.

I moved to Indiana in 1991 to accept the position of director of instructional services in the public schools of Carmel. And in 1993 I took the opportunity to move into education publishing, becoming director of publications for the international education association, Phi Delta Kappa, here in Bloomington.

Throughout my career I have been a writer and, more recently, an editor of education materials. My list of publications includes some fifteen books that I've either written or developed as anthologies for educators. I've also written articles, monographs, encyclopedia entries, and instructional materials, among other things.

I maintain a lively interest in education, am active in education-related endeavors both locally and elsewhere, for example, continuing to serve as a senior consultant for the Center on Civic Education. My independent work now centers on freelance writing and editing, mainly in education contexts. And since 2008 I have served as an assessment administrator for the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP).