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Author Archive: Kirstie Truluck

Kirstie Truluck: More Metaphor for Learning

January 17, 2012 | Guest Bloggers, Kirstie Truluck, Malcolm's Blog

“How do you get songs on your iPod?”  That was the opening question for a lesson on notes and organization led by master Hyde School teacher John Romac.  The metaphor of the familiar iPod can help students break down and analyze what they do daily and how to apply the same methods to the content [...]

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Kirstie Truluck: Character Education in the Writing Classroom

January 04, 2012 | Guest Bloggers, Kirstie Truluck, Malcolm's Blog

I once worked with a boy in English 11 who illustrated for me his inability to tell the truth through his academic writing.  It wasn’t that he lied about a paper, or plagiarized.  No.  I witnessed a more fundamental link between a student’s character capacity for integrity and his ability to write well in school. [...]

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Motivation

December 15, 2011 | Uncategorized

The other day while walking my chocolate lab Maggie, I found that she did not ‘heel’ in the proper ‘her nose to my knee’ position. In all fairness she hadn’t walked with me in a while and I hadn’t asked this level of attention from her in weeks.  So I restated the command of “heel,” [...]

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Kirstie Truluck: For the Love of Metaphor

October 22, 2011 | Blogs, Guest Bloggers, Malcolm's Blog

There is a recursive relationship and it is not as simple as it looks on paper, BUT here is my newest education metaphor. Anatomy of an Education The Bones are the strategies: learning attitude, organization, reading, note taking, study/test taking The Fascia tissues are the teacher moves: wait time, active prior knowledge, connecting new to [...]

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Kirstie Truluck: A Teacher’s Prayer for Today

September 21, 2011 | Blogs, Guest Bloggers, Malcolm's Blog

It is a sacred thing we do here  – working with the minds, hearts and souls of young men and women. I must take a quiet moment each day to be thankful for my gifts and shortcomings as I strive to wake them from the slumber of mediocrity and pull them from the chaos of [...]

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Performing Arts Show: Bath, 2011

April 19, 2011 | Blogs, Guest Bloggers, Kirstie Truluck, Malcolm's Blog

The Hyde School community  – students and faculty – performed their annual Spring Family Weekend show for parents on Saturday, April 16th.  The show honored Hyde’s past by performing numbers from Hyde’s 1976 Bicentennial show “America’s Spirit.”  The show also featured original music, student choreography, and the traditional large group numbers that are hallmarks of [...]

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Who holds you accountable?

April 12, 2011 | Blogs, Guest Bloggers, Kirstie Truluck, Malcolm's Blog

Our school has a rather difficult (if not always definitive) discipline policy.  We do not operate on a “three strikes- you’re out” policy, nor do we assign accountability according to a menu – no “if you do this, then you get this.”  Yesterday a conversation with a student reminded me about the important difference between [...]

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What I Learned in San Francisco

April 05, 2011 | Blogs, Guest Bloggers, Kirstie Truluck, Malcolm's Blog

This year’s conference for the Association of Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD) took place in San Francisco where spring has sprung and it never snows. I felt right at home with the flowers and green grass. I also enjoyed sharing with and learning from a group of professionals committed to the ASCD motto of Learn. Teach. Lead.

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ASCD 2011 Character is Foundational

April 02, 2011 | Blogs, Guest Bloggers, Kirstie Truluck, Malcolm's Blog, Uncategorized

For a second year, I presented on the concept of character education at the national conference of the Association of Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD).  This year we had a better time slot and an interested crowd of public school teachers and administrators – leaders all.  The thrust of our argument this year was that you [...]

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Public / Private

November 07, 2010 | Blogs, Guest Bloggers, Kirstie Truluck, Malcolm's Blog

 “Can I confront in public?”  asked my colleague.  “Sometimes I think we need to.” Despite my own misstep, I agree. I feel blessed that sharing my story about a public confrontation gone wrong has helped stimulate conversation and questions, but this colleague’s question makes me want to clarify the message.  I engaged the wrong kid, [...]

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Student Centered

November 05, 2010 | Blogs, Guest Bloggers, Kirstie Truluck, Malcolm's Blog

A colleague of mine popped her head into my office to thank me for some time I spent observing in and brainstorming about her class.  She shared her relief that “things are better” after a few weeks of wild and wiggly sophomore boys disrupting the learning environment in her biology class. “What has made the [...]

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Yes & No at Once?

November 05, 2010 | Blogs, Guest Bloggers, Kirstie Truluck, Malcolm's Blog

When I directed the Performing Arts program for Hyde School, I worked hard to connect the development of performance skills to the development of character. I defined the content skills of Performing Art as “body, voice, stage.”  Translated, that means that students needed to learn how to make best use of their bodies, their voices, [...]

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Living with Paradox

September 29, 2010 | Blogs, Guest Bloggers, Kirstie Truluck, Malcolm's Blog

Raising children requires me to live in the tension between life’s natural paradoxes.  A paradox happens when two separate and opposing life truths are in simultaneous operation in one day in my life. Yesterday I picked up my daughter from school.  As I heaved her 20 lb. backpack (no lie, I weighed it) into the [...]

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Kirstie Truluck: Seniors get back to school – explicitly

September 01, 2010 | Blogs, Guest Bloggers, Malcolm's Blog

Today I saw the marriage of formative assessment, research supported instructional methods, and character education. Hyde Schools have a common language we use to understand and discuss our self discovery process, our parenting principles, and the Hyde philosophy.  Yet, the words and terms can become a bit cumbersome and resist rolling of your tongue with [...]

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5-minute AICR cycle

May 13, 2010 | Blogs, Guest Bloggers, Kirstie Truluck, Malcolm's Blog

In May 2004, the NCTE published a Position/Action statement outlining what teachers of adolescents need to know about adolescent literacy. I found myself reading, as I always do, with a pencil in my hand – asking questions, summarizing ideas, and making connections. I made a connection to both our work in senior English and to [...]

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