“Notes from the Playground” is a regular feature on our blog. For this series, Greg John generously allows us to share his principal’s reflections and stories from his wonderful book, Notes from the Playground. In these stories, Greg enables us...

Celebrating Poetry On her blog, My Head is Full of Books, Anne Bennett, a school librarian, posted a lot of terrific ideas for celebrating and using poetry (see below). Fortunately it didn’t rain and she was able to send us...

Leading from Within and Flawless Leadership: As we mentioned last week, we’re going to use #Throwback Thursdays to re-introduce or bring to light something new about Teaching with Heart, Leading from Within or Teaching with Fire. In February, we were...

Resilience: On Working and Mothering — Emily Brisse We have been having conversations lately, my son and I. Last night while I was putting on his pajamas, it was about the man on the road walking his dog. A week...

Ideas for Sharing Poetry This week we have several special blog posts we’d like to share. This means we’ll miss posting a few of our daily suggestions for using poetry.  To make up for the gaps in the week ahead,...

Using Poetry to remember to find what is beautiful in children:   In Teaching with Fire, one teacher told us that she taped the line “Life has loveliness to sell” from Sara Teasdale’s poem “Barter” onto her steering wheel so...

Poems that teachers love The “Teaching with Heart, Fire & Poetry” website takes its inspiration, approach and focus from Teaching with Heart, Leading from Within, and Teaching with Fire. In these books, teachers and other leaders, through their reflections on...

In Leading from Within, the contributors come from a wide range of professions including business, medicine, education, nonprofits, law, politics, science,  government, and religion. We often found that no matter the profession, the insights apply to all – so we’ll...

Using Poetry to Open Meetings: In Teaching with Fire, Several teachers shared how poetry can help to open meetings or create a positive atmosphere for group work. Angela Peery wrote: “When I conduct meetings of an English department at a...

Using Poetry with Each Other From Teaching with Fire, here’s a description of how using poetry can expand and deepen conversations. Intermixing poetry into faculty meetings, school discussions, and other forums can enhance and expand the quality and depth of...