Since November, I have been largely absent from this blog. It was not that I didn’t have thoughts and ideas I wanted to share. Instead, it was because I was involved in an exhaustive national search for my next adventure, a position that I would move to for the 2012-13 academic year. After 19 great years at my current school, it was time to move to the next challenge.

In the end, I accepted a position at the Quest Academy, a local position where I will not have to move. Quest is a pre-k to 8th grade school with a focus on gifted education. Below is an introduction that I shared with the new school community two weeks ago:

As noted philosopher and educator John Dewey noted in the 1930’s, “The world is moving at a tremendous rate and no one knows where. We must educate our children not for the world of their past, not for our world, but for the world of their future.” Today, this pace of change has only accelerated. The rapid changes in how we communicate, via WiFi and cellular networks with mobile devices including phones, tablets, iPads, and computers, now mean that your children literally have access to the world’s knowledge and information at their fingertips.

Over the past 25 years, the last 19 at North Shore, I have devoted my life’s work to constructing learning environments where technology is not merely integrated,  but is integral to the learning process and environment. I look forward to partnering the administrators and faculty of Quest Academy to create a framework for technology to support the fine teaching and learning that I have experienced. I aim to honor and cherish the traditions and community at Quest and to support and amplify the connections and relationships between students, teachers, and parents.

I look forward to return to a community defined by its “giftedness.” As a middle schooler, my education included two years within my public school’s first attempts at creating a gifted and talented program within district. I look forward to growing professionally as a member of teaching community to support gifted students and their families. I look forward to help weaving a tapestry which includes the most recent research and best practices of both gifted education and information literacy so that students can make sense of their worlds.

In the upcoming days and months, I look forward to reflecting on my accomplishments and on the new challenges ahead.