Introductions!

My name is Michael Low, and I teach a 9th grade Speech & Composition class and a multi-grade Leadership class at KIPP San Jose Collegiate High School in San Jose, California.  This is my first year at KIPP, and prior to this fall I taught for four years at a public high school (the Multicultural Academy of Scholarship in Chicago) as an English and Japanese teacher.  Prior to that, I taught for five years for a private reading enhancement program called the Institute for Reading Development all around the US, working with classes of students from Kindergarteners through adults.  For more on my background, feel free to take a look at my LinkedIn profile or simply download my resume from my website, lowslanguage.com.

This year I have the fortune to work with a Student Teacher who is working on her MA in Secondary Education with USC Rossier School of Education.  As I told Ms. Do, I was interested in working with a Student Teacher for two main reasons:

• First, I owe much of my own understanding of the art of teaching to my mentor teacher and the experiences I had during my year working with her at the University of Michigan.
• Second, as reflective and deliberate as any teacher can be, there are a number of “invisible skills” in teaching - things instructors do every day, without recognizing their actions as a practiced skill or procedure - that are the crucial difference between success and failure.

I asked Ms. Do if she’d be willing to work with me on this blog in order to help us both: her, as student, in asking the questions she needs answered, and me, as mentor, in being as explicit as possible in explaining what I do and why I do it.

In posts, Ms. Do’s contributions will be represented in block quotes, followed by my replies.  I’ll preserve hers in the type she uses most, Times New Roman, while my text will be typed in Arial.

Whether you’re a mentor, student, or just someone involved in the profession, I hope that our conversations about the how, why, and what of running a high school classroom can be as useful to you as they are to me.  Please feel free to comment, as one of the best ways to learn is an active dialogue!

Without further ado, I'll lead into our first post.  Enjoy!