welcome

Hi there, welcome to teachers with chalk. For those that are visiting for the first time, my name is Evan. Nice to meet you. I wanted this post - being a welcome message and all - to share a little bit about why I decided to create this thing.

I've worked in arts education for about five years. In this half-decade, I've met some incredible individuals, seen some really creative programming and witnessed people's incredible capacity for pushing education (of all forms) to the limit. There are a million other resources out there to learn about these things and I encourage you to visit them as well - ArtsJournal, ASCD, Dewey21C, etc. However, this will be my slice of the pie.

It's worth mentioning that this blog will focus on - although not entirely - arts education. I'll post examples of innovative initiatives, discuss (as best I can) education reform, ask writers to post best practices and interesting stories and, above all, invite discussion about what's going on out there. I come from a family of educators so I suppose ending up in this field was inevitable. My posts will be my own thoughts based on information from the field as I interpret it and should be considered only as such.

About the name: I was in discussion one day with two of my coworkers (for the sake of anonymity, we'll call them Adam and Kevin). It wasn't my idea, but the possibility of an education blog called teachers with chalk was thrown around. I loved the concept because it was a bit counter-intuitive to education in the 21st-century: Instruction and learning are not solely the responsibility of teachers and no one really even uses chalk anymore.

If you want to reach me, you can e-mail Evan@teacherswithchalk.com. That's my story and I'm (hopefully) sticking to it. Stay tuned and thanks for visiting.