Teacher feature: Charter School Teacher of the Year John Hall

We’ve just published an article about John Hall, a language arts and social studies teacher at ArtSpace Charter School in Buncombe county and the 2009-10 AT&T Charter School’s Teacher of the Year. The article “Staging history: Charter School Teacher of the Year John Hall brings lessons to life” is the third in a series spotlighting teachers who employ inventive instructional techniques.

This piece explores Mr. Hall’s use of curriculum integration, a classroom strategy that emphasizes activity-based learning projects, combines disparate curriculum elements in the service of broad educational goals, and illuminates relationships between and among complex intellectual concepts.

He favors this innovative approach, he explains, because, “I believe students gain a more comprehensive understanding of a subject when it’s presented in context and when they contribute something of themselves to their own learning.”

Our goal for the series is to allow outstanding teachers to present, in their own words, successful instructional practices for the benefit of not only other teachers but also policy-makers, school administrators, and education researchers.