Ten Years and Onward

In 2014, Malala Yousafzai won the Nobel Peace Prize, the Winter Olympics were held in Sochi, Russia, Apple released iPhone 6, TikTok predecessor Musical.ly launched from Shanghai, and the ice bucket challenge went viral. That same year, on a much smaller scale, Master Teaching published its first post. Let’s go back and look at some highlights from our first decade.

Our first post, Yahweh’s Wisdom, an introduction to Master Teaching, was published on April 2, 2014, on our original Blogspot site. It laid out our goal to seek wisdom from above while integrating profession, life, and faith in tune with Yahweh’s glory, with purpose and toward peace.

A year later, we switched to WordPress and gave our blog the name Master Teaching, a blog for teachers who follow the Master Teacher.

Since the first year, we’ve had over 15,500 visitors and 27,000 views.

We’ve had visitors from all the world’s continents (except Antarctica), from over 150 countries or regions.

Our most viewed post has been Equity vs. Equality. It has had over 4,000 views since it was first published in 2016.

Other posts filling out the top 10 most read are listed below.

2. Growth Mindset (Melissa K. Smith)
3. Adapting and Supplementing Materials (Kimberly Todd)
4. The Winter of my Discontent (Kenton Kersting)
5. Emergentism (David Broersma)
6. The least of these, my students (Jill Schafhauser)
7. Ownership of Behavior (Patrick Seifer)
8. Teach like a Bird (Bradley Baurain)
9. Identifying Starting Points (Melissa K. Smith)
10. Where else would we go? (LEAPAsia)

Over the last decade, Master Teaching had the most visitors in October and November of 2020. You likely don’t need a reminder that this was the first year of the pandemic when we were scrambling to manage online learning and life was hard in many ways.

In October 2020, our most read post was Where else would we go?, a teacher lectionary drawing us to our knees before the throne as we faced the crisis of the pandemic.

In November 2020, our second most read post was another teacher lectionary, Pressing in, which encouraged being over doing by pressing into the Presence in the face of loss.

Our most recent posts, over the last year, were a series of teacher liturgies aiming to give voice to prayers and petitions for teachers to cry out to their Maker.

What comes next? We’re planning to continue seeking wisdom from above as we pursue knowledge and skill in our profession. In fact, over the next few months, we’ll be returning to some practical ideas for the classroom. Along the way, we will occasionally make our way into the throne room. Where else would we go when we’re seeking wisdom for teaching and life?

We’re very thankful for all our contributors who have volunteered their time and words, some multiple times, for your benefit. We’re also thankful for you, our readers. We feel honored that you are willing to join us on our quest for wisdom and especially before the throne. Our family is wide and deep. The Master Teacher is gracious and wise. We feel encouraged to press on.

Further exploration

Most of our teaching posts include three or four sections at the end as described here. This section includes links or resources to further your understanding.

If you’re newer to Master Teaching or need a review, our content includes teaching posts on a variety of topics, teacher lectionaries and teacher liturgies. Some of our most read teaching categories are listed below:

• trends in education
• learner ownership
• learning activities
• be still
• this i teach
• favorite theories
• professional development
• building blocks of teaching

What’s your perspective?

We love to hear your perspectives on our posts. That’s what this section is all about. On our teaching posts, we include questions for discussion here, but we’re open to other comments. Although we will continue moderating comments, we’ve changed our settings so that your name and email are no longer required in order to join the discussion. We hope you’ll feel more freedom to join in. In fact, please feel free to comment below on anything in this post or in answer to these questions:

• What would you like to see more or less of on Master Teaching?
• What topics are you interested in reading about?

Try it out

Some of our posts include a “homework assignment” to help you put the post into practice. No due dates or grades, however.

If you’re interested in an assignment related to this post, you could take some time to reflect and write about this question: What does it mean to you to be a teacher who follows the Master Teacher? If your written reflection falls between 400 and 600 words, send us a message, and we can talk about posting it on Master Teaching.

Post Author

You’ll find information about a post’s author here.

This post was written by the LEAPAsia board. Although LEAPAsia sponsors Master Teaching, our authors and content are not limited to Asia. Our contributors come from different places and teach in a range of situations and countries. The content they share is applicable in a variety of settings and comes out of their rich experiences which they offer freely in order to bless you.