The Global Search for Education: Our Top 12 Global Teacher Blogs - Remembering Joe Bower and His Love of Learning
Remembering Joe Bower 1978 - 2016
We miss our Top 12 Global Blogger Joe Bower very much. Joe, a progressive and gifted educator from Red Deer, Alberta, Canada recently died of a massive heart attack at the age of 37. Through his regular contributions to the Top 12 Global Teacher Blogger series each month, Joe inspired our team enormously as well as thousands of educators around the world.
On a personal note, I was delighted to discover I shared a mutual passion with Joe when I worked with him on our November 2015 blog that focused on games that really help students learn. During the back and forth on his article, he asked me if he could write about board games (versus video games). He explained that he'd been working in a Children's Inpatient Psychiatric Assessment Unit, and he found that board games were a great way in the first instance to establish a trusting, caring relationship with an emotionally challenged child. Being a lover and believer all my life in the many merits of board games, Joe's idea completely resonated with me. He wrote in his "For the Love of Learning" blog on this topic and noted that beyond being an important relationship builder, this form of play was also "a great way of assessing children's skills including their creativity, collaboration, adaptability, resiliency, critical thinking, problem solving, patience, literacy and numeracy."
And so Joe - thank you for your amazing mind, your compassionate soul, your ideas, your commitment to education - all of which will live on through your legacy. "For the Love of Learning" from you and from each other, so that we may ultimately help learners everywhere to shine, we shall continue to share teachers' perspectives each month as I know you would want us to.
This month, we posed this question to our Top 12 Global Teacher Bloggers: What The Global Search for Education: Our Top 12 Global Teacher Blogs - Remembering Joe Bower and His Love of Learning: