Be of Use

What does good professional development look like? I've struggled with this question during my decade as a professional educator. Some of the questions I've asked myself or discussed with others is - Before school? During school? After school?  Compensated? Contractually compelled? Not compensated? At will participation? The better question is - how does the learning take place - not when or why. If we preach to our teachers to change how they are doing things in the classroom, it's pretty disingenuous to set up professional learning in a lecture hall/auditorium setting, or a 40 minute demo with time afterward to "give it a try." My last full day of the 2012-2013 school year, was my most proud because I think the team I worked with got professional learning right. It was a leadership retreat, rather than a data focused retreat this year. My director laid out the videos she wanted to share to get the building leadership teams to - for lack of a better

When I decided to blog I made the call not to give it a tech-centric name because I was at a crossroads in my career. I was smack dab in the middle of graduate school, getting my administrative certification and becoming a principal seemed like a potential career option. While my path didn't lead me in that direction it has veered me off the track of solely technology integration - coordinating data and assessments. For the first time in my professional life I'm looking at how I can help teachers assess student work, or meet the Common Core changes, rather than evangelizing why they need to embrace 21st Century Skills development...communicate with Web 2.0 tools...or something of that nature. It's refreshing. I think Krista Moroder's post on focusing on learning  helped to make me conscious of the importance of remembering why we're in education. She blogged more about this just the other day . I have no doubt I had lost site of that, lost in the world of wireles

My favorite thing to think about of late is how we in education can create districts and schools of innovation - not just pockets. And how can we do this in existing schools where the majority of our country's students attend? Starting a charter school is "the easy way out" in my way of thinking. How do we do this with fidelity in districts that serve 2,000 students and up? I'm hoping to apply some of what is in this Deloitte University Press paper to my thinking. Institutional Innovation: Creating Smarter Organizations to Scale Learning by Deloitte University Press

Like other folks, I was surprised and annoyed about the end of life announcement on Google Reader. This is something I use everyday (but I guess I'm only one of a few thousand...not several million) and I rely on it for getting a great deal of good ideas sent directly to me. Tonight I had a thought that it might be a good thing. Did Google Reader stunt my own growth and curiosity to read about what many others have to say? There's tens of thousands (if not hundreds of thousands or more...) of educators out there sharing what they're doing, what they're thinking about but don't have the bully pulpit of Larry Cuban or Will Richardson. It certainly doesn't mean they have lesser things to say. Mostly they right about their own action research they're doing right now - very useful things to read for practitioners. In the last few weeks I've divorced myself from Reader and used other avenues to get my information from. Tonight I came upon this nice post on I

Doug Johnson let me hook myself to his star as we collaborated on a Danielson style rubric for technology integration. Like in her framework, the highest levels of instruction have the students leading the way and doing the heavy intellectual lifting. Same applies here - when students are actively engaged with using the technology for deep learning you're meeting the distinguished mark.  Doug's column on it is published in this month's issue of Educational Leadership, with a link to the rubric we worked on. Take a look. Please, feel free to use! Article is here http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational-leadership/mar13/vol70/num06/Technology-Skills-Every-Teacher-Needs.aspx Rubric is here http://www.ascd.org/ASCD/pdf/journals/ed_lead/el201303_johnson_rubric.pdf

I'm sold on personalized learning for kids. As a parent I see everyday, if you give kids the opportunity to create and explore they take off with it. Adults, that's a different story. We've already been programmed to learn a certain way. This past winter (well we're still technically in winter...) I lead a professional development day starting with a keynote on Digital Literacy. In my email to the staff a week ahead of time I listed the learning resources and clearly stated that this would be self-directed learning time. After my presentation, I go off to the library to facilitate and I have 50 teachers staring at me waiting to start. Be free my children...go off and learn. Easier said than done. How do we break people of the habits they've learned over decades of schooling K through a Master's Degree, on to professional learning events? Putting together/curating resources is easy. The adult learning...that's the hard part. I think having personal learn

Over break I kicked the tires on Udemy for the first time. Being that Big Data and Personalized Learning are my current obsessions I choose Educational Big Data and Learning Analytics as my first class. Above is a video from that class - I was surprised I had not seen it yet. Warning - it is put out by Ericsson - but they aren't selling broadband plans with it ( at least not directly). There's plenty of good sound bites in here, but Sugata Mitra's line toward the end jumped (19:07) off the screen at me - "the teacher needs to step back and say, 'today's topic is this, now open your notebook and figure it out.'" An exciting (at least for me) and simple statement on his vision of education. I have hear and read a lot about holding  students and adults responsible for their own learning. Frankly I think that there's a lot of focus on student learning and not near enough on teacher learning. This statement certainly asks the learner to own it.

My New Year's Resolution for 2012 was to blog. Well from a legacy grading point of view I'll give 35 posts a gift C+. This past semester I've been assigned to dive into assessment - because after all its 50% of my job. What Stiggins writes about that really has peaked my interest is students owning their own assessment. Makes all the sense in the world, but I never thought about the power of that. This is a good way to view blogging - as the assessment of how you're doing/what you're doing. Miguel Guhlin said its more about getting his thoughts down and reflecting more than anything. So perhaps I can use blogging as 1) a means of self eval and reflection ad 2) as an example to teachers of self-evaluation. I believe for 2013 I need to blog more frequently just to get in the habit of writing to find a rhythm/voice. Another thing I've noticed from other edubloggers is that depth is so important. Some of my posts were less than what is expect out of myself for wor