Professional Development: Whose Job Is It?

“One-size-fits-all” is a description for a product that would fit in all instances. The term has been extended to mean one style or procedure would fit in all related applications. There are both positive and negative uses of the phrase. It’s a term that is often applied to staff development—the problem is that, according to Peter DeWitt in the following EdWeek article, this philosophy doesn’t work for educators. Check out to my post a few months ago where I actually attempted to describe the differences between, Professional Exposure, Professional Development and Professional Improvement….”

http://jeffpiontek.com/2012/03/14/teacher-professional-development-my-take-on-teacher-improvement-and-professional-development-what-do-you-think/

via Education Week

Professional Development is not defined by what someone else provides for us.

Twitter is creating a natural shift in professional thinking for connected educators and administrators. They are finding their own professional development (PD) through their Professional Learning Networks (PLN). There are other educators who don’t use Twitter but they research new and improved ways of meeting the needs of their students. Unfortunately though, there are others who wait for their school district to offer it to them.

All in all, whose job is it to offer professional development?

One-size-fits-all professional development does not work for educators. Sure, it gets them on the same page and can offer them base knowledge but its human nature for some teachers and principals to do their own professional development while others wait around for districts to offer something. One-size-fits-all PD leaves the best educators bored because they know most of the information already. With the Common Core State Standards, APPR and other accountability measures popping up, the need for PD is happening at a quicker rate than most districts can keep up with.

Add in budget cuts, and the possibility of getting high quality PD is becoming harder and harder and it becomes more of a drive-by session for staff than it is anything they can truly use in the classroom. Too often when PD is offered as a drive-by it becomes so quick and reckless that teachers walk away with more questions than answers.

How can school districts change the way they offer PD?
It’s not easy to change the way PD has been offered over the past few decades but it should be. It requires a shift in thinking on the part of district administration, building level leaders and the teachers within the school. Over the years in an effort to make sure school buildings were not their own islands some districts worked hard to create curriculum teams by grade level across the district. Now because of time and money those teams do not often get a chance to meet.

It’s time for the district and buildings to work together with teachers to design a better way of offering PD. In Unmistakable Impact (2011) Jim Knight wrote, “Educators, like everyone else, can be blissfully unaware of their own need to improve.” In addition to Knight’s insight, I believe that administrators can be equally unaware of how to offer PD to help teachers improve.

Jim Knight believes in a Partnership approach to professional development. The partnership approach is expressed in “several simple principles“:

• Equality – It’s not top-down. All stakeholders decide together

• Choice – Teachers should have a choice in what they are learning.

• Voice – “Professional learning should empower and respect the voices of teachers. (p.35)”

• Reflection – Great educators reflect on their practice but they also reflect on how they can improve. Reflection takes time.

Sure, it gets them on the same page … but its human nature for some teachers and principals to do their own professional development while others wait around for districts to offer something.

• Dialogue – Knight says that professional learning takes authentic dialogue. He’s right. PD is not about top-down initiatives but it involves conversations about what is working and what is not. Teachers need to feel as though they can share their opinions (We should just all remember that our students and parents deserve the same consideration in the classroom).

• Praxis – “Teachers should apply their learning to their real-life practice as they are learning” (p.42). Is this helping meet the social-emotional and academic needs of students?

• Reciprocity – Everyone should be taking the time to learn. Knight says, “We should expect to get as much as we give.” If teachers or administrators are waiting for someone else to give them what they need where PD is concerned, then they should not always be surprised what they get. Professional learning and PD are about what educators learn at conferences, in conversations at common planning times and what they find on their own. Professional Development is not defined by what someone else provides for us.

Knight says, “Clearly, complete freedom is not the solution. Total choice, without structure, would likely lead to total, unproductive chaos.” Many times administration believe they have the best ideas in order to help educators move forward and learn. When they decide the PD without teacher input, they are neglecting one important aspect of leadership, and one very big fatal flaw. Without including those getting the PD in the decision, administrators are not engaging their audience from the beginning and they are doing PD to teachers and telling them what they should learn.

The reality is that PD is not all about the district office offering PD, and there are many teachers who are waiting for administration to “just tell them what to do,” as their colleagues follow the road to self-discovery and find their own. Educators, including administrators, are all supposed to be lifelong learners. Whether they like it or not they have agreed to keep learning through their whole career. Time, will always be an issue. Even in the best districts, that offer common planning times and have set aside some time for professional learning, teachers are feeling the black cloud of accountability over them. PD needs to offer some breathing room and time for reflection.

It takes a partnership between the district office, building administration and teaching staff to create the best PD opportunities and they have a variety of venues to keep the professional learning going.

Venues:
• Faculty meetings – FM’s should not be about principals leading lists of things that need to be done every month. This is not an easy concept to get away from because it’s the “easy” thing to do. However, faculty meetings should be about professional conversations. This is a difficult concept for teachers as well. Sometimes they are so fried from the day they want to sit back and listen.

• PAC – Principal’s Advisory Councils should be in every school. They involve stakeholders from each grade, special area, special education area and support staff. They are the perfect place to discuss what teachers and students need and should not always be about what is going wrong in the building.

• EdCamps – It’s a concept that is catching on. No keynote speakers are involved and should be one large sharing best practices session.

• Professional Development days – If schools aren’t going to be teaching students on these days they should make sure they are as worthwhile as possible. How do school districts do that? Read Jim Knight’s book and refer to the above blog.

Resource:
Knight, Jim (2011) Unmistakable Impact: A Partnership Approach for Dramatically Improving Instruction. Corwin Press.

The 36 Rules Of Social Media [INFOGRAPHIC]

via MediaBistro

Everyone’s an influencer. The consumer is out for himself (not for you). Optimize content. It’s an organism, not a process. Think past vanity metrics (like followers). Update your Facebook Page… or delete it.

Good advice, right? As much as it frustrates marketers, the business of social media is as much an art as it is a science, but there are some tried and tested rules and guidelines that justwork. And brands, new and old, need to pay attention.

Fast Company asked some of social media’s savviest users about their best practices, many of which were delivered in bite-sized, tweetable chunks. The finest suggestions have been documented in this infographic, which is a useful, one-stop, printable guide to best practices for brands using social media.

The Success Indicator

via Huffington Post

A few months ago I spoke at an event that Steve Wozniak also spoke at. As you can imagine, when it was time for Steve’s session, it was jam-packed. Packed with attendees, vendors and all the other speakers.

As I sat there and listened to Steve poignantly share the story of Apple and his relationship with Steve Jobs, I was enthralled. He started from their middle school years and went right up until the present, after Steve Jobs’ passing.

It seemed like he did not leave out a single detail. He just talked. There was no power point presentation, there were not even note cards — he just told his story from his heart.

What struck me the most was not Steve Wozniak’s extreme brilliance or his exuberant passion.

No, what struck me the most was his overwhelming sense of gratitude. His gratitude for having the opportunity to make the world a better place. To help us all to be able to communicate with loved ones, to run our businesses better and to have an enhanced life.

That evening I had the opportunity to sit with Steve at dinner. This was one of the smartest individuals I have ever met, and he was literally thanking all of us at the dinner table for allowing him to create some of the best technology in the world.

This experience prompted me to go back and examine a chart I created a year ago about the characteristic traits of successful people vs. those of unsuccessful people.

I have enhanced that chart and added traits that I believe to be some of the most important because nothing in life is satanic.

This chart was inspired and composed after meeting and working with some of the smartest, most successful entrepreneurs in the world, many of who are dear friends.
The following is that chart I compiled of characteristics, traits and behaviors of successful people vs. unsuccessful people.

Drum roll please . . .

The Success Factor Indicator

Successful People
Have a sense of gratitude
Forgive others
Accept responsibility for their failures
Compliment
Read everyday
Keep a journal
Talk about ideas
Want others to succeed
Share information and data
Keep a “to-be” list
Exude joy
Keep a “to-do/project” list
Set goals and develop life plans
Embrace change
Give other people credit for their victories
Operate from a transformational perspective

Unsuccessful People
Have a sense of entitlement
Hold a grudge
Blame others for their failures
Criticize
Watch TV everyday
Say they keep a journal but really don’t
Talk about people
Secretly hope others fail
Horde information and data
Don’t know what they want to be
Exude anger
Fly by their seat of their pants
Never set goals
Think they know it all
Fear change
Take all the credit of their victories
Operate from a transactional perspective
If you are ready kick up the success meter a bit, make a conscious effort to eliminate the traits on the right hand side of the chart above.

Hey, none of us is perfect but as long as we recognize and identify where we need to improve and continually strive to get there — greater success will follow.

Blended Learning Webinar

Common Core: A Step Backwards for English Standards…you decide!

Little attention has been paid to the academic quality of the mathematics, literature, and writing standards that NGA and CCSSO developed, despite the fact that they were not internationally benchmarked or research-based. The fatal flaws in the Common Core English Language Arts (ELA) standards went unnoticed because over 45 state boards of education and/or their governors hastily adopted the standards in 2010, in some cases long before they were written or finalized.
Most states agreeing to adopt the Common Core English Language Arts standards may well have thought they were strengthening high school English coursework. However, the architects of Common Core’s ELA standards never claimed that their standards would do so. Rather, they claimed that these standards would make all students “college-ready.”
This extravagant promise was and remains undergirded by a belief that a heavy dose of informational or nonfiction reading (50 percent of reading instructional time in the English class at every grade level) will result in greater college readiness than a concentrated study of complex literature in the secondary English class will.
Loss of Classic Literature
Why do Common Core’s architects believe that reading more nonfiction and “informational” texts in English classes (and in other high school classes) will improve students’ college readiness?
Their belief seems to be based on what they see as the logical implication of the fact that college students read more informational than literary texts. However, there is absolutely no empirical research to suggest that college readiness is promoted by informational or nonfiction reading in high school English classes (or in mathematics and science classes).
In fact, the history of the secondary English curriculum in 20th-century America suggests that the decline in readiness for college reading stems in large part from an increasingly incoherent, less challenging literature curriculum from the 1960s onward. This decline has been propelled by the fragmentation of the year-long English course into semester electives, the conversion of junior high schools into middle schools, and the assignment of easier, shorter, and contemporary texts—often in the name of multiculturalism.
From about the 1900s—the beginning of uniform college entrance requirements via the college boards—until the 1960s, a challenging, literature-heavy English curriculum was understood to be precisely what pre-college students needed. Nonetheless, undeterred by the lack of evidence to support their sales pitch, Common Core’s architects divided all of the ELA reading standards into two groups: 10 standards for informational reading and nine for literary reading at every grade level.
This misplaced stress on informational texts (no matter how much is literary nonfiction) reflects the limited expertise of Common Core’s architects and sponsoring organizations in curriculum and in teachers’ training. This division of reading standards was clearly not developed or approved by English teachers and humanities scholars, because it makes English teachers responsible for something they have not been trained to teach and will not be trained to teach unless the entire undergraduate English major and preparatory programs in English education are changed.
Common Core’s damage to the English curriculum is already taking shape. Anecdotal reports from high school English teachers indicate that the amount of informational or nonfiction reading they are being told to do in their classroom is 50 percent or more of their reading instructional time—and that they will have time only for excerpts from novels, plays, or epic poems if they want students to read more than very short stories and poems.
Long-Term Consequences
A diminished emphasis on literature in the secondary grades makes it unlikely that American students will study a meaningful range of culturally and historically significant literary works before graduation. It also prevents students from acquiring a rich understanding and use of the English language. Perhaps of greatest concern, it may lead to a decreased capacity for analytical thinking.
Indeed, it is more than likely that college readiness will decrease when secondary English teachers begin to reduce the study of complex literary texts and literary traditions in order to prioritize informational or nonfiction texts. This is because, as ACT (a college entrance exam) found, complexity is laden with literary features: It involves characters, literary devices, tone, ambiguity, elaboration, structure, intricate language, and unclear intentions. By reducing literary study, Common Core decreases students’ opportunity to develop the analytical thinking once developed in just an elite group by the vocabulary, structure, style, ambiguity, point of view, figurative language, and irony in classic literary texts.
It will be hard to find informational texts with similar textual challenges (whether or not literary nonfiction). A volume published in 2011 by the National Council of Teachers of English on how English teachers might implement Common Core’s standards helps us to understand why. Among other things, it offers as examples of informational or nonfiction texts selections on computer geeks, fast food, teenage marketing, and the working poor. This is hardly the kind of material to exhibit ambiguity, subtlety, and irony.
Common Core Is Not the Answer
An English curriculum overloaded with advocacy journalism or with “informational” articles chosen for their topical and/or political nature should raise serious concerns among parents, school leaders, and policymakers.
Common Core’s standards not only present a serious threat to state and local education authority, but also put academic quality at risk. Pushing fatally flawed education standards into America’s schools is not the way to improve education for America’s students.

DreamBox Learning launches global online community on edWeb.net for educators implementing blended learning models for mathematics

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

PRINCETON, NJ, February 12, 2013 – DreamBox Learning® (www.dreambox.com), the leading Intelligent Adaptive Learning™ company, and edWeb.net, a professional social and learning network for the education community, today announced the launch of Blended Learning, an online professional learning community (PLC) to support educators exploring and implementing blended learning models for elementary mathematics.

The Blended Learning PLC will provide a collaborative forum for administrators, math coaches, curriculum coordinators, and teachers of mathematics to gather and share insights as schools and districts implement blended learning models at the classroom level.

“As the pioneer of intelligent adaptive learning, DreamBox Learning has redefined personalized instruction in the classroom,” said Lisa Schmucki, founder and CEO of edWeb.net. “Blended learning is an area of great interest to our online professional learning community and we’re thrilled to provide such high caliber experts to educators to improve their knowledge and help them implement best practices in classrooms.”

As part of the partnership with edWeb.net, DreamBox Learning will host a monthly Blended Learning webinar series as well as provide a dedicated blog and access to resources and tools that will allow educators to receive a Continued Education (CE) certificate.

The next webinar, Principal’s Guide to Blended Learning for Elementary Mathematics, is scheduled for February 27 at 3:00 p.m. EST. The session will be presented by well-known author and educator Dr. Jeff Piontek, who will present the keys to implementing successful blended learning models that leverage the powerful combination of real-time and online interaction to improve math teaching and student learning.

The joint effort benefits both edWeb.net and DreamBox Learning. “Joining forces with edWeb.net provides DreamBox Learning with the unique opportunity to engage directly with forward-thinking administrators and educators who are actively exploring innovative ways to increase student confidence and achievement in math through blended learning and differentiation,” said Jessie Woolley-Wilson, President and CEO at DreamBox Learning. “We’re very excited to share our knowledge and success stories as well as learn from the community as we collectively continue to inspire positive outcomes in education.”

Administrators and math educators are invited to join the Blended Learning community. All webinars and content are free. Register for the February 27 webinar. Listen to an interview with edWeb.net’s Lisa Schmucki and Dr. Tim Hudson, Director of Curriculum Design at DreamBox Learning discuss the rise in blended learning and the launch of the Blended Learning PLC. More information about the overall program can be found at www.edweb.net/blendedlearning.

About edWeb.net

edWeb.net is a professional social and learning network for the education community that makes it easy to connect and collaborate with colleagues, share information and best practices, and create professional learning communities. edWeb makes it easy to move forward faster with ideas that transform teaching and learning. edWeb hosts free professional learning communities on key topics in education and won the 2012 Edublog Award for Best Free and Open Professional Development for Educators. edWeb reaches 3.5 million educators in the U.S. through our membership and our partnership with MCH Strategic Data. Learn more at www.edweb.net.

About DreamBox Learning

DreamBox Learning was founded in 2006 in Bellevue, Washington and launched its first online learning product in January 2009. The platform has won more than 20 top education and technology industry awards and is in use in all 50 states. DreamBox Learning Math offers a groundbreaking combination of intelligent adaptive learning, rigorous elementary mathematics curriculum, and motivating learning environment. The innovative DreamBox platform captures every decision a student makes while working in the program and adjusts the student’s learning path appropriately, providing millions of individualized learning paths, each one tailored to a student’s unique needs.

DreamBox Learning closed its Series A round of funding in December 2011 led by private investors Reed Hastings, John Doerr and Deborah Quazzo, as well as GSV Capital Corp. (NASDAQ: GSVC).

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PR Contacts:

edWeb.net:
Lisa Schmucki, 908-407-2755 or lisa@edweb.net

Foghorn Public Relations for DreamBox Learning:
Mary Leddy, 508-872-3369 or mleddy@foghornpr.com
Shelly Eckenroth, 717-852-7060 or seckenroth@foghornpr.com

7 Excellent iPad Games to Develop Kids Critical Thinking

How does your smartphone work?

Classrooms for the next generation?

A three-year project with 400 eight to 10-year olds found that using interactive “smart” desks can have benefits over doing maths on paper, and that pupils are able to improve their fluency and flexibility in maths by working together.

“Our aim was to encourage far higher levels of active student engagement, where knowledge is obtained by sharing, problem-solving and creating, rather than by passive listening,” said Liz Burd of Britain’s Durham University, who led the study.

The research team, whose findings were published in the journal Learning and Instruction, designed software and desks that recognise multiple touches on a desktop using infrared light vision systems.

The desks are built into furniture of the classroom to help encourage more collaboration, and are networked and linked to a main smartboard. A live feed of the desks goes directly to the teacher who can intervene quickly to help a pupil while allowing group work to continue.

Burd’s team found that 45 percent of pupils who used a maths programme on the smart desk system increased the number of unique mathematical expressions they created, compared with 16 percent of those doing it on paper.

Using the new desks helped children work together and solve problems using inventive solutions, the researchers said.

“We found our tables encouraged students to collaborate more effectively,” said Burd. “Such collaboration just did not happen when students used paper-based approaches.”

You never get a second chance at a first impression…..

You never get a second chance to make a first impression,” Don’t make the mistakes that many have made before you.

In today’s world, the first impression idea still holds true. However, digital consumers and social media allow us to connect in ways that we could never have in the past. And the impression that you leave on your Facebook page, Twitter stream, or website could have some people making judgments and drawing conclusions before they actually get to know you, your company, or your products.

What is your goal? What is the impression you are trying to create for yourself? What kind of customers are you attracting by delivering the impression you project?  It’s important to make sure that you always have the best foot forward in whatever business you are in to build an impressive social networking presence with the right impression.

This post originally appeared in The Marketing Tech Blog (http://www.marketingtechblog.com/infographic-whats-your-social-media-impression/)