Recently a principal who attended one of our Leading the Common Core trainings lead her entire staff in an activity to help them begin unpacking the Common Core standards for themselves. Here’s part of an email she sent us one week later: “We were able to present the Unpacking the Common Core Standards activity that [...]
Taking Charge of your Professional Development By Shauna Leung, a former teacher and school reformer, who is presently pursing Doctoral studies at Harvard University. This article originally appeared in our June 2009 newsletter. Maybe I am a glutton for punishment, but I really looked forward to being observed in the classroom. I loved the idea [...]
An Alternative to Traditional Walk-Throughs I was visiting a school recently and taking the instructional leaders on classroom walkthroughs as a part of the leadership training we were doing in the district. The purpose of the walkthrough was to help the leaders learn how to distinguish rigorous instruction and provide teachers with effective feedback that [...]
Most people argue that great teaching cannot be taught. I offer that it’s not so much that it can’t be taught; it’s just that it often goes untaught. Most education programs catalogue effective teaching behaviors but few show teachers how to integrate these behaviors or the thinking that goes behind these behaviors. It is this [...]
I had been working on the final draft of second edition of The Differentiation Workbook and had nearly finished it when I got interrupted and put it down. When I went to pick it up a day later, it was gone. Just like that. Gone. I looked everywhere. I went to my office and my [...]
We thought this would be a great opportunity to revisit our summer reading list from 2009. Summer is here and it is always a time for reflection and renewal. Although this summer is especially busy for me this year, I still plan to take time to read for my own professional growth and development. Here [...]
Every June we release our summer reading list for educators. Here are five books you should be reading this summer: Imagine: How Creativity Works by Jonah Lehrer. We’ve been big fans of Jonah Lehrer since his book Proust was a Neuroscientist (we even included it in a previous summer reading list). He is masterful at [...]
By: Kenyatta Dorey Graves I was once asked to provide professional development training for a large, urban school district in the south newly ignited by the pressures of urgent, immediate reform. Prior to the start of my workshop, the Superintendent of the district arrived and decided to offer what we’ll today call “motivation” for the [...]
By: Robyn R Jackson Recently I had to come face to face with a brutal fact. I had to re-brand. We don’t talk about branding much in education. It seems as if branding is something that we leave to those folks in business and marketing. Education has always been viewed as being on a higher [...]
Recently, I invited my favorite eight-year-old to help me bake cookies. I set out all the ingredients we would need and we got to work. First we measured the flour. She asked me, “Can I do it?” “No sweetie, you’ll make a mess. Let me measure the flour and then you can put it in [...]
