Leadership MIndsets

Who Moved My Cheese-Spencer Johnson

Learner Centred Innovation- Foreword and Chapter 1

Disobedient Teaching Welby Ings

Timeless Learning

Designing a Public School From Scratch

"Here, we understand that every child learns at a different pace. We let them take the wheel, but help them navigate the way.”


“If school were a place where…? Then we would need teachers who…? Students who…? Parents who…?” The questions pushed everyone to dream big.

The Repair of Early Trauma

Community Capacity Building

Empower

UnCommon Learning

Future Wise David Perkions

Ed Journeys Grant Lichtman

A New Culture of Learning

A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change by Douglas Thomas, John Seely Brown

This book just reminded me of so much I’ve talked about  with some of my colleagues over the last few years. It emphasises the relevance of MMOG and MMORPG’s and the lessons from them for 21st Century learning. It talks about participants creating their own collective learning in spaces like online forums in order to help themselves get better (learn).

It talks about the power of the collective and references such things as Kiva and other microfinance operations.

Its an excellent and easy read.

1 ARC-OF-LIFE LEARNING

What happens to learning when we move from the stable infrastructure of the twentieth century to the fluid infrastructure of the twenty-first century, where technology is constantly creating and responding to change? The answer is surprisingly simple. Ironically, this requires environments that are bounded yet provide complete freedom of action within those boundaries. This familiar dynamic, in fact, structures all our contemporary notions of play, games, and imagination. Play can be defined as the tension between the rules of the game and the freedom to act within those rules. But when play happens within a medium for learning—much like a culture in a petri dish—it creates a context in which information, ideas, and passions grow.

Play, questioning, and—perhaps most important—imagination lie at the very heart of arc-of-life learning. Children, for instance, embrace play as a central part of how they experience the world, and they learn that questioning the world is one of the key ways they can understand it.

The new culture of learning actually comprises two elements. The first is a massive information network that provides almost unlimited access and resources to learn about anything. The second is a bounded and structured environment that allows for unlimited agency to build and experiment with things within those boundaries.

It is the combination of the two, and the interplay between them, that makes the new culture of learning so powerful.

In the twenty-first century, how do we cultivate the imagination?

I really like the interplay of unlimited agency for a learner within a bounded environment. It reminds me of some of the presentations I was doing back in the early 2000’s when I was first running individual programmes with students running their own timetables and I was creating and giving presentations with titles such as Structure Behind the Chaos. It was easy for someone to walk in and perceive 60 students all doing their own thing and just doing what they wanted, but there actually needs to be structure behind that kind of programme for it to be as effective aspkossible and focus learners in on what the need. That structure is not always immediately apparent from the outside, but without it the student agency could turn to apathy.

2 A TALE OF TWO CULTURES

For most of the twentieth century our educational system has been built on the assumption that teaching is necessary for learning to occur. Accordingly, education has been seen as a process of transferring information from a higher authority (the teacher) down to the student. This model, however, just can’t keep up with the rapid rate of change in the twenty-first century. It’s time to shift our thinking from the old model of teaching to a new model of learning.

The ultimate endpoint of a mechanistic perspective is efficiency: The goal is to learn as much as you can, as fast as you can. In this teaching-based approach, standardisation is a reasonable way to do this, and testing is a reasonable way to measure the result. The processes that necessarily occur to reach the goal, therefore, are considered learning should be viewed in terms of an environment—combined with the rich resources provided by the digital information network—where the context in which learning happens, the boundaries that define it, and the students, teachers, and information within it all coexist and shape each other in a mutually reinforcing

Typically, when we think of a culture, we think of an existing, stable entity that changes and evolves over long periods of time. Individuals can choose to join cultures, but no individual can create one.

primary difference between the teaching-based approach to education and the learning–based approach is that in the first case the culture is the environment, while in the second case, the culture emerges from the environment—and grows along with second difference is that the teaching-based approach focuses on teaching us about the world, while the new culture of learning focuses on learning through engagement within the world. 

This reminds me of a conversation I had with a teacher I was co-teaching with last year. We  talked about possibly changing the whole structure of what we were doing because the learners weren't completing things as quickly as we wanted. But then we managed to reflect and review what our purpose for learning was. We realised that we could standardise things and get more finished quicker or “in a more efficient way,” but this wouldn't necessarily lend itself to better learning just completion. So we went another way with helping learners develop the boundaries within their environment but still maintain that learner agency.

3 EMBRACING CHANGE

“No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.”

In the traditional view of teaching, information is transferred from one person (the teacher) to another (the student).

major pitfall of the twentieth century’s teaching model—namely, the belief that most of what we know will remain relatively unchanged for a long enough period of time to be worth the effort of transferring

As information is constantly produced, consumed, updated, and altered, new practices of reading, writing, thinking, and learning have evolved with it. 

Children use play and imagination as the primary mechanisms for making sense of their new, rapidly evolving world.

In a world of near-constant flux, play becomes a strategy for embracing change, rather than a way for growing out of it.

The challenge is to find a way to marry structure and freedom to create something altogether new.

I really like the concept about play being a strategy for embracing change rater than growing out of it. I still think there is much we cold do with games like Minecraft in the classroom to help kids understand and embrace their changing future, just not sure how to do it yet.

4 LEARNING IN THE COLLECTIVE

In the new culture of learning, people learn through their interaction and participation with one another in fluid relationships that are the result of shared interests and opportunity.

In communities, people learn in order to belong. 

In a collective, people belong in order to learn. 

Communities derive their strength from creating a sense of belonging, while collectives derive theirs from participation.

I think our new eldership structure is perhaps a bit of a starting road towards collective rather than community with teams forming because of people passion to learn and further that particular aspect of our school. I’m hoping this reaps benefits across the whole school and from that collective feeling across everywhere.

5 THE PERSONAL WITH THE COLLECTIVE

But is public versus private really the best way to frame the distinction anymore? Perhaps the fact

that the boundary between the two is becoming so permeable indicates a need for a new way to think about the differences between them. We suggest a framework that has elements of both but involves intertwining and remixing—rather than opposing—domains: the personal combined with the collective.

Collectives, unlike the larger notion of the public, are both contextual and situated,

Sharing something personal with a collective, therefore, is very different from taking something private and putting it into the public domain.

We see collectives as the creations of play and imagination in an era of digital media. They are, in that sense, a product of a changing world that can no longer focus on a single, national sense of community. But collectives are also a nearly infinite set of resources that any individual can selectively tap into and participate in as part of his or her own identity.

approaching some of our biggest challenges—whether financial, environmental, or health-care related—in terms of the collective has led to the development of meaningful solutions.

Kiva is dedicated to microfinance—lending very small amounts of money to people in the world’s poorest regions to effect economic and social change. Funding for small projects had previously not been possible, since small loans are typically too costly for banks and other traditional financial institutions to provide. Yet as of July 2010, Kiva had loaned $147 million to more than 370,000 recipients in 200 countries using the World Wide Web as a platform. The average size of each loan was roughly $200, and the repayment rate greater than 98%.

children who live in lower-income homes perform significantly less well in school as a direct result of poor educational attitudes and a lack of exposure to educational resources at home.

I’ve been involved with Kiva for a couple of years now, and it completely amazes me how the loans are pretty much always paid back. One of the best things outside of school Ive been made aware of in the last few years,

6 WE KNOW MORE THAN WE CAN SAY

Different people, when presented with exactly the same information in exactly the same way, will learn different things.

Students learn best when they are able to follow their passion and operate within the constraints of a bounded environment.

Both of those elements matter. Without the boundary set by the assignment of playing the prelude, there would be no medium for growth. But without the passion, there would be nothing to grow in the medium. Yet the process of discovering one’s passion can be complicated.

Consider a student who loves basketball, for example. A physics teacher might be tempted to take advantage of that interest by writing a problem set concerning gravity, force, and acceleration within the context of the sport. She might want to ask, “At what angle and with what force must a person shoot a ball to make a basket 20 feet away?” In doing so, she might think she has engaged the passion and imagination of the basketball enthusiast. But in reality she has done little more than cloak a typical physics problem with a basketball theme. Now, imagine asking the question a little differently: “What is the best way to shoot a basketball?” If the student has a true interest in the game, he will have seen countless times that the best players all use jump shots to score points, and that those jump shots all share similar mechanics. Now the student may become curious: “Why is that? What do they have in common?” He may turn to physics for an answer, but that will tell him only part of the story. Knowing the physics of how a jump shot works doesn’t explain why it is the best way to do it. So he continues to dig. Where he will go with this line of inquiry is anyone’s guess—it could be history, math, anatomy, physiology, sports psychology, or something else entirely. The point is that no matter what direction he goes in or what he finds, more questions await. And the questions he asks are limited only by his imagination.

Inquiry is the process by which we ask not “What is it that we know?” but “What are the things that we don’t know and what questions can we ask about them?”

Game worlds are meritocracies—leaders and players are subject to the same kinds of assessment—and after-action reviews are meaningful only as ways of enhancing performance (whether individual or group).

• Understand the power of diversity.
• Thrive on change.
• See learning as fun.
• Live on the edge.
• Collective Indwelling

Such a close relationship between games and effective assessment- how can we make the most of that? Great example to illustrate true integration. Used this with staff at induction and it seemed to help some understand the difference between the old thematic approach and true integration.

And again, passion is being highlighted.

7 KNOWING, MAKING, AND PLAYING

The truism, “you live, you learn,” lies at the heart of the new culture of learning. A lifelong ability to learn has given human beings all kinds of evolutionary advantages over other animals. It is our killer app.

Up to and through the better part of the twentieth century, regarding knowledge as a static, easily transmitted what made sense, and it was the primary principle we used to shape our understanding of learning and education.

In the twenty-first century, however, knowledge is becoming less a question of “What is the information?” and more of a “Where is the information?”

When we build, we do more than create content.

Learning now, therefore, goes far beyond a simple transfer of information and becomes inextricably bound with the context that is being created.

Since many of the places we now look for information do not carry the institutional warrants that have traditionally been used as markers for accuracy or truth, learning to navigate through and evaluate them—an expanded notion of literacy—is now critically important. We need to learn to read in a whole new way.

What we do in play may best express the sense of becoming. Whatever one accomplishes through play, the activity is never about achieving a particular goal, even if a game has a defined endpoint or end state. It is always about finding the next challenge or becoming more fully immersed in the state of play. In play, therefore, learning is not driven by a logical calculus but by a more lateral, imaginative way of thinking and feeling instead.

The three dimensions of learning—knowing, making, and playing—are already beginning to emerge within the fabric of the digital world itself:

Expanded notion of literacy is critically important- learning needs to go far beyond a simple transfer of information

8 HANGING OUT, MESSING AROUND, AND GEEKING OUT

Hanging Out

At the most basic level, participation in digital environments requires a sense of “learning to be,” which is more about acquiring certain social practices that give meaning to experiences than it is about any kind of abstract notion of knowledge as a thing or set of facts.

Messing Around

“When messing around, young people begin to take an interest in and focus on the workings and content of the technology and media themselves, tinkering, exploring, and extending their understanding.”

The function of play in messing around, above all else, is to unpack and experiment with the familiar.

For some users in digital environments, messing around, which is characterized by Ito as “open-ended,” “self-taught,” and “loosely goal directed” follows from hanging out.

Geeking Out 

The final stage of participation, geeking out, is the most complicated.

The richness of experience and social agency produced by hanging out and the sense of embodiment and personal agency created by messing around, combined with the sense of making, produces what we think is the ultimate goal of indwelling: learning.

Geeking out provides an experiential, embodied sense of learning within a rich social context of peer interaction, feedback, and knowledge construction enabled by a technological infrastructure that promotes “intense, autonomous, interest driven” learning.

This kind of learning highlights the importance of understanding the power of collaboration.

9 THE NEW CULTURE OF LEARNING FOR A WORLD OF CONSTANT CHANGE

When we think about what a new educational environment might look like in the twenty-first century, we can imagine a number of things.

Imagine an environment that is constantly changing. Imagine an environment where the participants are building, creating, and participating in a massive network of dozens of databases, hundreds of wikis and websites, and thousands of message forums, literally creating a large-scale knowledge economy.

Imagine an environment where participants are constantly measuring and evaluating their own performances, even if that requires them to build new tools to do it.

Imagine an environment where user interface dashboards are individually and personally constructed by users to help them make sense of the world and their own performance in it.

Imagine an environment where evaluation is based on after-action reviews not to determine rewards but to continually enhance performance.

Imagine an environment where learning happens on a continuous basis because the participants are internally motivated to find, share, and filter new information on a near-constant basis.

When people stop learning in a game, they lose interest and quit. When understood properly, therefore, games may in fact be one of the best models for learning and knowing in the twenty-first century.

Why? Because if a game is good, you never play it the same way twice.

his or her maximum potential, and in order to do so, each player’s character must successfully fulfill the specific responsibilities of its class. Perhaps most important, however, is that each stage is highly indeterminate; players only know what to expect in a very general sense. The monsters they face have a certain degree of artificial intelligence, meaning that they will respond to the context in different ways depending

That moment of fusion between unlimited resources and a bounded environment creates a space that does not simply allow for imagination, it requires it. Only when we care about experimentation, play, and questions more than efficiency, outcomes, and answers do we have a space that is truly open to the imagination.

And where imaginations play, learning happens.

The most important part of the above: Only when we care about experimentation, play, and questions more than efficiency, outcomes, and answers do we have a space that is truly open to the imagination.

This really is an amazingly easy and though provoking read. Its well worth the effort. Backs up a lot of thinking around inquiry learning, experimentation, the value of playing and games including online games.

Leading Professional Learning

Leading Professional Learning: Tools to Connect and Empower Teachers (Corwin Connected Educators Series) by Thomas C. Murray, Jeffrey (Jeff) J. Zoul

As Michael Fullan has been saying for many years, “technology is not the right driver, good pedagogy is,.”

Effective PL cultivates teacher leadership, builds capacity in staff, encourages building leaders to be transparent in their own learning, and develops shared ownership and a culture of learning.

Traditional professional learning is top-down,  professional learning is someone else’s job and is something “done to teachers,” as opposed to something each teacher actively participates in and owns.

Traditional professional learning is one-size-fits-all BUT

Teachers learn at different rates, have different learning styles, and possess a wide span of needs.

Just like students, we need to identify and meet teachers needs on an individual basis.

Traditional professional learning is hours-based

We trust teachers with the lives of children on a daily basis yet often not “trust” them enough to make their own professional learning decisions.

When school leaders use seat time as the measurement tool, they’re measuring the wrong end of the learner.

Traditional professional learning uses a “sit and get” format

The traditional model simply hasn’t worked to the extent needed to serve our teachers and, ultimately, our students. It is time for a change, and there is a better way—a way that motivates and empowers teachers, shares ownership, and personalizes professional learning, all while increasing accountability and expectations for all.

Just as a personalized model meets the needs of today’s children, a personalized model for professional learning is also needed to meet the various needs of teachers.

Todd Whitaker (2003) goes so far as to suggest that there are, ultimately, only two ways to improve any school: hire better teachers and improve the ones who are already there. Because the opportunity to employ new staff is limited this

means to get better, even our very best teachers need to continuously improve—indeed, that is one thing that makes them so great.

First and foremost, our responsibility is to ensure high levels of learning for all students we teach. Almost as important, of course, is our own learning as educators.

We need to model our own learning to help our teachers see the importance of it.

“Training” teachers to do something may be appropriate to an extent, but a training—or development opportunity—connotes an event teachers attend to obtain a specific skill that they can, in turn, use in scripted ways and in specific settings. To truly affect student learning, teachers must not merely be “trained”; they must learn deeply in a way that results in the learning being transferred to their own classrooms and shared with other teachers with whom they interact.

“professional development” suggests a one-time event or, at best, a series of events, whereas “professional learning” suggests growth that is ongoing, sustainable,

continuous, and personal.

To create authentic personalized learning plans (PLPs), we must shift the primary ownership of the learning from outside to within, from top-down to organic, from those with formal authority, to the intended learners: teachers.

Professional learning is something most teachers and educators do every day: we reflect on our professional practice, work together, and share ideas and resources in an effort to improve student outcomes. We need to harness this learning energy inherent in our daily lives as professional educators into a systematic, integral component of our school cultures.

Too true, so how do we harness all of this ongoing professional learning into an effective documented plan?

Successful professional learning experiences tend to be those embedded in daily practice, needs-based and linked to student learning needs, tailored to meet the specific circumstances or contexts of participants, and sustained over time.

every teacher in every school knows something about his or her craft that another teacher does not. The more we can learn from within by learning from our own experts—the teachers with whom we serve—the more flexible we can be in offering a wide variety of personalized learning opportunities

How do we have systems- apart for collaborative teaching that allow our teachers to continually learn with and from each other?

Expanded its definition of what constitutes professional development, when it can happen, how it can be delivered, who can deliver it, and how it is measured. We adopted a variety of professional learning delivery methods that enhanced teacher voice and provided teachers with multiple options allowing them to determine their own path to learning.

It might be a small distinction but the difference between professional development and professional learning is actually huge. Language is important.

Two favourite methods included using an “unconference” format and “speed discussions.” Unconference refers to a gathering of educators exchanging information and ideas in a less formal structure, allowing participants the opportunity to determine the agenda by creating it themselves at the beginning of the day. Speed discussions are a series of short conversations, each focusing on a specific topic, usually lasting about ten minutes per topic. Educators self-select which discussions to attend. For instance, one discussion might center on formative assessment and another on an app for creativity; the list of options is limited solely by the interests and needs of the participants.

We need to try to get people to some of the edu-camps- maybe focus on the Rotorua and maybe Wellington ones.

The goal for the day was to provide time for informal learning that was self-organized, self-initiated, just-in-time, and made visible to others.

teachers in charge of their learning by having them make decisions on what to learn, how to learn it, and how to display their learning for others.

“A leader is one who knows the way, goes the way, and shows the way.” —John C. Maxwell

We must design personalized, meaningful, and practical professional learning plans for every teacher at every school

The leadership gap in the area of what we say we need to do in the area of professional learning and what we actually do is more of a chasm than a gap, and it is every bit as important as the gap we face in student achievement.

School leaders who wish to transform professional learning for teachers by providing every staff member the opportunity to design and follow a personalized learning plan for continuous improvement begin the process by monitoring their own learning and ensuring that they have a PLP in place for themselves.

They share this plan with everyone at the school, modeling the way and inspiring a shared vision for what continuous professional learning should look like, serving, as Fullan suggests (2014), as the lead learners of their school communities.

Having a growth mind-set when it comes to improving our practice as educators is essential to our success and, more importantly, to our students’ success.

School leaders must make the conscious decision to invest in teachers’ professional learning as a long-term commitment that we hope pays off not just today but over a long period of time.

Rather than a series of stand-alone purchases, investing in personalized learning must focus not on a transaction but on transformation.

School leaders must know their teachers every bit as well as they expect teachers to know their students. They must know their strengths, their areas for growth, their interests, and their experiences. Then, they must work together with each teacher to collaboratively design a personalized learning plan that will meet the teacher’s needs.

School leaders with an investment mind-set tend to focus more on spending time with their teachers rather than spending money on teachers when it comes to personalized learning plans.

When school leaders do schedule whole-faculty meetings, they should do so with four purposes in mind: 

To build relationships among staff members 

To celebrate school and staff accomplishments 

To identify problems and brainstorm possible solutions 

To focus on professional learning

Like this list. Put it up somewhere.

Any time the whole faculty is called together, the entire meeting time should be spent engaged in activities that fulfill one or more of these purposes.

Building leaders must be careful to intentionally schedule time for both whole-faculty and smaller team meetings, each with nonnegotiable expectations in place for all meeting attendees. Such nonnegotiables may include the following: 

• Any scheduled meeting will have a stated purpose, a clear and viable agenda, and an agreed-on start and stop time. 
• Team meeting norms will be established, communicated, monitored, and adhered to by all members. 
• Roles and responsibilities for meeting attendees will be clearly outlined and shared among all members. 
• The physical setting for each meeting will be conducive to maximizing productivity, including appropriate seating, work spaces, audio-visual capabilities, temperature, and technology. 
• The meeting will be a “safe” environment for all in attendance, meaning that different perspectives are not only allowed but valued and expected. 
• Minutes from each meeting will be documented and shared with all appropriate staff members. 
• Whole-faculty meeting time should be reserved for the sole purposes outlined earlier. Such times should be treated as truly precious opportunities to bond as a team, promote the school’s culture, celebrate successes, share stories, and learn together. 

When it comes to whole-faculty meeting times, we believe in a less-is-more approach, meaning that school leaders should not convene regularly scheduled monthly or semimonthly meetings merely because that is the way it has always been done or that is the frequency for which the contract allows. Instead, whole-faculty meetings should be scheduled purposefully and planned meticulously. Many principals find that scheduling only four such meetings each year suffices, gathering together as a whole staff once each quarter. In addition, of course, many other school meetings must occur during which “nuts and bolts” work is completed, but such meetings rarely require every staff member’s presence. 

During “working” meetings, only those directly involved in the work need attend. Regardless of the decision school leaders make regarding how often to hold whole-staff meetings at their school, here are our tips for holding staff meetings: 

A multitude of technology tools enable us to have faculty members participate actively during faculty meetings just like our students do in classrooms. A few such examples include Poll Everywhere, Kahoot.it, Socrative, Soap Box, Edmodo, and TodaysMeet. Each of these services offers free, nonthreatening participation

Remind staff members of the school’s mission and values. 

Open and close the meeting with some type of celebration. 

Plan whole-faculty meeting “rituals” or traditions followed at each meeting, including sharing stories, celebrating accomplishments, highlighting individual and/or team successes, sharing jokes or anecdotes, and providing refreshments. 

Ensure that many, if not all, staff members play a lead during some part of the whole-staff meetings. 

Find ways for as many voices as possible to be heard during the meeting. 

Make sure that no meeting lasts for more than sixty minutes. 

Make sure that whole-faculty meetings include a heavy dose of fun. 

Set a personal goal for each meeting that all teachers will leave the meeting more excited about teaching at the school than when they arrived. 

Allow time for staff members to share personal, as well as professional, successes, joys, sorrows, and challenges. 

Create a culture of caring among staff members that extends beyond the schoolhouse. Spend ten to twenty minutes of each whole-staff meeting modeling the way as “lead learner.” Do this by “teaching” the staff something you have recently learned through your own personalized learning plan.

Backchanneling refers to the conversation that is secondary to the primary conversation being led by a teacher, speaker, principal, or anyone else facilitating a meeting of any type. Backchanneling allows the participants in the audience to weigh in on what is being discussed, providing feedback and asking questions. Several technology tools allow for backchanneling during such events. One such tool we have used often and seen many other educators and presenters use is TodaysMeet.

TodaysMeet is a backchannel chat platform for classroom teachers and learners. Designed for teachers, TodaysMeet has in place safeguards that respect the needs and privacy of students while giving educators the tools to encourage and elicit their students’ voice in the classroom. Participants join easy-to-start chat rooms instantaneously, with no sign-up, and can immediately engage in powerful conversations that augment the traditional classroom or meeting. Ideas can be curated and rooms can be open for up to a year. As easy and effective as this tool is for teachers to use in the classroom, it is equally easy and appropriate for school leaders to use when meeting with teachers. To learn more about TodaysMeet, visit their website at: https://todaysmeet.com.

Dont know this- have a look at it.

Leaders also model the way for teachers by blogging. Through blogging, lead learners model a host of traits, behaviors, mind-sets, and habits that they want all educators to consider important, among them: The importance of taking a risk by publicly sharing their thoughts in writing. The importance of writing in authentic ways and the belief that we should all engage in writing, not just our students. The importance of reflecting on their daily lives as educators, sharing what they experience and what they learn from these experiences. The importance of communicating regularly with the students, educators, parents, and citizens living in the school community. The importance of sharing their stories with the larger educational community as a way to highlight the many good things that are occurring, including spotlighting teachers at their schools who are experiencing success with their students.

school leaders are already extremely busy people and that blogging regularly does take time. Yet we feel that this is another example of investing, as opposed to spending, their limited time. The returns we have seen principals realize from this investment once they commit to blogging regularly make a compelling case for all principals and school leaders to follow suit. There are hundreds of school leaders around the world whose blogs we read regularly and inspire us in our own work.

I agree- blogging is a really good medium for both sorting your own thoughts and sharing your work.

George Couros (@gcouros on Twitter). George is the division principal for Parkland School Division in Stony Plain, Alberta, and a teaching, learning, and leadership consultant. George posts his thoughts about all aspects of education regularly on his blog The Principal of Change available at http://georgecouros.ca/blog.

“For me, blogging goes beyond reflection to the point of ‘open reflection.’ Writing for yourself is powerful, but when you know that an audience can read it, it helps to clarify your own thinking while also creating opportunities for collaboration. If every educator did this type of reflection, we would see monumental shifts in practice.”

Ben Gilpin (@benjamingilpin). Ben is the principal at Warner Elementary School in Spring Arbor, Michigan. Ben posts his reflections of teaching, learning, and leading on his blog The Colorful Principal available at http://colorfulprincipal.blogspot.com.

have found blogging to be a vehicle for clarification, reflection, and most importantly, increased collaboration. I strongly encourage educators to blog. Even though you may be thinking, ‘Who will want to read my blog?’ I recommend simply beginning your blogging journey by blogging for yourself, using it to reflect and grow as a person.”

Vicki Davis (@coolcatteacher). Vicki is a teacher at Westwood Schools in Camilla, Georgia. She is host of the biweekly Every Classroom Matters show on the BAM Radio Network. Vicki’s blog, The CoolCat Teacher, can be accessed at www.coolcatteacher.com.

Every day I learn from the Tweets and blogs of other educators and share some of my own. Blogging changed everything in my life and made me a better teacher and that is the coolest thing about blogging.”

Pernille Ripp (@pernilleripp). Pernille teaches seventh grade in Wisconsin and is the creator of the Global Read Aloud. She posts frequent musings about her life as a teacher at her blog Blogging Through the Fourth Dimension available at http://pernillesripp.com.

Blogging can be incredibly stressful, hurtful, and invasive at times, yet I always tell people to reflect on what they are doing. However, educators who do choose to blog their reflections then know that their words may plant a seed of change for someone else.

You blog not for others but because your heart and mind tells you to and you realize that your words have power, that others may listen. You blog because you want to and then you hang on for the ride.”

Sheninger (@e_sheninger). Eric served as principal at nationally renowned New Milford High School in Bergen County, New Jersey, and serves as a senior fellow at the International Center for Leadership in Education (ICLE), a division of Scholastic. Eric is the author of Digital Leadership: Changing Paradigms for Changing Times. Readers can follow Eric’s popular blog, A Principal’s Reflections, at http://esheninger.blogspot.com.

“Blogging is a powerful way for educators to not only reflect upon professional practice, but also discover and learn from the work of innovative educators across the globe.

Whether using blogs for communications, public relations, or professional learning consistency, a sound message, citing sources, and proofreading are key. The most important element, though, is to weave in actionable experiences into your personal thoughts and opinions.”

What we model is what we get

As leaders, we must not forget the importance of supporting the individual growth of our teachers by providing an environment that encourages innovation and risk taking if we aim to build a community of leaders where everyone’s talents are appreciated and valued.

Personalized plans for professional learning contain the following components: Teacher voice is at the heart of the plan’s roadmap. Seat time is irrelevant. The learning outcome is what matters most. Professional learning occurs in both formal and informal environments. Nontraditional forms of professional learning (e.g., blogging, social media, Twitter chats, Edcamps) are recognized as valuable learning experiences. Teachers are responsible for learning outcomes and must be able to communicate how their learning has improved their craft; specifically, how their personal growth has improved classroom experiences for students. A supervisor’s input is a vital part of the plan, yielding a collaboratively designed roadmap for professional growth.

Each day, educators are taking charge of their own learning through connections on social media. From networking with others worldwide, to taking part in weekly chats on Twitter, to sharing resources on Pinterest, to connecting through groups on Facebook, 

nontraditional forms of professional learning offer educators the ability to connect with others and design their own personalized roadmap for learning.

Connected educators collaborate both online and in person, use social media to interact with educators around the world, engage in conversations in online spaces, and most importantly bring their learning back to their home environment to transform the learning space.

Educators connecting in these spaces often refer to these connections as their personal learning network or PLN.

Many educators are connecting on Twitter, an online social microblogging platform, where conversation bites (tweets) are limited to 140 characters at a time. Educators share research articles and blog posts, discuss issues and trends, and engage in healthy, professional debate. Twitter is one of the most popular online mediums in which educators connect worldwide.

Each week, educators from around the world take part in various conversations on Twitter known as “chats.”

Edcamps are free, organic professional learning opportunities by teachers, for teachers. Any educator can hold a session at an Edcamp, and the schedule is determined on the day of the event in response to the most cutting-edge, pressing needs of the group. Based on open space technology, Edcamp events are derived from the belief that a group of people, given a purpose and freedom, have the ability to self-organize, self-govern, and produce results. Educators who attend Edcamps are treated as experts, and an open exchange of learning and sharing takes place.

EDCAMPS ARE Free Non-commercial and with a vendor free presence Hosted by any organization or anyone Made up of sessions that are determined on the day of the event

Events where anyone who attends can be a presenter Reliant on the law of two feet that encourages participants to find a session that meets their needs

See above re edcamps.

As teachers work to create a learning environment that maximizes the learner’s ability to interact with others through discussion, collaboration, and feedback, so too can adults create their own personalized learning environment built on this same framework.

Today’s teachers with a twenty-first century mind-set are learning collaboratively in unprecedented ways. Examples include the following: Engaging conversations at an Edcamp A shared board on Pinterest highlighting resources and best practices A Twitter chat on an educational hot topic A grade-level team’s data meeting focused on student learning strategies Teacher-facilitated professional learning activities Online coursework with a high-quality learning community 

Peer coaching A book study with colleagues Professional learning communities (PLCs)

coaches may do the following:

Observe teachers in the classroom and offer specific, personalized feedback Facilitate professional learning activities Team teach lessons in an effort to model a particular skill Help teachers assess students’ learning needs and map out strategies for success in meeting these needs

“Teacher growth is closely related to pupil growth. Probably nothing within a school has more impact on students in terms of skills development, self-confidence, or classroom behavior than the personal and professional growth of their teachers.” —Roland Barth

When we shift our expectations for student learning, including the type of assignments in which we engage them and the ways in which they will demonstrate their learning, logic dictates that we must also shift our expectations for teacher learning.

Effective professional learning mirrors effective classroom instruction. It is structured yet flexible. It is teacher-focused yet a collaborative venture between each teacher and a building leader or leaders.

allows for a great deal of teacher choice and teacher voice within a system of professional learning expectations and mind-sets.

based on the needs of individual teachers and provides real-world, practical learning experiences that allow teachers to become better at what they do.

We live in a world in which learning—including teacher learning—can occur anytime and anywhere.

As educators ourselves, part of our personal and professional mission—regardless of the various roles in which we have served—has been to work in a way that will make our students’ tomorrow better than today. Transforming professional learning for our children’s teachers is a matter of urgency and a primary way we can fulfill this mission. Our kids—and their teachers—are worth and deserve the effort!

So the big challenge is how do we acknowledge all the learning individuals participate in and acknowledge this along with robust professional goals for learning?