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What my school is learning, and what current research suggests, is that teachers don’t improve by listening to someone tell them how to do something newer or better in their classrooms. They learn by working together to address problems they themselves identify in their schools and classrooms. This type of staff development goes by many names, but I’ll use the term “collaborative PD.” The problems with old PD are so many, and the benefits of collaborative PD so great, that the days are surely numbered for the former. Yes, old-style professional development is doomed.

there’s a new emphasis on teaching critical thinking, problem solving and creativity.

“We give our teachers a lot of freedom in their work, much like academic professors,”

“This autonomy contributes to the popularity of the profession.… After that it’s easy for us when we have the right people.”

a little startup called Android.

Motorola hadn’t had a major success since the Razr—in 2004

failure would likely mean the end of Motorola, the company that invented the cell phone

Whether students work in cloud-based platforms or take pictures of analog notes, technology lets them save their work indefinitely. I once had a wonderful advisee. Every afternoon, we repeated this routine. Find his planner. Find his notebooks. Make sure that he could find his notes in said notebooks. Put the notebooks into his backpack. When we finally got this child a laptop, everything changed. He typed all of his notes in Google Docs so that he could access them from any device and from anywhere. Suddenly, everything was truly saved.

note taking is an activity where the note taker needs to process information and reframe, reorganize, and work with the data to make note taking useful.