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"Please, No More Professional Development! By Peter DeWitt on April 17, 2015 8:10 AM Today's guest blog is written by Kristine Fox (Ed.D), Senior Field Specialist/Research Associate at Quaglia Institute for Student Aspirations (QISA). She is a former teacher and administrator who has passion for teacher learning and student voice. Kris works directly with teachers and leaders across the country to help all learners reach their fullest potential. Peter DeWitt recently outlined why "faculty meetings are a waste of time." Furthering on his idea, most professional development opportunities don't offer optimal learning experiences and the rare teacher is sitting in her classroom thinking "I can't wait until my district's next PD day." When I inform a fellow educator that I am a PD provider, I can read her thoughts - boring, painful, waste of time, useless, irrelevant - one would think my job is equal to going to the dentist (sorry to my dentist friends). According to the Quaglia Institute and Teacher Voice and Aspirations International Center's National Teacher Voice Report only 54% percent of teachers agree "Meaningful staff development exists in my school." I can't imagine any other profession being satisfied with that number when it comes to employee learning and growth. What sense does it make for the science teacher to spend a day learning about upcoming English assessments? Or, for the veteran teacher to learn for the hundredth time how to use conceptual conflict as a hook. Why does education insist everyone attend the same type of training regardless of specialization, experience, or need? As a nod to the upcoming political campaigns and the inevitable introduction of plans with lots of points, here is my 5 Point Plan for revamping professional development. 5 Point Plan Point I - Change the Term: Semantics Matter We cannot reclaim the term Professional Development for teachers. It has a long, baggage-laden history of conformity that does not

"Change is the one constant that we will always have in our world and if we do not grow and learn to embrace it, then we will become irrelevant."

"Classic literature can be exciting. You can teach classic literature like a pro with today's insight from Starr Sackstein. What do Rodney Dangerfield, Alfred Hitchcock, and Harry Potter have to do with teaching students about classical literature? You'll have to listen to find out. (I can't believe all of them came up in one episode!) This wide-ranging conversation hits at the heart of teaching literature. Just because a piece was written hundreds of years ago doesn't mean that it be irrelevant to the students who read the text."

5 great slides about technology, learning and change sums up succintly many advantages and issues in the great threat/opportunity posed by recents developments in education

"As with many schools in the United States, the shop program at Analy High School in Sebastopol, California, had become largely irrelevant. The main shop room had become little more than a glorified storage room. The school's priorities were firmly focused on college readiness and success at standardized tests, and vocational programs had taken a backseat. Sebastopol is also the home of Make magazine, one of the leading voices of the maker movement, a community of inventors and do-it-yourselfers that has blossomed on YouTube and shows up in the tens and sometimes hundreds of thousands at Maker Faires all over the world. Make proposed that a group of students from Analy come to their offices to explore the possibilities involved in creating things with 3-D printers, computer-aided design, and more. The program was so popular that soon Make could no longer accommodate it in their offices, so they agreed to donate equipment to Analy if the school would ramp up their vocational program."

"Gone are the days when kids would get in trouble for passing notes in class. Today's youngsters are much more sophisticated, technologically speaking, than those who grew up in the days of flip phones and CD players - let alone those whose only access to a phone growing up was a spin-dial one. This means there's a lot more texting, tweeting, and Facebooking on smartphones in your average high school or college classroom than ever before. Does this also mean that kids today are way more distracted by the bombardment of information reaching them via their tablets and iPhones? A new study out of the National Communication Association wanted to find out whether increased smartphone and social media use in class impacted student learning - and what they found was that it had both negative and positive effects. In the study, researchers analyzed kids who were using phones in class to respond to text messages - both relevant and irrelevant to the class material. They measured the type of messages and the frequency of them, and found that students who were texting about the material actually scored higher on multiple choice tests about the subject than those who were texting about non-class related things."

"The Managing Complex Change model puts language to that which makes some schools successful while others struggle. The model looks at five components necessary to create a desired environment. These include vision, skills, incentives, resources, action plan. If any one piece is missing the model indicates results schools will experience including change, confusion, anxiety, gradual change, frustration, and a false start. When thinking of successful schools such as Science Leadership Academy, The MET, The Island School, The iSchool, you will find they have all those components in place. On the other hand, when I hear teachers lamenting about their school failures, the model brings clarity to the fact that one or more of these components are missing. Below is the chart that lays this out. Following the chart, I'll take a look at what each missing component might look like in a school environment. As you read, consider which, if any are components, are missing at your school. save image Lack of Vision = Confusion When I hear exasperated teachers spinning their wheels, working so hard to get ready for all the various mandates and requirements, but never feeling a sense of accomplishment, it is clear there is not a tangible school vision that has been communicated. In some cases this is because what is being imposed does or can not reconcile with what the school wanted for their vision. Skill Deficit = Anxiety My heart goes out to those with a skill deficit. They are required to implement a curriculum they are not trained in using or being evaluated via measures with which they are not familiar. Or…they are put into a position they were not trained for or prepared to embrace. Social media provides a great medium for helping these teachers get up to speed, but when the outreach occurs, the anxiety is abundantly clear. Lack of Incentives = Gradual Change It is not unusual for innovative educators to feel like and be perceived as misfits. Islands onto their own

Every September millions of children begin the greatest adventure of their lives... Gr8 video

Educators sharing on Twitter is what makes it such a rich environment for teachers!

"Editor's note: This guest post from Chris Casal started as a comment on "Filtering social media in schools because it's a 'distraction'" which appeared on Scott McCleod's Dangerously Irrelevant blog. Social media is no different than pencil and paper. I doodled a lot in the margins of my physics book. It wasn't Twitter and Facebook that made me doodle but I doodled nonetheless. Social media can serve as the new platform for distraction but not a new cause for it. Doodles, passing notes, sleeping in class, all of the "analog" forms of distraction, have just morphed into branded platforms. The difference? Sleeping in class never led to anything. On the other hand, connecting & engaging on social media might. The doodler who grew up to be a graphic designer may have been distracted in class but is now earning a living born out of that distraction. Maybe the students tweeting in class will develop the next great media platform."

"omputational thinking is one of the core objectives that runs through the computing program of study in England from Key Stage 1 to Key Stage 4. Before computers can be used to solve a problem, computational thinking refers to understanding the problem itself and the ways in which it could be resolved. Software engineers and computer scientists for example, routinely engage in computational thinking. As a higher order thinking skill, computational thinking has applications both across and beyond the school curriculum. There are four key techniques to computational thinking: Abstraction - focusing on the important information only, ignoring irrelevant details Algorithms - developing a step-by-step solution to the problem Decomposition - breaking down the problem into smaller, more manageable parts Logic - looking for similarities among and within problems Learning to program is one of the best ways to develop computational thinking, as it uses each one of these techniques. My intention here is to show an example of a lesson in which computational thinking is taught at Key Stage 1 (5 to 7 years) through programming. I took the lesson plan (attached above) from The Barefoot Computing Project and I taught it to my 1st grade class last week.  It required the children to work in pairs to create step-by-step instructions through pictures.  The pairs then swapped each other's instructions, which they used to draw the 'crazy character' that the other child had in mind."

"Obviously a lot can change in 15 years. We all know this, but these images put that reality into perspective for me. It makes me wonder about things. It make me ask myself, "If that's what was on the movie of the summer, what was in our classrooms? How much has changed with technology? What about in our classrooms?" Why innovate? Here's my worry: Schools that don't innovate are going to look like this, and it likely won't take 15 years to happen. In all likelihood, it's probably happening more places than we'd like to admit right now. If we don't change, we're going to end up looking like that picture appears to us now-irrelevant, a relic of the past. For some (maybe even many) what we were doing now will be nearly unrecognizable in the not so distant future. In hindsight, some of what we understood as best practice not too long ago seems that way. We can't control the fact that our schools will continue to grow, but if we don't start getting some movement now and gaining momentum today, we're going to end up so big and so settled in that our own inertia will keep us from moving forward. With each day that passes without innovation, we only make it harder to make change happen in the future."

"You just cannot ignore the fact that when you think about searching online for your assignments and projects, the first name that comes to your mind is Google. However, when it comes to academic research, Google search engine does not serve the purpose as it does in most cases. Its search results are not perfect some times. This doesn't mean that it is the end of the world for students trying to collect academic data online. Apart from Google, there are a number of search engines that are especially designed for the purpose of academic research. They can help you get your hands on relevant information without going through irrelevant or low-quality pages. Given below is a list of some of the best academic search engines that will help you get the research material you want quickly and easily, and without compromising on quality."