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The study identified these five global trends in professional learning

Learning is integrated

A 2013 Australian study conducted by the government-funded Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership and the nonprofit Innovation Unit examined 50 high-performing corporations, educational institutions, and nonprofit organizations from around the globe to identify common features of professional learning experiences.

Learning is design-led

Learning is market-led

Learning is open

These finding suggest that education professionals should have an individual learning plan and access to a combination of collaborative and online learning experiences, all of which need to be reinforced by regular embedded feedback and assessment mechanisms.

 Our ability to ensure that professional learning is highly relevant and personalized, incentivized, and largely self-directed for all teachers will be paramount to the success of our education institutions.

ating Essential Questions (07:01) Coming up with an essential question (also called a guiding or driving question) is one of the first key steps in designing a project. For a fun tool to help craft effective driving questions, check out BIE's "tubric."

BIE's Project Planner Tutorial (02:02) BIE offers a powerul and simple online tool, the Project Planner, for organizing your ideas while putting together a project. You must sign up for a free account, but you can save and print your work to your profile.

Tips For Building Projects (06:17) The audio is a little low on this teacher-produced screen-capture video, but it does a great job outlining the basics things you should be thinking about in your initial project planning stages.

Think Forward: Assessment (07:26) Assessment for project-based learning requires a more comprehensive approach. The poor audio quality is worth it, to hear real teachers describe exactly how they assess for learning throughout a project. From Manor New Tech High School's Think Forward PBL Institute.

roblem-Based Learning for the 21st Century Classroom (05:22) This nice overview from ASCD goes into some of the obstacles to project-based learning, and then shows teachers sharing strategies for addressing those challenges.

cheduling for Project-Based Learning (05:35) Three high school teachers talk about how they re-structured their day to accommodate integrated PBL. Not everyone has the flexibility shown here, but it's fascinating to see how these teachers broke it down.

How PBLU Works (01:15) Hungry for more lessons on PBL? PBLU is an incredible resource offered by BIE. See how you can access two-week training courses and Common-Core-aligned projects that you can modify and customize.

Parents around the dinner table and teachers in the classroom should ask, ‘Who had a fabulous struggle today?

how to model a growth mindset amongst students and one of her key principles is encouraging teachers to see themselves as learners, and, just like students are all capable of learning and improving, so too are teachers

A second principle requires that schools provide opportunities for teachers to try new things and make mistakes.

what will teachers and the school learn as part of the process, rather than whether the new idea is going to be a success or a failure.

inked to it, and equally vital, is providing a chance for teachers to reflect upon their new ideas and consider what they learned from the process. Ideally, this reflection should focus less on whether the idea was a success or a failure, but rather on what the teacher learnt from the process.

The Museum Box site allows you to build  an argument or description of an event, person or historical period by placing items in a virtual box. Students can display anything from a text file to a movie. My students will be using this platform to argue their thesis, rather than writing a traditional essay.

My students have started designing our curriculum units. Seriously. While transitioning to our current unit, we discussed the possibilities as a class.

Before the technology/constructivist shift in my classsroom, I would have taught all of this quite traditionally. We’d read books, answer questions, and then address those questions in class. I’d lecture a lot, with supplemental grammar lessons here and there, and I’d include some type of artistic project to achieve viewing and representing objectives. The whole design would have been extremely teacher centered. And at the end of it all, I’d hope they learned something about writing and thinking. Instead, inquiry and technology are a natural part of our English classes.

Habits are nearly invisible. You engage in them without realizing they are there. And you can look at another organization that is succeeding and not notice the real differences between how that outstanding organization behaves and how your organization behaves. When looking at outstanding organizations, you may miss the important trees and just see the forest.

First, personalizing professional development pathways with modules and badges reflect an individual teacher’s learning needs.

teachers that were absent), I was spending more time working at night (as I had to catch up on stuff I

fecting me) were causing more work and taking its toll on me.

gaging in very negative conversations, and external changes that were beyond my control (but

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This year, our district has made a commitment to improving adult wellness and our school had a team

nd and see so many positives at our school.

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ave also challenged staff to show more gratitude not only to each other but also be more thankful for what we have at work and at home. We continue to start every staff meeting with WWW (What Went Well) and encourage each other to share s

ed before like this. We have started a “gratitude wall” in the staff room for staff to acknowledge the positives they see around the school (this is in the early stages). Some staff have starte

A teacher used a gratitude exercise with her grade 4/5 students and surround their classroom door with things they are thankful for.

e with her grade 3 students and they then wrote personal thank you notes to classmates and staff.

We think like a designer, not like a teacher, when we say: the teacher is just one element in the design. The choice of task, pedagogy, groupings, flow of work, resources, furniture, light, noise level, role of people and text – all of these design elements are arguably as important as the teacher.

What are those conditions, in a nutshell? I would highlight the following: Thought-provoking intellectual challenges (inquiries, questions, problems) The challenge has been designed to optimize self-sustaining and productive work by learners, related to a clear and intellectually worthy goal The learners have become reasonably competent in classroom routines that foster productive goal-focused work The challenge cannot be accomplished by a worksheet, checklist or recipe. It requires strategic use of knowledge and skill, creative problem-solving, and critical thinking; and the eliciting of multiple perspectives on how to address the challenge and gauge progress. There is an unambiguous product or performance goal (even if there is ambiguity about how to achieve the goal), supported by clear criteria and standards, thus permitting ongoing student self-assessment and self-adjustment. There is enough feedback within the challenge (and resources) that the work can be maximally self-sustaining and productive. The teacher is therefore freed up to coach for a significant amount of time, permitting personalized feedback and guidance (as well as just-in-time mini-lessons). This coaching role also permits the teacher to determine what is and isn’t working in the challenge, and thus enables the teacher to quickly change gears if the desired learning is not occurring or the process is not working.

In other words, it is a poor design for learning that puts all the burden of teaching and processing on the teacher. Then, the teacher can neither coach nor understand what is going on in the minds of learners. Worse, endless teaching, no matter how expert, soon becomes passive and without much meaning to learners who must wait days, sometimes weeks, to get meaningful chances to interact with the content, to try out their ideas on others, and to get the feedback they need.

Group-worthy tasks – Focus on central concepts or big ideas that require active meaning-making The challenge itself has ambiguity or limited scaffold and prompting so that student meaning-making and different inferences about the task and how to address it will emerge. Are best accomplished by ensuring that multiple perspectives are found tried out in addressing the task. This not only rewards creative and non-formulaic thought but undercuts the likelihood that one strong student can do all the key work. Provide multiple ways of being competent in the task work and the task process Can only be done well by a group, but are designed to foster both individual and group autonomy. (The teacher’s role as teacher and direction-giver should be minimized to near zero). Demand both individual and group accountability Have clear evaluation criteria