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knew that our buildings needed to move towards places where students learned to experiment and imagine INSTEAD of remaining places where students spend their days listening and memorizing.

Go and ask any high schooler taking AP classes how much "designing and creating" they do before their final exams.  Chances are, you'll hear a WHOLE lot more about the "memorizing and cramming."

If you REALLY want risk-taking teachers who spend their days showing kids how to design and create, then start DEMANDING that your elected officials -- who are the real power players in conversations about what's happening in our classrooms -- rethink what we're holding schools accountable for. 

What I am learning about professional development is: 1. It must include differentiation for staff 2. It must include deep reflection

Reflection needs to be deep and involve analysis. You need to dig deep: this could be blogging, discussing with others. Reflection needs to be systemic and is an expected part of the process in order to be powerful. Then you will be ready to make conclusions and generate conclusions on the effectiveness of your strategy and its impact on student learning.

Why are principals spending time blogging when that time could be better devoted to doing other things in their schools?  Are administrators blogging because they find true value in the practice, or because they’re trying to make a name for themselves? Where do administrators find the time to do this?

I enjoy blogging about educational issues. It helps me reflect on my practice. If I read a book, a blog post, or a tweet, writing about the ideas shared helps me make connections with my own work and that of our students and teachers.

I maintain the staff blog to provide updates about school happenings and share links/ideas I find in my online reading. I’m trying to connect my teachers with those ideas and model how I use social media to enhance my practice.

However, one thing I have noticed when it comes to integrating information communication technologies (ICT), is that the teachers and the schools that really fly, the high performing schools...they don’t come to my PD. They don’t go to any PD. They understand that they, and their professional networks, are their own PD.

The problem with PD is that on the whole it treats teachers as ‘consumers’ of professional knowledge, and discourages teachers from thinking for themselves. The reality is that most of good practice with ICT is still to be developed. Teachers need to be ‘creators’ of professional knowledge.

Great teachers see themselves as ‘creators’ of professional knowledge. Through a continuous cycle of ‘planning, application, reflection’ great teachers develop improved ways to educate students, tailoring their teaching to the specific needs of the context within which they teach.

But we realized within the first day how much more important it was to just get them working on their individual projects. It’s ironic because as a teacher, we end up teaching the same thing separately to all the mini-groups, and we want to teach it at once; we naturally desire the simplicity of that. However, when a team gets stuck on something and can’t proceed because they are lacking a piece of knowledge, that is when the iron is hot to strike. It seems that that is really the most effective way to teach (even if as a teacher it takes five times as much work!), because, as usual, emotional motivation trumps rationality.

There will be more innovation—but it will not change the way the world works in the way electricity, internal-combustion engines, plumbing, petrochemicals and the telephone have. Mr Cowen is more willing to imagine big technological gains ahead, but he thinks there are no more low-hanging fruit. Turning terabytes of genomic knowledge into medical benefit is a lot harder than discovering and mass producing antibiotics.

But Pierre Azoulay of MIT and Benjamin Jones of Northwestern University find that, though there are more people in research, they are doing less good. T

One factor in this may be the “burden of knowledge”: as ideas accumulate it takes ever longer for new thinkers to catch up with the frontier of their scientific or technical speciality. Mr Jones says that, from 1985 to 1997 alone, the typical “age at first innovation” rose by about one year.