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"The best long-term strategy I can see for continuously getting better is for the process of improving to be fun. If I want to get better at teaching, it's got to be fun for me to do so, because that's the only way for me to stare down the abyss of my current craptitude and the probability of my own immediate failure. That's going to look different for different people, because we've all got different tastes. I enjoy planning lessons, so I spend a lot of time on that. You like giving feedback, so you spend your time on that and you get great at that. I hate it, so I suck at feedback and am decent at curriculum." Agree completely with this statement. I think this holds true for our students too. The best long term strategy for improvement in school is that kids needs to have fun in the process.

"So, what's a leader and the school to do? How do we create "checks" to serve as guideposts toward success?  One potential way may be a novel idea in education.  Use teachers and educators that have experienced success in building instructional capacity to be "scouts" for other teachers and schools that are building capacity in a meaningful way.  What I mean by 'scouts' is that these individuals would be charged with working next to teachers and school leaders to develop and refine instructional capacity, but when "it" shows itself in the form of meaningful and intentional classroom instruction or PLCs that really improve student performance, the 'scouts' chronicle this story.  The 'scouts' dual responsibility is to not only share in the building of the capacity, but to also spread the good news when it's been accomplished. In doing so, the profession of teaching and learning, can begin to articulate and share in these guideposts toward meaningful capacity.  What's missing in this dynamic are the 'scouts' that are embedded in several classrooms, schools and districts simultaneously and use this experience to improve the work simultaneously.  What's crucial about this approach is that it isn't 'helicoptered in' and is never something done 'to' teachers.  The work of the 'scout' is to find, develop, and refine great teaching and learning and use this as a way to scale up the work so that more and more students can have access to highly effective teaching and learning. " This article, specifically this annotated section, really spoke to me and made me think about what the two main initiatives of our department - Henrico 21 and Reflective Friends, should look like. It shouldn't be something that is "helicoptered in" or "done to teachers," but instead should be about developing, refining, promoting, and sharing good teaching.

If any of these questions seem interesting, you may want to watch listen to the interview.  It reminded me of the Student-led TED Talks I saw at GAHS this spring. * What makes for a good TED talk? * Do you have an example of a TEDster who greatly improved their talk? * What makes for a really bad TED talk? * How do you deal with someone who does not think they need to improve? * Do you think there is a real value to the short-form, "TED Style" talk?

"InterTwinkles is a platform built from the ground up to help small democratic groups to do process online. It provides structure to improve the efficiency of specific communication tasks like brainstorming and proposals. "

This is a list of teachers, coaches, and educators involved in the Math Twitter Blogosphere. The MTBOS is an extremely active and rich community of individuals looking to improve and refine their own math instruction. This document contains an excellent collection of blogs and twitter handles worth sharing with your math teachers.

This is a pretty cool app that my PE teachers want to buy. It allows the user to be John Madden and analyze their athletes improvements. It even allows editing and voice overs.

Interesting article that I'm going to share with my English teachers. If they are interested, I'm going to look for/recommend similar functioning tools that they could use with their students. "Instructors at the New Jersey Institute of Technology have been using a program called E-Rater in this fashion since 2009, and they've observed a striking change in student behavior as a result. Andrew Klobucar, associate professor of humanities at NJIT, notes that students almost universally resist going back over material they've written. But, Klobucar told Inside Higher Ed reporter Scott Jaschik, his students are willing to revise their essays, even multiple times, when their work is being reviewed by a computer and not by a human teacher. They end up writing nearly three times as many words in the course of revising as students who are not offered the services of E-Rater, and the quality of their writing improves as a result. Crucially, says Klobucar, students who feel that handing in successive drafts to an instructor wielding a red pen is "corrective, even punitive" do not seem to feel rebuked by similar feedback from a computer."

Writing Next - effective strategies to improve writing of adolescents in middle and high schools