Learning to Change

Successful initial implementation and ongoing maintenance of process improvements requires overcoming the resistance to change. Green Belts are change agents who need to recognize, understand and interpret resistance to change and develop skills to manage it effectively. Managing change resistance is often covered in training, yet a primary learning issue facing most organizations is the lack of engagement and motivation in lecture-based training. By using simulations, exercises or games, practitioners can enliven their learning environments and improve knowledge retention, skills and applications. This will keep the audience members interacting with each other and with the content.

The game really can "change" your classroom by actively involving students in exploring the effects of innovation in the past and on the future.

Online, what's personal is increasingly becoming what's professional, and vice versa. Locking down the bits streaming in from Facebook and other social networks may seem like a good idea at the time, but it's likely shutting down one of your employees' most powerful networking tools. We're in a knowledge economy, people. And people and relationships and who knows what and who knows whom are an integral element of the knowledge economy value chain. And you want to shut that down? Really? Seriously?

Mike Arrington, the TechCrunch uber-blogger, spoke for many when he wrote recently: "Voicemail is dead. Please tell everyone so they'll stop using it."

Gathering data. You do it all the time. With it, you've gained an expert understanding of how your school operates. But have you also capitalized on it to improve your students' learning? Data Retreats, two-day leadership institutes, help you focus on the important data you've gathered and create the strategies you want to help improve your school. A Data Retreat guides you through the discovery and analysis of four types of school data: Student achievement Demographic Program Perception

An important step in the school improvement process is to examine local data in order to determine future goals. The Cooperative Educational Service Agencies (CESAs) have developed a format for conducting data retreats. Contact your local CESA for more information. The following 8 steps are exerpted from the CESA 7 Data Retreat Participant's Guide.

Professional Learning Communities at Work Best Practices for Enhancing Student Achievement Professional Learning Communities at Work Best Practices for Enhancing Student Achievement by Richard DuFour & Robert Eaker

The Effective Professional Learning Communities project is a study of effective professional learning communities in schools and of how they are created and sustained. It is an exciting, new, collaborative venture between the Universities of Bristol and Bath and the Institute of Education, University of London, which is funded by the Department for Education and Skills (DfES), General Teaching Council for England (GTC) and the National College for School Leadership (NCSL)

The term professional learning community has become quite commonplace in education circles. The term describes a collegial group who are united in their commitment to an outcome. In the case of education, the commitment would be to student learning. The community engages in a variety of activities including sharing a vision, working and learning collaboratively, visiting and observing other classrooms, and participating in shared decision making. The benefits of professional learning community to educators and students include reduced isolation of teachers, better informed and committed teachers, and academic gains for students. Shirley Hord of the Southwest Educational Development Laboratory says, that as an organizational arrangement, the professional learning community is seen as a powerful staff-development approach and a potent strategy for school change and improvement.

A must read for anyone interested in education today.

If you haven't implemented a mobile device policy, now is the time to start, according to an Info-Tech Research Group analyst. With established devices such as RIM's BlackBerry already in rotation at most companies, and new handhelds like the Apple iPhone and Samsung Instinct on the way, IT departments must ensure employees using mobile devices are doing so in a safe and secure manner. Mark Tauschek, senior research analyst at the Canada-based Info-Tech, said a well balanced acceptable use policy - with a strong focus on mobile device security - is essential to every major organization.

The biggest political story of 2008 is getting little coverage. It involves the collapse of assumptions that have dominated our economic debate for three decades. Since the Reagan years, free-market clichés have passed for sophisticated economic analysis. But in the current crisis, these ideas are falling, one by one, as even conservatives recognize that capitalism is ailing. You know the talking points: Regulation is the problem and deregulation is the solution. The distribution of income and wealth doesn't matter. Providing incentives for the investors of capital to "grow the pie" is the only policy that counts. Free trade produces well-distributed economic growth, and any dissent from this orthodoxy is "protectionism."

For decades, the way the TV networks and advertisers worked together was simple. A lot of people watched TV, the Nielsen company estimated just how many, and the advertisers paid for airtime based on the Nielsen ratings. Now, the TV industry is changing and Nielsen is trying to keep up.">@import "/templates/css/mainstyles.css";@import "/templates/css/bucket_alt.css";@import "/templates/css/stories.css";@import "/templates/css/print_stories.css"; metatext/html; charset=iso-8859-1

NCLB provides strong incentives to choose education policies and programs that work. Yet traditional educational research has rarely been designed with the goal of providing scientific evidence of "what works," and relatively few educational researchers have been trained in how to do that kind of rigorous quantitatively sound research. WCER's Interdisciplinary Training Program (ITP) in the Education Sciences is preparing a new generation of scholars who can provide solid evidence of "what works" in education.