Grants to individuals fund participation in high-quality professional development experiences, such as summer institutes or action research; Grants to groups fund collegial study, including study groups, action research, lesson study, or mentoring experiences for faculty or staff new to an assignment.

Could be a nice additional source of funding to support existing projects.

"Anybody can be creative ... You just have to learn how."

"The best way to unleash creativity ... is to give students an "experience," or in d.school speak, a design challenge. Under his teaching model, however, students aren't just handed a problem to solve-they must define the problem themselves through research and direct observation."

"...it is behavioral change that enables students to gain innovation confidence, something he believes is as important as gaining literacy skills. "For me this is a mindset," he says. "It's a way of thinking that you can use in every part of your life."

"In order to 'think different,' you have to act different." - Ask yourself...when was the last time you heard of a new initiative in a school and said this? "Wow! That's truly innovative and is a completely unique approach to education!" - Where is the innovation and innovators in our schools? How do we foster innovation in education? How do we find and support innovators?

Today's students adjust to rapid technological and social changes, navigate vast flows of information and learn to work collaboratively with diverse individuals and cultures in a global economy. Discover cognitive tools and teaching techniques to help them cultivate the skills and abilities required to succeed in the new millennium. - November 18, 2011 - November 20, 2011 at the Westin Boston Waterfront Hotel in Boston, MA

"...the absence of grades is a necessary ...(condition for)... promoting deep thinking and a desire to engage in it. It's worth lingering variety of efforts to sell us formulas to improve our grading techniques, none of which address the problems of grading, per se." - "If you have one eye on how close you are to achieving your goal, that leaves only one eye for your task."

"On August 4-6, 2010 in Boston (MA), 150 invited education leaders convened at the SIIA-ASCD CCSSO Symposium on [Re]Design for Personalized Learning. They gathered under the common belief that today's education system is inadequate to meet the needs of tomorrow, and focused on identifying changes essential to transform learning for each student. Following are the Symposium participants' key findings about how to redesign our current education model to a student-centered, customized learning model that will better engage, motivate, and prepare our students to be career and college ready."

What if we applied the principles of Formative Assessments to the district level rather than just in classroom practices? "...like unemployment statistics. Scores on standardized tests ... usually arrive too late to help individual children or schools that are struggling." "Leading indicators - indicators that provide early signals of progress toward academic achievement - enable education leaders ... to make more strategic and less reactive decisions about services and supports to improve student learning."

"... innovation ... goes beyond telling people in one place to replicate someone else's reported success. It means letting the people in the schools try things they believe will work for their students." Other Systems Are Innovating, Dramatically - Traditional School Suppresses Innovation - To Succeed We Will Have To Innovate with School - How Might Innovative Schools Be Different? - 'Innovation' Is a Strategy for Systemic Reform - We Cannot Afford the Risk of Failing to Innovate -

What if we applied the psychology of what makes technology attractive to students...to our practices in the classroom? Using this idea, instead of using more technology in the classroom, why not design the traditional human / face-to-face classroom experience to be more like what makes technology so engrossing to modern students? Do these principles sound familiar... Deliver information in bite sized chunks, Create mental models, Use short stories to help process information, Learning happens and is remembered through repetition, People are motivated by Progress and Mastery, Sustained attention lasts 10 minutes, and the use of Progressive Disclosure. Progressive Disclosure an interaction design technique often used in human computer interaction to help maintain the focus of a user's attention by reducing clutter, confusion, and cognitive workload. This improves usability by presenting only the minimum data required for the task at hand. Here are 100 little articles that could have big implications in the classroom.

Twelve youth-adult teams from Vermont's "Youth and Adults Transforming Schools Together" initiative (YATST) are excited to once again "Be the Buzz" at this second annual conference. Two rounds of "learningshops" will follow for engaging activities and deep discussions focusing on 1) why schools need to transform, 2) how schools might engage youth in the process of transformation, and 3) what transformed schools might look and sound like.

Find interventions (educational programs, practices, or policies) that address your school or district's needs and summarize their evidence of effectiveness. Only interventions with research evidence that meets WWC standards are included in the summary results.

"...draws on interviews and site visits with innovators and the limited literature that has been developed on the topic of competency-based approaches. The first section introduces a working definition for competency-based pathways that hopefully will be the beginning of creating consensus on the characteristics of a high-quality approach to guide policy. The second section explores the driving forces behind competency-based innovations and implementation issues. The last section highlights a number of challenges facing states and districts as they explore competency-based approaches."

"The reality is that a quarter of all students currently enrolled at colleges and universities are taking at least one course online, and one-in-ten is enrolled in a degree program that is delivered entirely online." So, the question is "How are we as educators in Vermont preparing our students to be successful in college if we are not exposing them to online and/or blended learning experiences in high school?"

"Chance favors the connected mind." Why the Rowland Foundation Group Diigo can be the keystone to school change in Vermont. How do we create a system where we can allow our collective "hunches" to come together to form something bigger than the sum of their parts?

Today ask yourself... 1. What am I teaching and to whom? 2. Why am I teaching it? 3. How am I teaching it? 4. Why am I teaching it that way? 5. What evidence will I collect to show my kids are getting it? 6. How will my students know they are getting it?

"...funding to support efforts in the school community to 'make a difference' through the collaboration and involvement of schools and local communities."

"...the day is growing nearer when quality higher education confronts the technological disruptions that have already upended the music and book industries, humbled enterprises from Kodak to the Postal Service (not to mention the newspaper business), and helped destabilize despots across the Middle East." Ten years ago who would have thought that these institutions would be "threatened" by computers? Are schools evolving rapidly enough to meet the challenge?

"If your school, and your school day, is not about students collaborating, connecting, and building knowledge and understandings together, why would anyone come?"

"In isolation neither the research nor the teacher seems to have much of a chance for sustained discovery, growth, and positive change." (p. 39) "Faculty members are changing how they teach and making informed choices when it comes to teaching strategies. They feel empowered and are encouraged to take risks, are fostering collaborations in their teaching and are talking about teaching. For some, the change in how they teach has been radical. For others, the change has been small but still noticeable." (p. 42) And to what do the conveners attribute this success? "We saw that we are learners together in this learning community and we are our own best resource: Our collective knowledge is an invaluable asset." (p. 43) Retrieved from: http://www.cs.kent.edu/~volkert/science-learning/files/sirum-madigan.pdf

As educators do we model those "best practices" for learning which we expect from our students? How do we... "Engage ... in active learning experiences; Set high, meaningful expectations; Provide, receive, and use regular, timely, and specific feedback; Become aware of values, beliefs, preconceptions; unlearn if necessary; Recognize and stretch ... styles and developmental levels; Seek and present real-world applications; Understand and value criteria and methods for (our own) assessment; Create opportunities for (peer to peer) interactions; ...; Promote (peer) involvement through engaged time and quality effort" Retrieved from: http://pandora.cii.wwu.edu/cii/resources/outcomes/best_practices.asp

"...Farm-Based Education Conference. The goal of the conference is to provide networking opportunities and support to the farm-based education community." There is a "scholarship" offered through the VT Dept. of Agriculture to attend the conference. Conference Scholarship