Rowland Foundation

The Institute on Thailand and its Cultures is a study abroad program for Vermont educators and teachers in Thailand. The program, which includes three instate planning session and three weeks overseas, provides participants with the opportunity to study various aspects of Thai culture such as economic development, education, and women's social status, and minority cultures in Thailand.

In my humble opinion, the best way to think out of the box is to actually get out of the box. What a better way to do that than something like this?

"What capacity do we need as leaders to demonstrate authenticity and build credibility and trust? One of the most critical is our ability and willingness to engage in challenging, sensitive - in a word, courageous - conversations."

"If we are leading for improvement, we are inevitably leading for change and can expect some degree of discomfort, disagreement or resistance along the way - whether on the level of the individual, or the organization."

"Leadership often involves challenging people to live up to their words, to close the gap between their espoused values and their actual behaviour. It may mean pointing out the elephant sitting on the table at a meeting - the unspoken issue that everyone sees but no one wants to mention."

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.

Great resource. Teachers at Harwood Union Middle High School applied for a Learning & Leadership Grant to explore iPad apps in a fairly informal PLC-type setting and received $5,000 to support their work. It helps that the application for the grant was fairly easy to complete.

"It takes people with big ideas - and smart ways to implement them - to make any progress. And that's the point of the Big Ideas Fest, held December 4-7 in Half Moon Bay, Calif., a gathering of leaders and innovators who will share their thoughts and tactics with educators and all those interested in education innovation."

"When you issue an open invitation and gather together a large group of self-nominated passionate stakeholders from a broad cross-section across a system or organization and ask them to vision your shared ideal future, anything can happen."

16 crucial reasons why students need teachers

Long-term transformational change has four primary aspects: scale (the change affects all or most of the school), magnitude (the degree to which it challenges the status quo), duration (the change is incremental at first and then moves to exponential), and strategic importance (how ready the culture is for adapting to change). Yet schools will only see significant change when the change occurs first at the level of the individual educational leader- be that principal, superintendent, or teacher. Real change, transformational change happens when there is personal ownership of the new technologies and concepts. Today's new economy is all about human capital, which starts with the educators in a school and then extends outward to all members of the school community.

Principles for Managing Change 1. People before Things (or test scores) 2. Start at the Top 3. Everyone is a Player in the Change Game 4. Garner Buy-in 5. Can't Give Away What You Do Not Own 6. Communicate and Often 7. Know Your Culture and Predict Possible Impact 8. Expect the Unexpected 9. As the Individual Grows so Will the Collective Wisdom of the Community

An inspiring look at NH's work toward transformation and policy change.

One of the four stated goals is to "Help Higher Ed partner with K-12 schools." What ways can Vermont high schools work with our state colleges? For me, I'd like to see the opportunity for high school students to take all of their courses through CCV or other state schools their senior year.

PLCs, Common Core, Next Gen and Problem Based Instruction and Paula Denton.

"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."