Some of you may remember that I have hosted summer PD reading in the past. I hope to get another summer PD reading book club off the ground this summer. I have narrowed the selections down to three choices: Falling in Love with Close Reading: Lessons for Analyzing Texts””and Life by Christopher Lehman and Kate Roberts:…
I am asked often enough for recommendations of this sort of thing that I thought I’d share. Understanding by Design by Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe was the first truly useful and completely life-changing professional development book I read. I utterly altered the way I taught after reading it. It seems obvious to think about larger…
You have probably heard the joke about professional development: “Dear Lord, please let me die at a staff development workshop. The difference between being alive and being dead is so indiscernible that I probably won’t even notice I’ve died.” In fact, my dear former colleague Barbara Rosenblit at the Weber School in Atlanta recently quoted…
In the final chapter of An Ethic of Excellence, Ron Berger addresses the need to support teachers. This chapter in particular is one I think administrators should read. I wish those in business and educational bureaucracy would read it and let it sink it and really reflect on it as well. Berger points out that…
The third chapter of An Ethic of Excellence is a meaty one. After you’ve tackled school culture (chapter 2), this chapter asks you to think about the work. Don’t focus on students’ self-esteem before expecting them to do good work. The praise is not genuine, and students know it. Instead, encourage them to produce quality…
The second chapter of Ron Berger’s An Ethic of Excellence discusses the importance of school culture in student learning. If you have ever worked in a school with a negative school culture, you will find yourself nodding as you read and highlighting several sentences in every paragraph. Reading this chapter, I reflected on the school…
The message of the first chapter of Ron Berger’s book An Ethic of Excellence: Building a Culture of Craftsmanship with Students is the importance of student models. I think a lot of educators are afraid to use models because they want student ideas to be original, and they are afraid students will simply copy the…
What PD reading are you doing this summer? I’m reading the following three books: An Ethic of Excellence: Building a Culture of Craftsmanship with Students, by Ron Berger. This book is an all-faculty read. Ron Berger will be visiting our school to do some professional development at the beginning of the school year. Here is…
I participated in a Teq webinar on QR codes today. I thought I was fairly well versed in QR codes and their uses, but I learned a couple of interesting things today that I thought I’d share. First of all, I hadn’t played much with QR Stuff. I think I sometimes become set in my…
Bethany Smith asked a great question on Twitter this morning: I don’t remember learning much about technology integration when I was a preservice teacher, but then that was 1996-1997. We thought we were advanced for using email to communicate with each other. I’m not sure what has changed in the intervening years, if much of…
