When delivering face-to-face professional development, what happens after the inservice day is over or after the guest presenter leaves? Right now school and district leaders are planning professional development that will take place in the upcoming weeks as part of our back-to-school routine, but what...

It’s that time of the year again! As we get ready for the start of the school year, professional development leaders everywhere - whether leading PD for a school, district, region, or state - are making yearlong professional development plans in hopes that by improving...

500+ teachers watched and voted online. Four teacher "sharks" circled the tank with tough questions about impact, implementation, innovation, and results. And...

The recent TNTP report, The Mirage, revealed a secret that I’ve long avoided admitting out loud – that most teacher professional development (PD) efforts do not appear to have a measurable benefit to teacher or student learning. I suspected this to be the case five years ago when...

Great things are happening in education, but too frequently success occurs in pockets. There is a path to scaling effective innovations, but beware of falling for misconceptions that lead us down side roads of disappointment and blame. Scaling innovation is a process that recognizes teachers...

Embedded assessment undergirds each of the five levels of blended learning (as illustrated below). "Embedded" means that the assessment is part of the learning experience, not a separate activity. In this age of accountability, there is an imminent danger of over-assessment, spending so much time...

What do we really want students to be able to do with technology? Sometimes blended learning or the integration of specific tools is held up as the goal when really they are the means to achieving a higher purpose: high-quality, optimal learning experiences for each...

In previous articles, I discussed the need for a different type of professional development for educators. This entry describes more specific, actionable ideas for immediately enhancing your school learning community’s professional development experiences. Focus professional collaboration time Most forward-thinking schools build into their schedule time for teachers in...

Recapping Part I – Developing an MVP: We identified our problem, crafted a hypothesis, and used lessoncasts as the communication vehicle to define the minimum viable practice. Part II – What to Build: We developed a two-week cycle to facilitate collaborative planning, reflection, iteration, and refinement. Part III -...

Here’s a quick recap of parts I and II… In applying lean methodology to guide the implementation of our reading strategies initiative, we defined our problem, crafted a hypothesis, and used lessoncasts as the communication vehicle to define the minimum viable practice (the essential elements required for effectively implementing the identified teaching practice)....