Tim Wilson Blog ePortfolio

In reading Ronald Barth's article The Culture Builder I had a question I am wondering about.  Barth argues that the most important goal that we should have for our graduates "is some evidence that that this youngster is becoming or has become an independent learner." And that more so is that each of us in our community are independent lifelong learners.  My question is then, does it matter what our teachers are choosing as their continued professional development or is it enough that they are simply continuing their learning? To me it seems that I would be as much better an educator for choosing to learn a musical instrument or a foreign language as I would be taking mastery classes on say differentiation.  Some of the teachers would still choose to focus on differentiation or assessment.  What if the professional development goal for each of your teachers was to learn something new and present their growth at the end of the term, given the one hour a week (?) ...

I've just finished reading How to Innovate: The Essential Guide for Fearless School Leaders  and I am reminded of the statement that came up at the Innovate 2015 conference at The Graded School here in São Paulo that I wrote about earlier.  In the panel disscussion on the first evening  Denis Russo Burgierman  Editor-in-Chief of  Superinteressante , Brazil's leading monthly magazine, made the point that innovation is a process.  It doesn't just happen as a good idea pops into your head and away you go.   From the reading I see that this is very true.  The movement that happens due to the innovative idea happens when structures are put into place to allow for and encourage the following through with.  I've worked with many teachers and admin who have innovative ideas but no culture within which to flourish.  This is probably the most difficult portion of becoming an innovative school.  The process and suggested exercises that Brown ...

In reading "How to Innovate: The essential guide for fearless school leaders" I had an idea when reading the chapter on Rethinking Your Space and this line in particular: "Your vision, in addition to the constraints of realities of your physical spaces, can lead you to develop innovative solutions later in the school design process." What if I started a collaborative blog or Google Doc with all of my friends from the around the world in their different schools and asked them to contribute to different categories of best practices, scheduling, use of space, curriculum... to create the visionary school that I know we all have been working towards (or complaining about how our school is not there). What if we gave these plans to an architect still in University as their final project?  We would be providing the student with a real world opportunity to be designing for and the strong possibility of the project being built.