The Tempered Radical

What Do You Want From Me?

Blogger's Note: I read a John T. Spencer bit a few weeks back that touched a bunch of emotions.  That's led to a bit of unvarnished truth that I wanted to process here in a post that is decidedly light on the smiles and candycorn.  Hope that doesn't shake you. 

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One of the most painful moments in my teaching career happened several years back when I was working in a language arts classroom.

The results of our state's standardized tests had just come back and I was called into my assistant principal's office to review my scores.  "What are we going to do about this, Bill?" he said, passing a paper covered with red ink across the desk.  "You've got the lowest scores on the hallway again."

I wasn't mad at the principal.  In fact, I considered him a friend and he was only doing his job.  But in that moment, I was definitely defeated by a system that defined the value that I add in such a narrow way.

I lost it.  Literally started to cry in front of him.  I was embarrassed and brokenhearted all at the same time.  I felt like a failure and a fool all wrapped into one.

I was ashamed -- both of my results and my emotions:

Download: Slide_TheProblemwithShame

 

In that moment, I couldn't think rationally.  I couldn't remind myself that the end of grade exams given in our state only measured 2 out of 6 objectives in the curriculum.  I couldn't remind myself that my students excelled at untestable skills like engaging in collaborative dialogue or building new knowledge together.

I wasn't thinking about the kids who left my room inspired each year -- motivated to study new topics or to tackle new tasks or to try new things that they'd never considered trying before.  The power of those connections were forgotten; blurred by the stream of red ink that my state's legislators intended to use as an indicator of the sum total of the contributions that I make in the lives of my kids and my community.

I stormed out of the principal's office, grabbed my things and headed home.

On the way out the door, a parent chased me down in the parking lot.  "Mr. Ferriter.  MR. FERRITER.  Can I talk to you for a minute?" she said.

"I just wanted you to know how thankful I am for you.  My son loves you.  He comes home every day so excited about school -- and your lessons about life are sinking in.  He's proud of himself and he's determined and he told me that you talk about those things in class all the time.

"He means everything to me -- and sending him away for 8 hours a day is hard.  But knowing he's with you makes it easier.  I just thought you needed to know how grateful I am for you."

Her words mattered.  They were a reminder that I wasn't completely useless -- that some people really DO care about something other than end of grade test scores.

The entire experience has left me bitter and angry, though. I haven't let it go -- and I definitely haven't recovered.  Years later, I catch myself thinking back on that day.  

Most of the time, I wonder just what people want from me.  Am I supposed to inspire and encourage -- or am I supposed to grind a collection of random facts into twelve-year old minds in a march to the end of grade test?

Am I accomplished when my kids can spit back facts on low level multiple choice exams, or am I accomplished when my kids care about themselves and each other and their communities?  Can I make a difference even if I have the lowest test scores on the hallway?

And to be honest, my bitterness and anger only grows stronger in a Race to the Top world where even progressive politicians seem determined to use test scores to reward and punish teachers while simultaneously stripping away our resources and publicly celebrating their quest to destroy our profession.

Some days, fighting such a dysfunctional, confused system seems incredibly pointless, y'all.  Things aren't getting better.  They're far worse than they've ever been -- and I don't see any light at the end of the professional tunnel.

#whybother

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Related Radical Reads:

The Monster You've Created

My Work Has Been Gutted

Breaking Public Education to Pieces

The Handcuffs Holding Us Back [SLIDE]

In a recent bit over on his blog, my buddy Tony Baldasaro argued that the decisions schools make are often designed to support the system rather than to support students or to advance learning.

He writes:

"I’m trying hard to not be so cynical about the institutionalization of our public schools and I remind myself all the time of the amazing people that my kids get to learn from everyday, but when I get notifications of things such as that which I wrote above, I am reminded of how powerful the institutional machine really is."

In a lot of ways, Tony's right about the damage that "the institution" has done to education: The incredibly sad reality is that the principals and teachers working inside of our schools rarely have enough influence over "the system" to intentionally control much of anything that happens inside of our buildings anymore.

(click to enlarge)

Instead, we spend the vast majority of our professional time and energy doing little more than responding to the #edpolicy decisions that govern our work. 

Everything from the time that our students spend in class, to the content that must be covered in our curricula, to the way that we can spend our budgets is often explicitly defined by legislators.

To make matters worse, experimentation and innovation is literally crushed in high-stakes environments that tie our evaluations -- and our public reputations -- to the "results" we produce on low-level multiple choice exams that do little to encourage the kind of progressive thinking and instruction that REALLY matters in our classrooms.

Don't get me wrong: Schools need to change.  And yes, I believe that teachers and principals are the right people to lead that change.

But the simple truth is that practitioners are all-too-often handcuffed by the #edpolicy choices made by legislators working a thousand miles from the classroom. 

Until that reality changes, I'm hesitant to lay the blame for a stagnant system at the feet of principals and teachers.

Any of this make sense?

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Related Radical Reads:

Walking the Moral Tightrope

Are #edpolicies Turning Schools into Brainpower Wastelands?

Value-Added Teacher Evaluation Fails Kids and Communities

Declaring War on Teachers

How Engaged ARE Your Students?

Let's start with a simple truth, y'all:  Student engagement matters. 

When kids care about the lessons that they are learning, they are WAY more likely to master the kinds of essential skills, content and behaviors that will help them to become productive, contributing members of our society.

But the uncomfortable reality -- drawn from this January 2013 Gallup survey of 500,ooo students in grades 5-12 -- is that the chances are REALLY good that the majority the kids in YOUR classes AREN'T engaged:

(click to enlarge)

How can we legitimately defend the work that we are doing in schools -- and our status as professionals -- when over half of the kids that we serve report not being engaged in our classrooms?

Something's got to change -- and from the looks of this survey, it's our teaching.

#enoughsaid

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Related Radical Reads:

Technology Gives Kids Power

Digital Immigrants Unite

Introducing Our Newest Cause: #SUGARKILLS

Value-Added Teacher Evaluation Models Fail Kids and Communities

Anyone that has spent any length of time following the Radical knows that the test-happy culture that we're swimming in rubs me the wrong way.  It's simultaneously stripping the joy out of learning and driving good teachers out of the classroom all in a thinly-veiled attempt to declare war on teachers.

What frustrates me the most about today's accountability culture has always been the suggestion that measuring student performance on content-driven multiple choice tests given once per year is the best way to measure the "value that teachers add" to their kids, their schools and their communities. 

That's ALWAYS sat wrong with me -- and it should sit wrong with YOU too.  

Teachers do SO much more for our kids than deliver content. We coach and we encourage and we inspire.  We are cheerleaders.  Kids take risks while they are in our classes that they may never have even considered had it not been for the fact that they knew we cared.

But in a world where tests are created with the sole intention of ranking and sorting our teachers, those intangibles -- those small acts of kindness and care that are often the things that keep kids moving forward -- are dismissed, pushed aside by politicians who argue that the only value that matters rests in the results that we can measure with multiple choice exams.

My rants against testing have always felt half-baked to me, though, because I could never back up my assertions with a healthy dose of research -- the Turkish Delight of the #edpolicy kingdom.

Until now, that is. 

You see, a new study from Kirabo Jackson of Northwestern University FINALLY supports my hunch that our single-minded determination to assess and evaluate the cognitive impacts that teachers have on students is flawed policy at best -- and failing our children at worst. 

What Jackson -- who was interested in determining the impact that cognitive and non-cognitive behaviors have on the future success of students -- discovered should force every parent, politician and policymaker who cares about schools to rethink the role that testing plays in our buildings. 

First, he discovered that non-cognitive skills and abilities like motivation, determination, and self-restraint are a better predictor of future success -- particularly for struggling students -- than the cognitive skills measured by standardized tests.

Perhaps more importantly, he discovered that SOME teachers are good at increasing the cognitive skills of their students and OTHER teachers are good at increasing the non-cognitive skills of their students, but MOST teachers AREN'T good at increasing BOTH cognitive and non-cognitive skills.

This has HUGE implications, doesn't it? 

If Jackson's research and methodology is sound, current educational policies -- which prioritize test scores when measuring a teacher's value -- are incentivizing the WRONG behaviors. 

Our students are the ultimate losers in environments that encourage teachers to push non-cognitive skills and abilities -- skills and abilities that Jackson argues are actually BETTER indicators of future success -- to the sidelines in response to the cognitive-first realities they are working in.

What politicians who are pushing the testing culture in our schools should REALLY worry about, though, is that educational policies designed to reward teachers for producing results on standardized tests are actually wasting taxpayer cash. 

As Jackson explains:

"Teacher effects on test scores and teacher effects on non-cognitive ability are weakly correlated such that many teachers in the top of test score value-added distribution will also be among the bottom of teachers at improving non-cognitive skills.

This means that a large share of teachers thought to be highly effective based on test score performance will be no better than the average teacher at improving college-going or wages."

And:

"Because variability in outcomes associated with individual teachers that is unexplained by test scores is not just noise, but is systematically associated with their ability to improve typically unmeasured non-cognitive skills, classifying teachers based on their test score value added will likely lead to large shares of excellent teachers being deemed poor and vice versa."

Just stew in that for a minute, will you?

We are literally spending MILLIONS of dollars  -- not to mention MILLIONS of instructional hours -- every year measuring the wrong skills and rewarding the wrong teachers!  Sure, mastering the content covered in the K12 curricula matters, but according to Jackson, mastering non-cognitive skills -- skills that we currently do nothing to assess -- matters more.

No joke, y'all:  It's time that you start asking your policymakers some difficult questions about their positions on value-added measures of teacher performance.

If Jackson is right, those policies -- which have rapidly become the norm instead of the exception in most states in America -- are wasting our time AND our money.

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Related Radical Reads:

Nate Silver on Using Test Scores to Evaluate Teachers

Three Things Parents and Policymakers Need to Know about Merit Pay in Education

What Economists Don't Understand about Educators

 

Nate Silver on Using Test Scores to Evaluate Teachers [SLIDE]

One of the hottest statistical minds in the world right now is Nate Silver, the mind behind the FiveThirtyEight blog which is dedicated to helping readers to "cut through the clutter of this data-rich world." 

Silver rose to prominence initially by using algorithms to correctly predict the winner of 49 out of 50 states in the 2008 presidential election.  He's gone on to become one of the most respected voices on the use of data to drive decisions.

Yesterday, Silver participated in an online IAmA Blogger Q+A session over at Reddit -- and the first question that he was asked was whether or not he believed that using standardized test scores to determine a teacher's value was a responsible decision.

Silver's response was worth sharing with every parent and educational policymaker you know:

 

Download Slide_SilveronTesting

 

Now to be fair, Silver DOES say that he'd need to give the topic a much longer look before he'd be able to make any real decisions on using test scores to evaluate teachers. 

But his initial hunch that using test scores as the most important measure of a teacher's effectiveness is an example of using data badly aligns nicely with the thinking of other really bright minds working BEYOND education -- including Bill Gates (see here and here), Dan Pink (see here) and Chip and Dan Heath (see here).

And as Liz Dwyer points out on the Good Education blog, Silver's hunch on testing as a tool for holding teachers accountable also aligns nicely with REAMS of studies already completed by everyone from The National Research Council and the president of Math for America to respected senior scholars like Richard Rothstein.

Finally, Silver's initial hunch ALSO aligns nicely with the opinions of the very companies that make the standardized tests that are strangling education in our country, who have noted time-and-again that their products were never designed to be used to draw conclusions about individual teachers. 

So if there is a broad consensus starting to form that using test scores to evaluate teachers is a bad idea, then why do policymakers -- including President Obama and his Education Secretary, Arne Duncan -- keep pushing for these failed policies?

That's a question that every person you vote for should be forced to answer.

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Original Image Credit: American statistician Nate Silver at SXSW in Austin, Texas USA on March 15, 2009 by Randy Stewart -- Licensed Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike on January 10, 2012

Quote from: Data King Nate Silver Isn't Sold on Evaluating Teachers With Test Scores

 

 

 

Should Teachers Be Ashamed When They Promote Their Work?

Blogger's Note:  This has the potential to be an uncomfortable conversation, y'all, and I'm not sure that my thoughts are completely polished yet.  Hope you will respect this for what it is: Transparent first-draft reflection on a topic that I think has real implications for our profession. 

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A few weeks back, I wrote a bit here on the Radical promoting my newest book - Making Teamwork Meaningful -- that was cross-posted on the Center for Teaching Quality's TransformED blog. 

In it, I shared the reasons why I think Making Teamwork Meaningful is a worthwhile read, I pointed to the collection of free resources from the book that are posted online, and I posted a series of recommendations from peers who had reviewed it in advance. 

An anonymous reader of the TransformED post questioned my decision to advertize the release of MTM, writing:

Having read so many of your worthwhile posts, I am disappointed that this is merely a promotion of your new book.

I knew it was coming and would have been interested in a simple announcement that it is now available. You have, however, gone over the top here.

You have taken advantage of a great blog for self-prmotuion. For shame.

As a guy who is trying to build a bit of a career beyond the classroom -- something that I can turn to during the two months a year that I'm not working with students -- Anonymous's take has challenged me to think about who I am as a professional AND who where we are as a profession.

The simple truth is that -- like a lot of other classroom teachers -- I need a part time job in order to make ends meet around my house.  But instead of pumping gas or stocking shelves at the Piggly Wiggly, I've decided to try to sell what I know. 

And while I'm constantly giving away content for free (see here, here, here and here for starters), I'm also hoping that interested audiences might actually buy my books, come to my workshops or hire me for onsite professional development with their faculties. 

I won't hide it: I really DO want people who stumble across my content to see me as a potential expert worth investing in. 

But maybe that's a truth best left unsaid in our profession?

Has wanting to profit off of our expertise inadvertently become the ultimate betrayal in a service-driven field where sacrifice has long been the criteria used for identifying the heroes in our hallways?

And if so, what are the consequences for our standing as professionals?

Isn't it possible that one of the reasons people beyond the classroom don't respect the knowledge and skills of classroom teachers is because we so often refuse to publicly lay claim to the title of "educational expert?"

Maybe I'm over-reacting -- or maybe I'm just a paranoid curmudgeon -- but I really do see every post that I write and every bit of content that I create as a digital haymaker in my own personal fight to defend practicing teachers as professionals.

The way I see it, we can't afford to hide what we know anymore because every time we hide what we know, our critics feel justified in questioning just how valuable we really are. 

Almost 20 years ago, my mom and dad gave me a plaque that still hangs in my classroom.  It reads:

A hundred years from now, it will not matter what my bank account was, the sort of home I lived in, or the kind of car I drove; What will matter is that the world will be different because I was important in the life of a child.

Those words resonate with me simply because the handful of very human moments when I know without a doubt that I've made a meaningful and lasting difference in the life of one of my students really DO mean WAY more than the cash that I pull in on quarterly royalty checks from my publisher.

But I guess I'm just worried that the "sacrifice-with-a-smile" attitude we've built into a professional mythology over the past 100 years is simultaneously cheapening our field in the eyes of our critics AND chasing our most talented practitioners out of our classrooms. 

Any of this make sense?

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Related Radical Reads:

The Self-Promoting Teacher

Shameless Self-Promotion in Social Media Spaces

Twitter Snobs or Efficient Learners

Guest Post: Changing Learning Spaces Depends on Technological AND Pedagogical Knowledge

Blogger's Note:  One of the people in my learning network that I value the most is Matt Townsley. 

A former high school math teacher and current curriculum and technology director in Iowa, Matt has served as a reliable sounding board and critical friend for me for the better part of the past 5 years. 

What I love the best about Matt is that he's ALWAYS willing to push against my thinking -- which helps me to refine and polish what I know to be true about everything from the role that assessments should play in driving learning to the role that central office staffers can play in moving districts forward.

Recently, Matt left a SUPER-THOUGHTFUL comment on my bit about Ever Optimistic Techno-Cheerleaders detailing the fine balance between technological and pedagogical knowledge that successful technology integration depends on.

I asked him if he'd be willing to turn it into a guest post for the Radical.  Thankfully he said yes!

Hope you enjoy his thinking as much as I did.

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Changing Learning Spaces Depends on Technological AND Pedagogical Knowledge

By Matt Townsley

 

In Bill's previous post on the Ever Optimistic Techno-Cheerleader, he asked an important question:

Can you HONESTLY say that digital tools have made significant and meaningful changes to the kinds of learning experiences that happen in the majority of classrooms in your school -- or are teachers using digital tools to do little more than put a little lipstick on their instructional pig?

Those are questions worth wrestling with even if the answers ARE uncomfortable.

I find myself cheerleading more than I'd like to admit and that IS a bit uncomfortable.

One of the double edged swords I see is the way in which technology tools enter the classroom.

Constantly Fighting the Good Idea Fairy [SLIDE]

One of the books I just finished working my way through was No Easy Day, the firsthand account of the killing of Osama Bin Laden written by Navy Seal Matt Bissonnette under the pseudonym Mark Owen.  

As a bit of a military buff, my main goal for reading No Easy Day was just to learn a bit more about the work that Seals do to defend our nation.  Their service goes largely unrecognized simply because of the secretive nature of their missions.   

While reading, however, I learned that Seals and full-time classroom teachers actually have something in common.

We both spend half our professional lives pushing back against Good Idea Fairies, who Bissonnette decribes as well-intentioned people working in the "head shed" beyond the mission who dream up ridiculous solutions to nonexistent concerns and slow teams down (Kindle Location 665).

(click to enlarge)

 

Download Slide_GoodIdeaFairy

In the case of the raid on Bin Laden's compound, the Good Idea Fairies -- in an an attempt to convince Osama's Pakistani neighbors that the middle-of-the-night attack was nothing more than a local police action -- decided that a group of Seals would be tasked with attaching a police light to the roof of one of Osama's Land Rovers in the early moments of the attack.  

Then, the same group of Seals would work together to push the car -- complete with flashing police light -- into the street in front of Bin Laden's house before returning to the battle.

Stew in THAT for a minute, would you?

Why would a group of Seals on a covert mission inside the borders of a country that didn't know we were coming ever WILLINGLY draw extra attention to themselves by firing up a flashing blue light that they just happened to carry along?

And are we REALLY convinced that neighbors woken in the middle of the night by the sounds of war -- helicopters, machine guns, explosions -- next door would believe that a local police action was taking place simply because ONE car with a flashing blue light happened to be blocking the street? 

But most importantly, do we REALLY want soldiers who are finally in position to capture and/or kill one of the world's most notorious and elusive terrorists afer YEARS of searching -- and who are literally risking their lives on our behalf-- to spend ANY time pushing a car out into the street? 

Ridiculous, right?

And discarded immediately by the guys who knew better because they'd been carrying out raids in Iraq and Afghanistan -- rather than calling the shots from Washington DC -- for the better part of the last decade.

The leadership lessons learned from Bissonnette's police light experience is a simple one: 

Sometimes the best laid plans -- especially in complex, constantly shifting, unpredictable situations -- are simple and flexible. 

And sometimes the best choice that leaders can make in complex, constantly shifting, unpredictable situations is to trust their talent to execute under fire.

Heavily scripting the shots does nothing but pigeonhole your team into an overly-complicated plan based on nothing more than your predictions about what MIGHT happen.

So what's the #flashinglight in YOUR school and/or district? 

What crazy plan dreamed up by a Good Idea Fairy is distracting you from work that REALLY matters? 

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Original Image Credit: If You Believe in Fairies by JD Hancock

Licensed Creative Commons Attribution on December 4, 2012

Three Things Every Parent and Politician Needs to Know about Merit Pay in Education

On the drive home today, I tuned in to the local talk radio station because the host was interviewing a TON of local and state political candidates and I wanted to learn more about their individual positions. 

The interviews were incredibly interesting --- especially when they turned to education simply because the host seemed to ask every candidate how they felt about merit pay for teachers. 

Considering how important the issue has become in conversations about the future of education, I decided to whip up a list of three things that I wish every parent and politician knew about merit pay.

Here they are:

Experts in fields BEYOND education are convinced that merit pay plans WON'T improve schools.

The simple truth about merit-based compensation plans is that they are ONLY effective in fields that require "rudimentary cognitive skills." 

In fact, research has shown that compensation plans that tie pay to performance may actually have a NEGATIVE impact in knowledge-driven fields like education.

Need proof? 

Then check out this RSA Animate video sharing the ideas of Daniel Pink -- a one-time supporter of merit pay plans in education whose personal opinion changed after studying nearly every independent research report on the impact of incentives on human motivation. 

Or this bit detailing the thinking of Chip and Dan Heath, who argue that our constant attempts to design a better carrot result in a tendency to focus on ONE variable -- which might successfully drive change in simple fields, but are destined to fail in work that is complex and dependent on multiple variables.

 

Most merit pay plans are generally built around high-stakes standardized tests that almost NEVER actually measure anything we REALLY want our students to know and be able to do.

In almost every conversation that I have with stakeholders about the skills that students need in order to succeed in tomorrow's workplace, people -- including employers in almost every field -- argue that kids need to be able to communicate, to collaborate, and to solve problems creatively. 

Sounds about right, doesn't it? 

If YOUR child left school having mastered those three skills, you'd be happy and they'd be successful no matter what profession -- or personal passion -- they decided to pursue.

Here's the thing:  Today's high stakes standardized end-of-grade exams -- which are almost ALWAYS used as the basis for deciding which teachers deserve merit pay bonuses -- don't measure ANY of those skills.  Instead, they measure nothing more than a student's ability to remember and regurgitate facts.

Which means that the merit pay plans that wonks like to tout as silver bullets for motivating lazy teachers end up simultaneously stripping classrooms of the kinds of higher-order skills that we claim to care about. 

Need proof?  Then look at what years of teaching in a tested classroom did to my instruction.

 

If you want to incentivize something, incentivize collaboration.

Something incredibly powerful is happening in my professional life this year:  I'm working on a learning team with two young teachers who are literally changing the way that I teach.  Both are skilled at developing hands-on, inquiry-based science experiences for kids.

That's an area of REAL weakness for me even if I AM certified to teach middle school science!

What's cool, though, is I'm having JUST as a significant impact on my colleagues. 

I bring a bunch of nonfiction reading experience to our collective planning table -- I have spent the better part of my career in language arts classrooms, after all -- and that's helping my peers, who AREN'T trained reading teachers.

That means collaboration is paying off for ALL of the kids on our hallway. 

My students are benefiting from the inquiry-based strengths of my peers and their students are benefiting from my experience as a reading teacher. 

That's beautiful, right?

But here's the thing:  That collaboration will DIE in a merit-based workplace.

Think about it:  Would YOU share your best practices with struggling colleagues if you knew that there was a limited pot of money that was going to be given to a small handful of teachers that produced the best scores? 

HECK NO.  You'd let THEM -- and more importantly, the KIDS in their classrooms -- fail miserably because it would give YOU a better chance of cashing in.

Which is why the report on redesigning professional compensation for educators that I wrote with 18 accomplished teachers a few years ago recommends incentivizing collaboration INSTEAD of individual performance.

If we believe that SOME teachers have discovered the best strategies for teaching essential knowledge and skills to our kids, why wouldn't we design incentive systems that encourage SHARING rather than COMPETITION between peers?

 

I get it, y'all.  There ARE real problems in our educational system that need to be addressed.  Change IS necessary. The uncomfortable truth that we've been all-too-willing to overlook is that our current approach to schooling just ain't working for a TON of our students.

But as a teacher AND a taxpayer, I cringe whenever I hear someone argue on behalf of merit pay programs simply because they WON'T improve schools. 

Instead, they're just another #edpolicy disaster that the kids in our classrooms will end up paying for.

 

These Are OUR Kids [SLIDE]

Some of the most exciting work that I've ever done in my professional career was on the first professional learning team that I was ever a part of. 

What made it so different from most of the collaborative groups that I've worked on was our genuine belief that EVERY teacher on our sixth grade language arts team was responsible for the success of EVERY student on the sixth grade hallway. 

(click to enlarge)

Download Slide_TheseAreOURKids

When we looked at numbers -- test scores, attendance patterns, student surveys, students in need of remediation -- we didn't see MY numbers or THEIR numbers.  Instead, we only saw OUR numbers.

And OUR collective commitment drove us to help one another.  To ask and answer questions about practice together.  To spot trends in what was (and wasn't) working -- not because we were playing some game of professional gotcha where spotting successful practice meant spotting successful people, but because spotting successful practice meant spotting solutions for helping kids to succeed.

That shared work was incredibly important for our kids.  Whether they ever sat in different classrooms, they were learning from all of us -- which guaranteed them access to the best of what we knew as a learning team.

But just as importantly, that shared work was incredibly important to me.  Turns out that studying practice together in a safe environment where you can trust the intentions of your colleagues and where helping kids matters more than competing against the guy in the room across the hall can be a heck of a lot of fun.  

Now don't get me wrong:  Pulling off that "our kid" mentality on a learning team ISN'T easy.  It takes time, it takes the right kind of people, and it takes a bit of professional know-how about collaboration around student learning. 

But when you get it right -- when focusing on the OUR in YOUR becomes the norm instead of the exception to the professional rule -- there's nothing better.

#truth

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Related Radical Reads:

Lessons Learned from One Fat Ox

The Power of PLCs

Why Parents Should Care about PLCs and Poor #edpolicies

 

 

Original Image Credit: Nice Portrait of Tween Girl by pictureYouth

Licensed Creative Commons Attribution on September 26, 2012

 

Quote from Learning by Doing: A Handbook for Professional Learning Communities at Work