I recently heard a friend ask his student a question that captures how parents and teachers should discuss future aspirations. The question was not "What do you want to be when you grow up?" Instead, he asked the boy, "What problems do you want to solve when you grow up?" Today's students will enter a […]
The small rural district of United Local Schools in northeast Ohio has seen its math scores increase in the eight years it has used Everyday Mathematics® in its elementary school classrooms. In 2015-16, the first school year in which all sixth-grade students had used Everyday Mathematics since kindergarten, those students scored 26.8 percentage points higher […]
Colleges blame high schools. High schools blame middle schools. Middle schools blame elementaries—and everyone tends to blame funding, poverty, bad parenting and other factors for low student achievement. A new movement that promises closer cooperation between higher ed and K12 aims to end this legacy of passing the buck. Educators from New York City to […]
Schools and districts in nearly 30 states—including Lyon County School District (Nevada)—use the Edthena platform to video coach educators. Lyon County began video coaching its 200 elementary school teachers in the 2017-18 school year. The PD was made possible by a grant from the Nevada Department of Education. The Virginia Department of Education has approved […]
How closely is professional development linked to student achievement? Professionalism expects learning to be in the collective. We should think of our own learning and growth as part of a mutually beneficial ongoing professional development process. A big part of that idea is that we share and become more transparent in our practice as educators. […]
When it comes to professional development, Regina Teat believes building the instructional capacity of every instructor and classroom teacher is the most effective use of time and money of any program, especially using grant funding. "When the money goes away, the capacity and knowledge through good professional development for the teacher remains" says Teat, Director […]
While innovations typically involve a high degree of novelty and a paradigm shift, tried-and-true best practices often serve as their launch pad and rocket fuel. In designing and selecting professional development opportunities that harness and reflect best practices in education, there are four key elements for a high-quality experience: authenticity, contextual learning, a creative climate, […]
Timothy Collier has been teaching high school mathematics for more than 30 years, most of them at McAlester High School in southeast Oklahoma, where he is the department chair. State budget cuts have affected McAlester High School and the district's eight other schools, especially in the area of professional development for teachers, who were facing […]
When Mark MacLean became superintendent of the Merrimack Valley and Andover School Districts in New Hampshire four years ago, he wanted to find an online solution for teacher evaluation that could also link to professional development. After some research with his leadership team, MacLean found TeachPoint, which offers a Professional Development Tracking Solution that also […]
Two years ago, Elizabeth Rincon was seeking to end the last-minute scramble to cull professional development for approximately 125 special education paraprofessionals on days when teachers had preplanned PD. "Principals had to either swiftly get something together for paraprofessionals in terms of PD or they would email me and I would have to quickly plan […]
