I’m sitting in the Grand Rapids airport right now waiting for a flight to haul me out to California for the week. In Cali (oh, Cali — why can’t I be visiting you in February?) I’ll be leading four professional development days in a row at three separate schools, all around the non-freaked out approach […]
Search Results for: professional development
Keynotes that Engage, Inspire, and Instruct
Topics & Combinations When you bring me out for a keynote, you have the cost-free option of using me for a same-day breakout session or two. With that said, here are the keynotes I offer. Topic: Prioritization, Work-Life Balance, Teacher Retention Working Title: Never Finished: Continually Becoming the Teachers We Want to Be (and Staying Sane […]
Moving Forward with Close Reading
Yesterday, I wrote an obituary to close reading. This grew out of a delightful professional development session I led with a group of teachers in Louisville, KY. (It was delightful, mind you, because of the audience, not the presenter!) During the training, in which we worked through the non-freaked out approach to Common Core literacy, it hit me: the […]
Early Career Teacher Trainings that Rock
When I was in undergraduate courses, I remember taking classes on “teacher leadership” and being pretty unimpressed with how bland and theoretical it all seemed. Sure, great schools will be places where teachers are empowering, encouraging professionals who work together to chase after the big problems we got into this gig to solve. But how […]
How Administrators Can Wage War on Bad PD
So I shared a bit ago about how one of the bad guys that’s driving teachers nuts these days is bad PD. Okay, driving them nuts is an understatement. Just ask a teacher. And while leading some PD a couple weeks ago in the fine states of Oklahoma and Missouri, I started thinking really hard […]