One reason teachers leave the profession is surely that the profession doesn’t feel all that professional sometimes. This is caused, in part, by poor professional development. (It is also caused, in part, by poor teacher attitudes around professional development… but that’s a topic for another post.) In designing professional development that’s good, I find the […]
professional development
24 Tips for Leading Better Professional Development
At this point in my career, I’ve led over 100 different professional development experiences, ranging from keynotes to conference sessions to whole-day breakouts. The work has been with a broad spectrum of audiences: whole district staffs ranging from 6 people (total staff, whole district) to 1,500; elementary teachers exclusively; secondary teachers exclusively; ELA-only groups; only […]
Three Prescriptions for Thinking More Clearly about Teaching, Part 3: Write More
All right, here’s the ground we’ve covered so far: Clear thinking yields better teaching and better living and wiser choices. We want to be clear thinkers. But it doesn’t come automatically. It’s not the kind of thing that a degree confers. It’s won through practice, and we can always improve it. To start, we can […]
Three Prescriptions for Thinking More Clearly about Teaching, Part 2: Consume More Costly Things
Last time, I explained that thinking clearly is a huge promoter of our own flourishing. And since flourishing teachers tend to do better work and enjoy their lives more than frustrated teachers do, this is no small matter. It’s at the root of our mission to make teaching better. So the first step is to […]
How (and Why) to Ask Administrators for PD Funding
Every year, the US spends billions of dollars on teacher professional development. That’s a lot of money. If you stacked up $100 bills one on top of the other, a billion-dollar stack would be taller than the Burj Khalifa — the world’s tallest building. Unfortunately, much of this money is wasted. As Dan Weisberg of […]