One week away from Thanksgiving. The cold weather has arrived, crunch time is upon us, and yes…we’re one week away from Thanksgiving. Comments are due, grades need to be posted, deadlines have to be met, and the turkey has to be stuffed. I, for one, am hoping to be stress-free over the holiday break; while I’m guessing this will not be the case, I at least plan to mitigate my angst by getting a heck of a lot of work done over the next week – both SCH related and personal. I hope each of you can do the same, enjoying the Thanksgiving celebration for what it is intended to be: time to connect with family, to laugh, to be grateful for all we have….and to overeat in the best spirit of the day.
An idea that I’ve been thinking about since the start of the school year is that of visiting you in your classrooms. While I’ve worked for this school for over twelve years, I have not had the opportunity to develop relationships with every faculty member. I have had the pleasure of meeting with many of you on an individual level or in a group setting of some sort, yet one of my desires? challenges? remains the cultivation of deeper relationships with members of the faculty. I’d like to start with the Upper School, optimistically including all divisions over the next several months. Classroom visits have been in the back of my mind for months now, but it was a recent email from Suzi Morrison that prompted me to revisit the idea and start to make it happen.
The first bullet of Dr. Heine’s US Faculty Professional Development 2012-2013 document is dedicated to Classroom Observation. I’m hoping to build from this model by asking those of you who are Upper School Faculty to allow me to sit in on your classes. I want to learn from you. I’ve mentioned in several previous posts that I’ll be teaching a Digital Game Design class beginning in January and I’d like to learn from the best if I hope to become a classroom educator. I also believe that classroom observations are a great opportunity to borrow ideas from colleagues. In a video interview from 1994, Steve Job quoted Picasso who said Good artists copy, Great artists steal. Now I’m not condoning plagiarism, but I’m hoping that I might acquire brilliant and imaginative ideas from all of you. I would also like to learn what I might be able to offer you. Maybe it’s a tool that I recently read about or an educator that I think you might want to follow on Twitter. Whatever the case may be, please use me as a resource.
I would love to highlight what many of you do on a daily basis – innovate, communicate, collaborate, solve problems and so much more. With your permission, I would like to dedicate future blog posts to the amazing work that you all do. Feel free to leave a comment below or email me if you will allow me to sit in on your class.
When we return from the Thanksgiving break, I will be sending out emails with invitations to informal lunch gatherings for more internal professional development. While I don’t anticipate holding workshops at these lunches, I’d like to establish topics for the lunches that will address various needs gleaned from feedback from the PD survey sent out earlier in the year. These lunches will also serve as follow up for many of the great in-service workshops from last week. If you have any interest in leading one of these conversations at one of these lunches, please let me know. Otherwise, I’ll find you!
I leave you with a video from Ericsson on the future of learning via a Networked Society. The video is well worth the time, enjoy!
If you haven’t read last week’s post with details on Educon 2.5 and PLP Lite, click here for details on how to participate.
Daytime 
Love segments of the last video. The future really is personalization of education…that is technologies great promise for us. Also, the Steve Jobs vid is a classic and always watchable.
Jobs = innovation….not much more has to be said. The most brilliant innovations are often the evolution of another person’s ideas. Group cognition results in great things!
Agree with Pete, personalizing learning experience for each student & using technology is the future of edu in my mind & very exciting! Vince, deeply respect this idea of acquiring brilliant and imaginative ideas from all the incredible people in our SCH community!
LG, thanks for the feedback. It’s not only the future, it needs to be the present! BTW, great job down in DC…I’ve been able to follow the trip via Poasty.
If nothing else you should listen to the 3 minutes from 11:00 to 14:00. This is great stuff about real life, failure , standardized tests and real life. This is really intriguing stuff to think about in terms of how we educate young people today.
Which “Frank” is this response from? At any rate, I’m glad you decided to watch the full 20 minutes. Agreed this is great stuff…networked society, personalized learning, unique learning styles, standardized tests, failure…the list goes on. There is a great quote at around 12:50 “No one I know takes standardized tests for a living, so why are we using standardized tests to see if you’re going to be good, when you don’t have stanardized tests after you take it.” I continually find myself thinking of Zhao’s keynote this year at ISTE, he says “I would love common core standards if they weren’t common or core” and my favorite part of his speech “what is common or core about a student’s passion?”