As professional educators, how can we re-awaken the desire and capacity for learning on our own? Teacher leader Susan Lucille Davis suggests we revive a much beloved learning tool from childhood: Show and Tell.

Teachers are hungry for professional learning but their eyes are often bigger than their pocketbooks when it comes to professional conferences in distant cities and pricey online courses. Connected educators can feed themselves, says Becky Bair, who’s not busting the bank this summer but staying home with Twitter and Google Reader.

As the person most directly responsible for our school’s professional learning, I have been wondering what professional development looks like when you turn Bloom’s on its head and ask teachers to encourage students’ creative thinking early in the learning process. Teachers need to model their own creative thinking and embrace “messy” assessments.

I’ve been thinking about conferences recently. And unconferences. And a new kind of get-together that I don’t quite have a name for. It kiind of began when Hadley said she said that she didn’t need more ideas so much as time to implement the ones she already has. Isn’t that the truth! Maybe it’s time to take a step back, temporarily, to reflect and put some ideas into action?

In her new position as Westtown School’s Director of Teaching & Learning, Margaret Haviland says she is “mindful of the many ’21st century learning’ advocates who hold up for us a world in which our students will work in jobs that have yet to be created and likely will hold numerous jobs over the course of their lives. I see this school year as one of living into that experience as I sort through what this new position I’ve accepted will look like.”

In year two, our Digital Learning Collaborative teams look at what they’ve learned and apply it in their classrooms. Using an inquiry model, we ask the teams to evaluate what impact their use of technology is having on students. But more often than I’m comfortable with, teams balk at this point in the process. Some of them do not want to do this work. That keeps me up at night.