Like teachers, school leaders today must move beyond sit-and-get PD and take charge of their own professional growth. Elementary principal and Connected Principals contributor Lyn Hilt says Kristen Swanson’s new book, Professional Learning in the Digital Age, “provides practical, easy-to-follow steps towards becoming an effective user-generated learner.”
In this open letter, “Connected Educator” offers a blunt appraisal of the consequences for teachers and students when leadership refuses to connect classrooms to the world via public social media.
In this new interview with Canadian edtech leader Doug Peterson, PLP consultants Brenda Sherry and Peter Skillen talk about the theories of learning that undergird their advocacy for 21st century teaching strategies and their Minds on Media professional learning model.
Many educators are being invited to speak at TEDx gatherings in Australia, North America and around the world. Australian teacher leader and librarian Jenny Luca thought it might be useful “to analyse the process I went through putting a talk like this together. It may help if you’re asked to do something similar.”
With every turn of the page or scroll through a Reader feed, someone, somewhere, is giving advice on what education leaders ought to be. The articles, blog posts, and books on leadership will keep on coming, because the role of leadership is ever-evolving and increasingly complex with each passing day. (And with each passing mandate.) I enjoy reading the work of leaders in fields outside of education, too. While not every lesson can be translated to the work we do with students, many can, and we should consider them.
What can we do, as administrators, to promote teacher learning on a daily basis? How can we structure our organizations to allow for collaboration and communication among peers, embed opportunities for both face-to-face and online learning, help our teachers stay informed and familiar with current research and practices (in content, pedagogy, and technology), model for them that we ourselves are growing professionally, and help the organization as a whole realize that complacency must be eradicated?
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