Continuous formation

The School has been trying to leverage OneNote and its sharing and syncing capabilities ever since OneNote was introduced in 2003 ... in a 1:1 tablet computer environment it's a natural fit for both teachers and students. Each page that is created can hold any kind of digital content and can be inked with as much freedom as a piece of paper. There is an organization that is familiar to those in education -- you start at pages, put pages into sections (I always think of those Hilroy separators) and then the sections into notebooks... except being digital there are no limitations (you can include audio, video, PDFs, etc) and the tablet doesn't increase in weight the more pages you add. There have been difficulties with OneNote along the way -- although OneNote was capable of sharing a notebook between folks (so that more than one person could write on it at a time) and synchronize from a copy stored on a central server (so that you material could be in a central cloud and y...

I had a nice conversation with a colleague here ... chatting with teachers in the summer is always fun because everyone is relaxed but at this time there is also the anticipation of getting back into the classroom, so there's a great energy. He mentioned my new job and said something like "it's a great opportunity for you to bring your vision in to the classrooms." And I had to stop him... because that's exactly the opposite of what I want to do with this job. Sure, I have a vision of what classrooms should look like -- but I'd much rather help teachers bring _their vision_ of what their classroom should look like. There are a multitude of ways to make teaching and learning better (and I'm not going to define what that means at this point) -- and if I just march on with what I think is best, it's not going to initiate any real change in the classroom. Change has to be personal, individual, differentiated. It has to come from whatever space the ...

When I was interviewing for this position, one of the things I wanted to make clear was that when it comes to teacher-change, I wouldn't proceed too aggressively until I had dealt with the issue of time-and-space. Teachers at our school are extraordinarily busy; they wear many hats (teacher, coach, club leader, service trip organizer, residence staff ... and then they have lives) and tend to be over-scheduled during the school day. Yes we get great holidays but during the time we're in school, it's an 8-5:30 day followed by planning and marking overnight, not to mention the evening and weekend responsibilities as part of our academic and co-curricular components. So, if we're going to ask these folks to think deeply about their practice, we need to find the time by making their present work easier and more efficient. All those situations where they run in to an impediment, when they don't have the information they need at the time they need it or if they have to...