Teacher conversations about professional development often include the terms worthless and waste of time, and a general disdain for typical approaches is often evident. The back-and-forth can be a bruising arena for those who actually provide professional development, and I’ve been feeling a bit bruised recently. Don’t worry. The bruises have only been blows . . . → Read More: Professional Development: A Defense
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My cell phone rang when we were deciding which package of paper towels to buy. “Kevin, this is John Paine. Do you have a few moments to talk?” I had both anticipated and dreaded this call, and the paper goods lane of Publix was not my ideal setting for the conversation. My wife, sensing . . . → Read More: A Teacher’s Lessons from Writing, Part 2 A few times every year, I get to lead a professional development event known as “Writer’s Stylus.” Each time, including just last week, it proves to be an exciting experience. We begin the week thinking we already teach writing. We end the week as writers, producing an essay that has undergone multiple waves of . . . → Read More: Growing Personally and Professionally Produces Meaningful Results “Who do you think should be our coach?” I get this question from administrators in schools that invite me to lead professional development events. There is an assumption that after a few days of working with teachers I’ll have a good sense of who could coach colleagues effectively. Sometimes I do, but often I . . . → Read More: Who Should Coach? Three Essential Traits for Professional Development Coaches Growing up, my older brother loved jigsaw puzzles. He’d sort the pieces and bend over our card table looking for the next fit.
I only enjoyed one piece of . . . → Read More: A Missing Piece of the Professional Development Puzzle After describing memory thinking as cognition that provides “something in your head to reason about,” Sternberg, Jarvin, and Grigorenko (2009) suggest analytical skills as another type of thinking (p. 19). Analytical skills involve sorting or ordering ideas into valid schemata and are “sometimes referred to as critical thinking skills” (p. 22). Verbs associated with . . . → Read More: Analytic Skills & Comprehension |
 
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