Eddie Pruett's List: Education Articles

• Repetition may result in incremental success. But, exponential success demands new, often uncomfortable, ways of thinking about organizations, processes, and yourself.

• If you've ever observed a typical PD session, it's obvious why: undifferentiated "sit and listen" sessions abound, requiring little engagement from teachers and generating few personal insights as a result.
• If the central role of teachers is to orchestrate powerful learning experiences for students, then teacher PD ought to be practice-based: focused on deep and structured practice of planning and delivering these learning experiences
• First, we differentiate the professional development for teachers.
• Teachers cannot coast through the experience; they are responsible for creating something. At the end, it's evident whether they did or didn't.
• And when the best work product can be showcased publicly or made available to other teachers in their practice, there is an incentive to invest in doing great work
• practice-based methodology involves feedback. I can find out whether the plans I develop actually work with students. Did they help my students learn?
• What teachers really need is time. If we are going to ask teachers to use their time by passively listening to a lecture, we are wasting it. Professional development ought to challenge teachers to work hard on something they need to get done well; and to structure that time in a way that sets them up for success.
• we break lesson planning down into challenging but do-able steps. First, they analyze high quality examples. Then they analyze a rubric that describes the attributes of high quality. Then they research one Common Core standard, etc, etc.
• When professional development focuses on a useful product, and then breaks the creation of that product into doable steps, magic happens.

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