George Couros's List: You Should Read July 17

• Starbucks was founded with a clear sense of Why - that purpose, cause or belief that goes beyond the products we make or the services we offer. At its founding, it was all about the "third space," that space between work and home.
• Starbucks forget the reason it was founded and started to think it was their product that made them successful. Put simply, Starbucks has lost its Why.
• Companies with a clear sense of Why set the tone and direction in their respective industries. They lead and others look to follow them.  Suffering severe product blindness, however, these days Starbucks is looking for others to follow.

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• How do we as educators change the public view of what we do in the classroom?

• My action plan is not that complicated:

   
   
  1. Contact the media more often. Invite them to my classroom (again). Share, through multiple methods, what it is we’re doing.
   
  2. Bring parents into the classroom more. The parents in my school are already welcome in my classroom, although not many of them take our offer to visit. I want them to share their expertise in my classroom more often. Side note- I actually have really great and appreciative parents in my school, and for that, I am extremely grateful.
   
  3. Bring more attention to other teachers and students who are doing great things. Not every teacher has a powerful network where he/she can share successes. I have a great learning network of people who love to share ideas, collaborate, and celebrate with each other.
• I am a teacher. By choice. Not because I was incapable of doing anything else, but because I couldn’t imagine doing anything else that would make me as happy as teaching does.

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• The reason we hate advertising is because the ad industry has no idea who its customer is
• Steve Jobs recently shared his thoughts about how the entire music industry failed to innovate something like iTunes. His answer was as profound as it was simple (fancy that). The music industry, he expounds, thought their customer was Tower Records or Virgin MegaStore...but it never was.  Those were their distribution channels. The actual customer is the person who consumes the music. And it is the end user, not the intermediaries, whom Apple focuses on in all they do.
• Producing a product for the consumers who are the ones actually consuming the product makes more business sense, too.

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• I was thinking about the Special Education concept of Least Restrictive Environment and the idea that many of the concepts of special education, such as an Individualized Educational Plan, are concepts we should want for every student.
• there are some kids who struggle - despite many opportunities to figure how to manage it - to use technology in a classroom without it serving as a distraction.
• But banning their use or locking up every laptop would hamstring so much of what we do, and it would not be, for the overwhelming majority of students, the least restrictive environment in which they could - and do - learn.
  
• Let's take a tip from Special Education and in the coming school year, try to make sure our schools are the least restrictive environments for learning they can be.
  

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• It’s hard to find anyone here who believes that Joyce Irvine should have been removed as principal of Wheeler Elementary School.
• Ms. Irvine wasn’t removed by anyone who had seen her work (often 80-hour weeks) at a school where 37 of 39 fifth graders were either refugees or special-ed children and where, much to Mr. Mudasigana’s delight, his daughter Evangeline learned to play the violin.
• Ms. Irvine was removed because the Burlington School District wanted to qualify for up to $3 million in federal stimulus money for its dozen schools.
• under the Obama administration rules, for a district to qualify, schools with very low test scores, like Wheeler, must do one of the following: close down; be replaced by a charter (Vermont does not have charters); remove the principal and half the staff; or remove the principal and transform the school.

• even she understood her removal was the least disruptive option.

   “Joyce Irvine versus millions,” Ms. Irvine said. “You can buy a lot of help for children with that money.”
• Under No Child rules, a student arriving one day before the state math test must take it. Burlington is a major resettlement area, and one recent September, 28 new students — from Somalia, Ethiopia, Kenya, Sudan — arrived at Wheeler and took the math test in October.

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