I love the line from Pitt: "Ideals are peaceful; history is violent."
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Another thing I've always been interested in creativity, especially this summer since I've been reading about it in the works of Sarah Lewis, Rise, and Peter Sims, Little Bets, and now in Michael Hyatt, Platform,
Here is How to Spark Creativity in the Workplace.
#2 - "Set aside time to find inspiration and be creative" is one of my favorites. For teachers, that's what summer is for. But during the school year, this can be difficult. That's why I love to talk shop with my peers and just walk down the halls to hear and glimpse what others are doing in their classes.
#3 - "Be OK with failure in a fail-happy environment." This is right out of two works I've spent a lot of time thinking about over the past few months: Peter Sims' amazing, Little Bets, and this amazing TED Talk.
This also reminds me of what our principal always tells us: don't be afraid to fail. Just do it in front of the students. Show them how you're vulnerable. Show them how you recover from your mistakes.
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Here is a great blog post from a 16 year old on standardized testing. Here is one of my favorite passages:
Today, our generation is being smothered by standardized tests. It's like an addictive drug for school systems, they can't seem to get enough of them. Next year in many schools, Common Core will come into play. The Common Core is a set of academic standards in which teachers are required to teach their students. These learning goals outline what a student should know and be able to do at the end of each grade. Students will take a pre-test at the beginning of the year and a post test at the end of the year which will let teachers know how much their students have improved.
As I read this, I thought of a line from Peter Sims' Little Bets. It was about how we need to make students produces of knowledge, rather than just consumers of it. But standardized tests can't possibly assess that.
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It will be interesting to see how the ruling in California, which overturned teacher tenure, impacts us here in Minnesota.
Like it or not, I think tenure is on its last legs.
I do think, though, that tenure is given a bad name overall. It's not impossible to get rid of teacher. You just have to have an effective and diligent principal who is willing to take a standard against ineffective teaching. As Michelle Rhee found years ago in Washington D.C., those principals are exceedingly rare. They'd rather just pass an ineffective teacher on to another district (called "the dance of the lemons") rather than document their ineffectiveness.
Now to be fair, some districts have entered into insanely complex teacher contracts. So the issue of principals not being able to get rid of ineffective teachers because of all the insane requirements and procedures, well that's not solely the teachers' faults either. You should never have signed the contract.
Thankfully, as Denise Specht points out in the above article, MN is not one of those states.
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Here is one of my favorite bloggers, The Principal of Change, on the 5 Ways to Influence Change.
#5 is my favorite. And I think it applies to teachers in their classes just as much as it does to "change agents."
- Get people excited and then get out of the way. I have been to schools, watched administrators encourage their teachers to embrace something different in their practice, and they make that change impossible to do. Giving the answer that “we need to change the policy before you can move forward” not only encourages the detractors, but it kills the enthusiasm in your champions. When “yeah but” is the most commonly used phrase in your leadership repertoire, you might as well just learn to say “no”; it’s essentially the same thing. The most successful people in the world rarely follow a script, but write a different one altogether. Are teachers doing something better “because of you” or “in spite of you”. If you want to inspire change, be prepared to “clear the path” and get out of the way so that change can happen.
Tales of the best and worst teachers. See any commonalities between the best and the worst? Quick, think of your best and worst quickly. Have anything in common with the ones in the link?
For my money, here are my best and worst.
Best - 9th grade English. I'm convinced she is the reason that out of my graduating class, three of us are English teachers. She was inspiring. She was unique and creative. She shared our work aloud. She changed my life forever. She made me want to do for my kids what she did for me. In fact, I still strive to be like her in my classes.
Worst - An education professor in college. He loved to hear himself talk in Human Relations. He rambled and rambled and rambled, totally oblivious to his class. In Measurement and Evaluation, he taught the most unengaging class I've ever had. Overheads and notes. I took zero away from that class.
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And finally, in honor of Michael Bay's Fourth Transformers movie, Transformers: Age of Extinction, which finally features the Dinobots, here is their real original from the 1984 cartoon series. I was lucky enough to catch this show (which was actually on at 3:00 every day. Unfortunately, the bus didn't drop me off until 3:40 or so. Mom, however, did the next best thing (in the days prior to VCRs): she would watch the episodes and relay the action to me as soon as I got home. If that isn't love, I don't know what is!) on a random Saturday afternoon. It was awesome and totally blew me away.
Watching this short clip takes me right back there. What I loved about the Dinobots was that they finally gave the Autobots some nerve. In the series the Decepticons were always kicking the Autobots (who, of course, are peace lovers) around. But when the Dinobots were created, the Autobots finally had some attitude and some serious kick-butt!
Of course, the Dinobots would soon save the day!
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