Lauri Bartels, of Neuron’s Firing and tech educator at Rye Country Day School in New York, wrote yesterday…
I am in the midst of doing a massive clean out of my desk space. Several times a year I get an overwhelming urge to pare down “stuff”, and this current not-quite-mid-August motivation is that school begins in just three weeks. And so it was that I came upon my yellowed print out from Friday, February 17, 2006.
It was a blog post that I’d written back in 2006, and Brenda brought it to my attention after netting it in a Google News Alerts she has set up for me. The post is about personal learning networks, but focuses on the school culture, policies and teacher attitudes that facilitate casual self-directed professional development. In “OK, No More Staff Development,” I write, and Laurie quotes in here post, that..
(we) need to strive for a school environment where teachers:
- Have the time to reflect and retool (at least three hours a day),
- Have ready access to local and global ideas and resources that are logically and socially indexed,
- Have the skills to research, evaluate, collaborate, remix, and implement new tools and techniques (contemporary literacy), Are part of an ongoing professional conversation where the expressed purpose is to provoke change (adapt),
- Leave the school from time to time to have their heads turned by new experiences,
- Share what they and their students are doing with what they teach and learn — their information products and relics of learning become an explicit and irresistibly interwoven part of the school’s culture.
Thanks, Laurie, for bringing this out from under the cover of my archives link.