What Professional Development Should Be
Nothing is more fascinating and absorbing to me--or, IMHO, central to the preservation of a high-quality, fully public education for every child in America--than teacher leadership. It is the key reason to believe that public education might not only survive but regenerate, the hinge upon which genuine reform swings. I was thrilled to be asked to speak about teacher leadership at the 2014 Ann Arbor Open School conference on progressive education, and spent last Friday and Saturday happily wallowing in my favorite subject.
It was a fabulous conference--and absolutely unique. The Open School invented their own brand of ed-camp 31 years ago, two decades before the ed-camp pioneers, without having to rely on snazzy tech-tool training to lure participants into sharing and swapping their best ideas. In fact, the conference site--a very rustic Lithuanian Culture camp about 40 minutes outside Ann Arbor--has limited connectivity (a comes-and-goes single bar) so it was that rare gathering where most participants weren't sneaking continuous, surreptitious peeks at Twitter, Facebook or their inboxes. (With two exceptions--the guy checking his NCAA brackets at 10:00 p.m. Friday and the teacher who took Saturday morning off to marry her partner of 17 years, then texted a teary, exultant photo to the group.)
Naturally, I've attended tons of education conferences--the suit-and-heels mega-convention types populated by