PD+Should+Look+Like...


 * What if teachers' professional development... **
 * Recognizes, and builds on, the different personality/learning styles of participants and equips teachers to use that with students and their diverse styles
 * Supports “restoration education” and a sustainable world
 * Allows teachers to be immersed in learning
 * Equips teachers to be agents of positive change
 * Allows teachers to encounter, and be inspired by, great art
 * Equips teachers to use art to build pride, confidence and positive identity in students
 * Gives teachers confidence and skills to engage their students in fieldwork outside of the school building
 * Engages teachers in using professional tools
 * Allows teachers to “Get lost and find their voice”
 * Support teachers to use art to “enchant” rather than “illustrate”
 * Encourages staff to consider what they don’t do well – what they’d like to improve on – and build from there
 * Helps teachers find meaning
 * Transforms a teacher as a person
 * Impels staff to be reflective about their learning and growth
 * Frames teachers as “dynamic professionals interacting with live data”
 * Celebrates and models inquiry and multiple trials and drafts to solve problems and create things
 * Commits extensive time (e.g. 3 years) to allow staff to deeply adopt and sustain practices
 * Provides technical skills and content to a teacher as he/she needs it for a particular purpose
 * Supports staff with the knowledge and skills to create the right CULTURE in their classroom or school
 * Ignites a movement
 * Connects teachers with real-world experts
 * Supports teachers with strategies to put students in charge of important work
 * Equips teachers to contribute, with their students, in service to the real world
 * Centered in co-construction of new strategies, not getting “buy in” for strategies
 * Equips staff to collect, analyze and use data to improve teaching and learning
 * Allows staff to encounter and study important and beautiful things in the world – natural and manmade
 * Helps teachers understand and connect with the cultures and backgrounds of their students and their families
 * Reconnects staff with their core values and spirit, and renews and revitalizes them
 * Exposes you to a wide range of the people you need to count on, and who need to count on you – in multiple environments
 * Demonstrably invests generous, serious time and resources – compelling and inspiring staff to prove they are a worthy investment
 * Requires staff to demonstrate publicly what they’ve learned
 * Teaches or sharpens technology skills that empower teacher/student communication, work and innovation
 * Builds better relationships among staff and builds collaboration skills
 * Connects teachers to personal passion and mission
 * Driven by a question posed by a teacher
 * Allows teachers to conduct authentic learning
 * Inherently messy, because its real world and reminds teachers that learning is messy
 * Teaches or sharpens technology skills that empower teacher/student work and innovation
 * Builds better relationships among staff and builds collaboration skills
 * Allows teachers to take risks, fail, revise, and improve
 * Makes teachers feel special and important
 * Puts teachers in the role of designer
 * Combines graduate work with real-time classroom teaching, where teachers study, teach students, and teach graduate peers contemporaneously
 * Allows teachers to pose and solve problems
 * Compels teachers to be innovators and leaders
 * Involves teachers in creating real work for real world audiences
 * Teachers make their learning public (through authentic work, on line portfolios, etc)….
 * Builds and affirms staff norms, guidelines, relationships and culture
 * Gives staff genuine power to make important decisions about their work and their school
 * Models enjoyment in learning and is FUN
 * Requires the teacher to be the student and a teacher, spreading what one learns with colleagues
 * Puts teachers in the role of creators, rather than consumers
 * Helps teachers recognize and support youth innovation as manifest in youth culture (e.g. Hip Hop Genius)
 * Supports the courage in teachers – to be bold, to take risks
 * Focuses not on what teachers need to DO but what they can BE
 * Recognizes and addresses the varied roles on staff, and points in people’s career paths
 * Ignites passion
 * Gives staff access to strong models that they clone in whole or part to fit their settings
 * Encourages teachers to assume audacious goals for their students and imagine great possibilities