A new battery plus a little sleep goes a long way towards getting things back to a normal routine. Whatever that is.
I have lots of conference notes, on lots of little slips of paper, in my hideous handwriting to decipher so this will be a quick brain dump of the final two days of sessions.
I wish I could post a video of Andy Hargreaves‘ keynote from Wednesday morning. Nothing I could summarize in this space would do justice to his passionate presentation on building sustainable leadership.
Not to mention his spot on parody of Tony Blair in his best evasive answer mode.
Andy really doesn’t think much of the way American education is going, arguing that our current love affair with imposed, short-term targets violates every principal of sustainable leadership and learning.
And in the process of dwelling almost exclusively on adequate yearly progress (AYP, the foundation of NCLB), he declared that we have all become “little Enrons” of educational change. A delightfully perfect analogy.
Steve Dembo did a great job of summarizing Andy’s talk so drop by and read it.
One of the best parts of this conference was the opportunity to meet and hear from people whose work I’ve been reading and using in my training sessions as great examples of innovative teaching.
People like Sara Kajder who has done some excellent work using digital storytelling techniques to help students become better readers.
Or Darren Kuropatwa who is using blogging to improve the learning of his math students. The blog he put together for his sessions offers some tremendous ideas that any teacher could use.
And, of course, there was our host Alan November. His session on smart school design had little to do with bricks and plumbing and everything to do with creating a new vision what education should be for the future.
His analogy of how we create new school buildings by looking in the rearview mirror applies equally well to our efforts to reform American education.