As cognitive scientist David Perkins reminds us: If you don’t think, you don’t learn. It is the ongoing reflection by a teacher about their practice that results in improvement. In Creating a Culture of Reflective Practice, Cathy Gassenheimer writes, Pete Hall and Alisa Simeral show us how to build this reflective capacity schoolwide.
Cathy Gassenheimer is tweeting live from the Learning Forward Annual Conference. In one of her favorite Monday sessions, Cathy joined Jackie Flowers, Director of Instruction & Professional Learning in the Florence City Schools. Find out what they learned at a session with expert Nancy Love on teacher teaming to maximize formative assessment.
Cathy Gassenheimer (@cathygassenheim) is tweeting live from the Learning Forward Annual Conference in Dallas, Texas. We’re capturing her Twitter streams for various sessions and sharing them as posts. Educational leadership superstar Michael Fullan’s pre-conference session on Sunday was her first stop. Here Cathy shares some background and bits of Fullan wisdom.
We all like good stories. Stories capture our imagination and invite us to consider the possibilities that life presents us. Stories often offer an escape from our daily hum-drum routine. But can they change behavior or invite people to consider a different perspective? Bob Garmston, co-founder of Cognitive Coaching and author of The Astonishing Power of Storytelling, thinks so.
Chip and Dan Heath are masterful storytellers. In The Power of Moments, they explain the idea behind creating your own peak memories with an abundance of stories you’ll enjoy. The book chronicles insights and occurrences of people from all walks of life that lifted their spirits and often caused them to change their direction or goals.
UNC professor Bradley Staats, author of Never Stop Learning, believes continual learning is a survival skill in a fast-changing world. Yet many of us are poor learners who often place learning in the backseat, favoring a busy workstyle that doesn’t make room for reflecting and recharging. Read Cathy’s review.
Cathy Gassenheimer interviews Jennifer Abrams about communicating, collaborating, and creating community in today’s hyperconnected world. Cathy and Jennifer use the bestseller “New Power” (Heimans & Timms) to spring into a fascinating conversation about what it means to teach and lead in a society being shaped by social media.
In her reflection on the prime importance of positive school culture, Cathy Gassenheimer shares perspectives from a half-dozen education thought leaders, including Michael Fullan, “who reminds us that we can work all day to create structures for learning, but if we don’t work on our culture, it could all be for naught.”
As we rely more and more on the internet and on crowd-sourcing, there is an opportunity to bring people together for good by taking advantage of a new power growing out of our hyperconnectivity. Cathy Gassenheimer highlights an important recent book by Jeremy Heimans and Henry Timms.
After reading Regie Routman’s Literacy Essentials, “I became even more convinced that literacy instruction is central to every class, subject, and student,” writes Cathy Gassenheimer. “It’s a comprehensive guide to strengthening students’ reading, writing, speaking, and comprehension skills across the curriculum.”