By Stoney M. Beavers, Ph.D.
Vice President
Alabama Best Practices Center
As our network members already know, we will continue to use Leading a High-Reliability School by […]
ABPC is excited to announce that the guiding text for this year’s Powerful Conversations Network will be Jackie Acree Walsh’s Questioning for Formative Feedback: Meaningful Dialogue to Improve Learning. Please join us for a highly engaging year of networked learning as we dive deep into Jackie’s immense knowledge of this subject and gain new skills and strategies to increase learning for Alabama students.
If you are looking to memorialize and celebrate the creativity of our students, parents, and teachers, then Stoney Beavers recommends you dive into the hundreds of six-word stories and brief author essays curated in A Terrible, Horrible, No Good Year. They offer great insight into how the pandemic has affected education – and us.
In the face of so many recent disruptive experiences, writes ABPC’s Stoney Beavers, now is a good time to rethink the PLC process and ask ourselves some hard questions. Will they be extensions of administration? Loose collaborations? Or genuine communities committed to professional growth and advancing student learning? Inspired by the work of Robert Marzano and Richard DuFour, participants in our PCN and KLN networks will explore these and other essential questions this year.
Professional learning inside this year’s Key Leaders Network will focus on leading high reliability schools, using the five-level framework developed by Robert Marzano and incorporating much of the collective work ABPC networks have been doing over the past several years to improve teaching and learning. This year, writes Assistant Director Stoney Beaver, KLN will build on what we have all accomplished together.
Guided by Marzano’s expanded vision and based on the work of ABPC’s diverse design team, the Powerful Conversations Network will meet educators where they are in 2021-22. PCN will support the challenges of bouncing forward after a very difficult 18 months. Participants will collaborate as they identify essential standards, share ways to re-engage students, and develop authentic tasks that help all our young people become effective and confident learners.
ABPC and the A+ Education Partnership are promoting a big idea: One powerful way to improve learning is to listen closely to what our students have to say. In his recent conversation with Monte Syrie, a Washington State teacher whose advice about classroom culture-building is widely followed in education social media, ABPC’s Stoney Beavers came away with Monte’s tips for a simple, highly effective listening tool: the Smiles and Frowns strategy!
Make your plans now to “bounce forward” in the coming school year by participating in the Key Leaders Network and the Powerful Conversations Network for 2021-2022. REGISTRATION IS NOW OPEN! Read on to learn more about the latest PCN and KLN professional learning programs from Dr. Stoney Beavers, who introduces the new focus books and announces both blended/face-to-face and all-virtual options for this fall.
As schools struggle to teach standards, prepare students for college and career readiness, maintain discipline, and hopefully teach and reinforce character, co-authors Jimmy Casas and Joy Kelly offer today’s educators a unique set of strategies for building strong cultures that help everyone work more effectively and respectfully to accomplish our challenging task. Dr. Stoney Beavers reviews Handle with Care.
It’s rare that we really push ourselves to learn a new skill without an immediate need for it, writes Stoney Beavers. “We work hardest on something when the necessity is squarely in front of us.” Right now that urgent necessity is effective support for students’ social and emotional learning. “The tire is flat,” he says, and a new book from Corwin has tools we need to integrate SEL into virtual, blended, or in-person environments.
