• I read a great book last year, Coaching Matters, by Joellen Killion, et.al.  If you want a primer, read a recent article, Teacher-Coach Relationships, in Tools for Learning Schools by the same authors.  The excerpt from the book gives you a feeling for what you will learn.  Here is a quote:

To have a productive relationship, teachers and coaches need to trust one another, respect each other professionally, commit to keeping their partnership agreements, and clearly define the work they will do together.

• Educating Boys of Color, an interview with Pedro Noguera, appeared in Harvard Education Letter’s voice of experience section.  Noguera, a professor at NYU’s Steinhart School of Education, has written extensively on this issue.  See his 2008 book, The Trouble With BlackBoys and Other Reflections on Race, Equity and the Future of Public Education (Wiley and Sons).  He also wrote an excellent article, Saving black and Latino boys: What schools can do to make a difference, in Phi Delta Kappan, vol. 93, No. 5, February 2012. (click here for an Education Week summary of the article).

 

• Rethinking Classroom Observations, Educational Leadership, May 2014 introduces the idea that teachers learning from teachers is a powerful model for professional development.  Peer-to-peer observations are one way to open a faculty dialogue about instruction.  This method, similar to learning walks or classroom walkthoughs, represents a more powerful way to engage faculty in teacher observation and professional development.

Teacher-driven observation addresses these problems by empowering teachers with a classroom-embedded process to refine their instruction.  Through teacher-driven observation, teachers engage peers in gathering and analyzing classroom data–data that speak to the unique context of their own classroom.

 

• Check out what one school’s faculty, Mount Vernon Presbyterian School, @MVPSchool, is doing this summer for professional learning.  An interesting group of programs, activities and initiatives to stimulate adult learning.  Its About Learning, posted June 6, 2014 by Bo Adams

 

• Teachers Take Back Professional Development, the EdCamp model.  Kristen Swanson writes an interesting article in Educational Leadership about the power of EdCamp, a growing movement of professional learning that is participant led.

 

• Collective Genius, in Harvard Business Review June 2014, illustrates the link between leadership and innovation.  The authors, Linda Hill et.al., make the cast that:

innovation usually emerges when diverse people collaborate to generate a wide-ranging portfolio of ideas, which they then refine and even evolve into new ideas through give-and-take and often heated-debates.

From their perspective, innovation emerges out of community. It doesn’t typically emerge from top-down structures.

• Maria Popova writes a wonderful piece on her website, Brain Pickings, entitled, Kafka and What Reading Does for the Human Soul.  Here is one powerful image from a Kafka quote she references.

I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for?

This is just one of the memorable pieces she references from his letters to a friend, Oskar Pollak.

I hope you find some of these pieces enjoyable to read.  Share some of your reading that “wounds or stabs you.”