Hi Everyone,

I pasted the SRI Board Election Candidate's statements into Wordle and made this word cloud.  It shows the words used more frequently as bigger and less frequently as smaller.  The ones that are about the same size were used about the same number of times.  I think this is very cool!

Ross

Click on the link (or the little version) to see the word cloud full size...…

Wondering if anyone has an audit tool for assessing the status and quality of PLG work in a school?

I'm working with an urban IB middle school that has used PLGs for the past four years.  Most teachers have completed at least the initial PLC training and have at least 6-8 facilitators.  Teachers meet at least 1-2 times a week in both content and grade level teams to discuss student work and teacher practice. 

Appreciate hearing from anyone who has experience evaluating…

[This post was written with contributions from Cari Begin of Performance ED, LLC]

Teacher Evaluation & Accountability reform has been firmly placed on an educational front burner becoming a hot topic of state boards of education, district boards across the US, local school administrators, teacher advocate groups, teacher unions, the media and the general public. {The topic has also served as a seemingly endless source of material for blog posts, this one not…

[This post is an excerpt from the Preface of   The Practice of Authentic PLCs: A Guide to Effective Teacher Teams by Daniel R. Venables (c) 2011 Corwin Press.]

That Professional Learning Communities (PLCs) have become the talk of educators these days is curious to me, for two reasons. The first is that it has taken painfully long for educators to realize that working in iso­lation is…