I'll start with what is usually the most difficult reflection to bring voice to (not sure why), but how I hope I contributed to the learning of others. In my blog this week, and probably more often than I realize in general conversation, I seem to always put out the question/challenge about how we can make teacher preparation programs more relevant. Mind you, I don't have an answer to this myself (just a few ideas), but it's a discussion that seems very current to me. I get comments on my blog about this, and also at some points end up in discussion about this on Twitter. I think just keeping the discussion out there - keeping people thinking about it, is a contribution. There are some things about teacher preparation programs that I think work really well - I think my own was quite fantastic (thanks UAS!). I've seen some that had really good components, but the whole? No way! So I think all of us who are in the field need to keep talking about this, because education changes constantly. Even though we are in the classroom, many of us find ourselves struggling to keep up with some of the changes. Yet many teacher prep programs have hardly changed at all in the past 30 years, and I find this just unbelievable!
I really enjoyed the #ETLEAD twitter chat this week - especially when we started talking about our projects, and just the act of mentoring itself. I think that particular discussion still has a lot of mileage left in it, and I'm looking forward to continuing with it.
In reading through the blogs of my classmates, it's clear that everyone is very pumped by Dave Burgess' message in his TLP book - it's really a gem - just good to have on your bookshelf! I particularly liked how people are replacing a teaching term that I've never cared for - "winging it" - with "innovating". I think as teachers we are constantly asked to be flexible. Schedules don't always run as we planned for varieties of reasons we can't remotely predict, and we often have to be creative with ways we fill that time. Sometimes even our pre-planned time runs into a glitch, and the plans we originally had just won't do. Most of us don't want to waste that time, but we are not always prepared for it (in the formal sense of a pre-thought out lesson plan or a Plan B). Those are the moments when we operate on the fly, pull out our content, and some good ideas that we've been wanting to try out anyway. Now a few people truly do waste this time, but I think most teachers don't want to, and make a concerted effort not to. How successful we are with these flexible time blocks depends a lot on how motivated and inspired we are in our classroom to begin with. If you really are like that, you don't want to waste a second of time, and will try just about anything to make it worthwhile.
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