Training of at least nine to 16 hours on the use of computers for instruction, reading instruction, and student discipline all declined notably, while training of up to eight hours in those areas shot up. That could be a sign that teachers are back in the infamous and much-maligned one-shot workshops. (Time spent on P.D. in teachers' own content area improved slightly over this time period.)

That finding is particularly discouraging given two other studies on professional development. One analysis of nine rigorous scientific studies, released in 2007, found that professional development with fewer than 14 hours of training had no statistically significant effect on student achievement, in comparison to those with at least 30 hours.

And this study's first report found that teachers in high-performing countries generally spend less time on instruction and much more time each week meeting, planning, and constructing lessons with other teachers.

by the time you get to be senior, the decisions that matter the most are the ones that would be best made made by people who are junior

Read Seth's whole post to see why. See also http://dangerouslyirrelevant.org/2009/03/iowa-invest-in-leadership.html

if I was going to put so much personal energy into making something happen, it was a lot better to create the key to the future than to nurse along the dying past

great not-for-profits can amplify the contributions of top talent by maximizing one key asset: passion. To us, passion almost always trumps expertise and experience. Not that there's anything wrong with experience and expertise -- there's just a lot more right with passion.

When Rhee took over the D.C. schools in 2007, "8 percent of our eighth graders were on grade level, but all the adults in our schools were rated as exceeding expectations," Rhee recalled to NEWSWEEK. "How can all the adults think they are doing an excellent job but producing at an 8 percent success level? There's a wild disconnect there.

What's this look like in your school district?

success is coming from the atypical organizations, the ones that can get back to embracing irreplaceable people, the linchpins, the ones that make a difference. Anything else can be replicated cheaper by someone else.

The usual mantra is to 'try harder'. Trying harder is impossible when you're already trying as hard as you can.

But you can always try different.

…

If it's not working, harder might not be the answer.

Ask leaders what they think makes employees enthusiastic about work, and they’ll tell you in no uncertain terms. In a recent survey we invited more than 600 managers from dozens of companies to rank the impact on employee motivation and emotions of five workplace factors commonly considered significant: recognition, incentives, interpersonal support, support for making progress, and clear goals. “Recognition for good work (either public or private)” came out number one.

Unfortunately, those managers are wrong.

Having just completed a multiyear study tracking the day-to-day activities, emotions, and motivation levels of hundreds of knowledge workers in a wide variety of settings, we now know what the top motivator of performance is—and, amazingly, it’s the factor those survey participants ranked dead last. It’s progress. On days when workers have the sense they’re making headway in their jobs, or when they receive support that helps them overcome obstacles, their emotions are most positive and their drive to succeed is at its peak. On days when they feel they are spinning their wheels or encountering roadblocks to meaningful accomplishment, their moods and motivation are lowest.

And, of course, many educators in many schools feel that they are making little to no progress...

What I’m finding more and more as I visit schools that are getting more serious about “change” is that they have someone at the top who is willing to focus on the learning and not on the other crap. And you can pick these people out in a heartbeat; they are leaders AND learners, and they’re not ashamed to share the driving questions they have about their schools with those around them. They have a passion not for making AYP or top schools lists as much as they do supporting their teachers to be learners, allowing them to look at their own teaching as a deep learning experience and share that learning with others.

The most inspiring people at these events are ones that have stopped working for others’ ideas and started working for their own. The most interesting conversations are about ways in which individuals have found to risk a large portion of themselves in the hopes of creating something that exists nowhere else.

Those who can solve the problems and find the answers are essential. There is, however, another group who is as valuable - if not more valuable. They are the ones who ask the right questions.

...

I am beginning to understand that we can never find an answer to a question which has not been asked.

If you run a big factory, of course you need control. Control over when your workers come in, what they do, what they make, what happens to your inventory, where it's sold, how it's priced, everything. More control equals more profits, at least if the market is stable.

But if your business deals in ideas, control will stifle them. If your organization deals with the public, control will inevitably alienate your best customers. When United Airlines tries to control the way customers deal with their policies, they end up with United Breaks Guitars, not profits or market share.

Worse still, a rapidly changing competitive environment means that control is a losing strategy. Record companies tried to control technology and they lost. AT&T thought they could control how people used a telephone and they lost as well.

Is there any doubt that the world is going to go faster, not slower? Any doubt that non-state actors are going to have more influence on world affairs than ever before? Any doubt that technology will continue pushing us along a slippery slope where control is not a winning strategy?

GODIN: How do we get people to bring their artist to work?

PINK: Stop treating people like horses and start treating them like human beings. Instead of trying to bribe folks with sweeter carrots or threaten them with sharpen sticks, how about giving them greater freedom at work, allowing them to get better at something they love, and infusing the workplace with a sense of purpose? If we tap that third drive more fully, we can rejuvenate our businesses and remake our world.

The essence of good leadership

Risk aversion is the number one reason that people and organizations fail to tap the full power of social media. People often tell me that they can't afford to make a mistake online, because any error will be just one Google search away for anyone to see, forever.

Unless you're prepared to risk the occasional mistake, however, you'll never do anything interesting enough to earn real attention or foster real conversation. Even more crucially, you'll never develop the social media fluency that comes from making, and then learning from, your own mistakes.

Alexandra Samuel

Administrators are required to focus their energy, not on supporting teachers in developing and creating learning environments that encourage students to experiment and grow but in managing the data, fulfilling the mandated new curricula implementation dates, ensuring that testing and testing dates are met plus dealing with all the other managerial items that have become expected. There is a greater expectation to focus on gathering data to demonstrate achievement on particular assessment instead of ensuring classrooms are places where there is dynamic learning.

It is our assumptions about what education is, where and when learning and teaching takes place, and how education, school districts, and school sites should be organized that control the current organizational face of education. We have built what we assumed is the best organization and model for delivery of instruction to a population.

What, however, if those assumptions are wrong?

Have you ever considered the fact that the assumptions you make about what education is and what is should be are wrong?

As O’Toole puts it, “Remember, it was once widely assumed that no airline could trust its employees to decide how best to serve customers—until Southwest did. It one was assumed that no company in the discount retail industry could succeed while paying its employees decent salaries and offering them full benefits—until Costco did. It was assumed that poorly educated blue-collar workers in old-line manufacturing firms could not be taught managerial accounting and then left to be self-managing—until SRC Holdings did. Once the conventional wisdom was that employees must be closely supervised and governed by rules—until W.L. Gore proved otherwise. And it was assumed that the first thing a company must do in a financial crisis is to lay off workers—until Xilinx discovered alternatives.”

Are there alternatives to our current model?

Does education have alternatives? Are educational leaders willing to honestly explore them? Will teachers, union leaders, parents, and politicians allow for different assumptions to be pursued? William A. Foster said, “Quality is never an accident; it is always the result of high intention, sincere effort, intelligent direction and skillful execution; it represents the wise choice of many alternatives.” Is what we have built the "wise choice of many alternatives", or is it simply what we have ended up with?

Archibald MacLeish once said, "What is freedom? Freedom is the right to choose: the right to create for oneself the alternatives of choice." Wil education and those in it ever have the freedom to develop and create alternatives to the current model. Will we be free to pursue the The High-Involvement Company or the Global-Competitor Company, as described by O' Toole, or a hybrid of the two, or even something not yet discovered?

As O’ Toole says, “The statement ‘I have no alternative’ is one of the surest indicators of leadership failure.”

“By almost any standard, many if not most of the nation’s 1,450 schools, colleges, and departments of education are doing a mediocre job of preparing teachers for the realities of the 21st century classroom,” Duncan said in a major speech at Teachers College, Columbia University. “America’s university-based teacher preparation programs need revolutionary change--not evolutionary tinkering.”

Add university educational leadership programs to that list too, Secretary Duncan...