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Can You Make Average Students Extraordinary?
I read How To Make Average Employees Extraordinary and I agree with much of the ideas. It made me recall reading “Good To Great” by Jim Collins, where one of the main things mentioned about what makes a great company great, is that great companies tend to hire great people first. Then they try and ...
What Lies Do We Tell/Believe about Teaching?
I came across a great mini post in my rss reader today, and I wanted to share it. The Two Lies of Teaching by Dan Meyer. I really liked these ideas, and I wonder what kind of a reaction they spark in you? According to Tom Sallee: If I say it then they will learn it. If ...
Weak Students or Weak Practice?
Just reading through a book again which was given to me by a great friend. Talent Is Overrated – by Geoff Colvin. (Link to a summary article if you want to check out some ideas that will challenge your idea of practice and teaching: Why Talent Is Overrated. So according to Colvin, top performance is ...
What Teachers could learn from a great Chef
“We’re as good as our last meal…” (Taken from Gordon Ramsay on staying on top of business.“) Managing a restaurant/being a world class chef and being an English teacher: never thought that they had much in common until I came across this article. If you didn’t catch anything for your classroom practice, why don’t you try and ...
Initiating instead of Reacting
I was reading an article in Entrepreneur magazine today about doing small things to connect with your customers in meaningful ways. Goal: promote deeper contact and loyalty. My mind was instantly captured with ideas: sending a hand written thank you note to one of the HR managers who works with me – and who today ...
Focus Matters
Via: Seth’s Blog: Do you have 16 boxes?. That’s why human nature is so enraging. When something is going wrong, when the economy is out of sync, we panic. We obsess about just one of the sixteen boxes and ignore the others. We talk ourselves into hysteria about how, “none of our customers have any ...
Authentic Competency Testing: Myth or Reality?
Competency Testing is when an evaluation moves past the typical exam format we’ve known for years: fill in the blanks, multiple choice, short written answers – to sometimes longer essay style responses – but all on paper. When I was in school and studying French, I remember having a few oral evaluations. Those where the ...
Going to Where the Value is: Do you know your role?
Everyone on your team should be able to articulate their role and not have a title. LeadingSmart: Jim Collins on Building a Great Church. The entire list on the blog is worth reading and thinking about…but this last line got my attention because of how often I think we fail at helping people know and ...
Certification Exams: Pushing beyond plain study and memory work
The revision of the IELTS speaking test by Nick Boddy. One potential drawback for candidates used to being able to prepare for a language test by rote learning vocabulary and rules of grammar while standing on a crowded train is the fact that IELTS does not lend itself to this form of preparation. Of course, ...
On discovering relevant
Via Strategy Central: Quotebook: Relevance. Irrelevance comes from always doing the things you know how to do in the way you’ve always done them. Tom Peters Now take that to your classroom and think it over for a while! Being relevant is about doing things that you don’t always know how to do because you’ve ...
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