Comments for The Transforming Teaching Project

Comment on Moving from isolated teachers to connected R&D teams across multiple schools by Bo Adams

Bo Adams — Fri, 02 Oct 2015 09:19:33 +0000

Alex,

Your proposal to inspire, generate, and implement cross-school R&D teams is fantastic. In fact, when we started the Center for Teaching at The Westminster Schools, our cornerstone program was the Action Research Cohort – teams of about 10 teachers from private, public, and charter schools engaged in collaborative action research along the very lines and dimensions you outline here. That program expanded through some very generous grants to create cross-school and cross-sector teams in Atlanta schools. Bob Ryshke is the Executive Director of the program and would be a super resource. And I co-founded the Center for Teaching, so I am happy to share what I know, as well.

Comment on Moving From Districts To Networks To Better Prepare Teachers by Andrew Frishman

Andrew Frishman — Mon, 14 Sep 2015 12:36:27 +0000

Tom, thanks for sharing this. I’m intrigued to know more about what you mean by “philosophical networks” as there are elements to what you are describing that seem to align with the way in which we approach our work at Big Picture Learning. (www.bigpicture.org)

Also, some of this seems reminiscent of the approach in the NYC DOE and in particular New Visions – http://www.newvisions.org/… which has an intriguing origin story (see the mention here in Herb Kohl’s wikipedia entry – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Kohl_(educator)) … I share that only because it might be one mechanism that leads to the realization of some of what you propose (and also might be something we can learn from?)