Learning From the Best

#EanesPLC

This  hashtag sums up the first 2 days of the school year for Eanes ISD:
Eanes  Professional Learning Conference.

And what a learning conference it was!!
We heard from some of the foremost educational thinkers in the nation:
Dr. Thomas Guskey
Dr.  Anthony Muhammad
Dr. Thomas May
Diane Laufenberg

We will he processing and applying what we learned  in these 2 days over the course of the school year.

This conference was  brilliantly structured to allow 
us to hear from many of the  same speakers, some in large group settings, some in smaller groups by levels we teach.
This was so important because we now  have common vocabulary and  shared concepts as we work for change this year.

I saw the topics as foundation information to begin engineering significant change in the way we do school in the future at Eanes.

Some of the broad topics we covered were:

Grading
School Culture
Questioning
Communication and conversation
Student centered inquiry based learning
Practical assessment tools and strategies

As I reflect back and start putting the pieces together, I see the big picture of what the brilliant designers of this professional learning conference wanted us to experience.

Our district has generated something called the W.H.E.E.L  It grew from a year of school and community focus groups working together to clarify and define exactly what  the goals of educating  our children  are. To develop a program that accomplishes this, we need to change the way we do school here.

The ideas, concepts, and conversations that the Eanes PLC has stimulated will help generate this critical change in thinking.

I can't begin to cover all of the important aha moments and truths presented over the last 2 days, because I am still processing all of it. But, the Storify that I created of the Tweets from the #EanesPLC does a pretty great job.

It's pretty huge, so if you don't see the final  post by Cathy Yenca dated 2 hours ago, after clicking through all the  read more boxes, this Weebly may not have embedded all of it. 
You can click the Storify  link at the top left to view the complete story. It  runs chronologically from the beginning to the end.

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