Gary Ackerman @garyackerman@qoto.org

Your students are not blank slates and their brains are not there to be filled with information.

By including participation, engagement, flexibility, adaptability, and similar soft skills in our assessment and evaluation of students we are communicating to them these are valuable skills to develop. By removing these from their evaluation, educators are ignoring the most important skills students can develop.

Homework grades often depend on the availability of a quite and well-stocked space away from school (well stocked may also include someone to provided tutoring or even answers). It is difficulty to justify including it in our evaluation or assessment of students.

I am not concerned with the subjective nature of one’s evaluation of many soft skills. We encounter different people with different perspectives and different opinions all the time. Learning how to manage one’s soft skill interaction with diverse others is a perhaps the most important soft skill.

One of the underlying assumptions about technology is that it makes life easier or more efficient. This turns out to be a false assumption.

A school leader admitted to me, "We spend so much time trying to decide if the goals are specific, measurable, and all of the other adjectives for the acronym, we have no time to think about what we are going to do."

If we can conclude one thing about teaching and learning it is that there is no single organization, strategy, or practice that “works” in every situation.

Good teachers embrace the “take-them-from-where-they-are” reality of the work.

The most effective teachers, I have found, are those who have honed the craft of understanding a particular problem, then finding and refining on of the many choices available and using it to meet the immediate needs of students.

Intelligence. We don’t really know what it is.

I was trusted to make decisions about how I taught when I started. We sought to be as responsive to the needs of our students as we could. When I left, my decisions were influenced more by curriculum gurus, politicians, industry trends, and tests than by my knowledge and abilities.

If you have a brain in isolation, you don’t have intelligence.

Intelligence is in what we know, how we interact, and what society has recorded.

If you don’t see the world differently then you didn’t learn.

“Intelligence is too complex and multifaceted a thing to reduce to any single dimension.”
― Stephen Jay Gould,

Educators may see their role as primarily academic, but their learners will never be ready to learn if they do not become advocates for the mental and physical health of their students. "My job is to teach science (or whatever)" is no longer a tenable position.

Learning is the outcome of interaction such as modeling, explaining, asking, coaching, and many other activities that are replicated in good classrooms.

The familiarity that comes from recent experience cannot be confused with better performance. This is especially true when it comes to IT.

In many settings, IT solutions can be engineered and tested for highly predictable uses. In schools, one cannot accurately predict how IT will be used until it is used by students and teachers for educational tasks. Classrooms are places where diverse lessons are taught by diverse teachers to diverse students whose experiences affect how effective a lesson will be.

Most school leaders freely admit they are not “technology people.” While they use technology for their work, they generally have not built a career around using it, studying it, and managing it to the same degree they have other aspects of school operations.