Gary Ackerman @garyackerman@qoto.org

Those who say “we have always done it this way” should not receive pay increases, after all, “we have always paid you that.”

School is not about students, teaching, learning or any such thing. For me, it all started with A Nation at Risk.

I used to work with a principal and we disagreed on methods. I suggested we replace tests, and his response was "with what?" Over time I realized we had vastly different concepts of evaluation. I hoped to see growth, but he wanted numbers to display on a dashboard.

If you refer to students as “high performers” and “low performers” (using any terminology or in any guise), then your are bringing an obsolete concept learning and learners.

Education stopped being about learning a long time ago.

What good is critical thought if you do not yourself believe something or are not open to having your beliefs modified? - Mark Edmundson

If your leadership disallows questions (explicitly or implicitly, actively or passively, overly or covertly) you will fail and so will they.

Those who value immediacy, efficiency, and ease will find their systems precarious then disastrous.

"It would be a shame if brilliant technology were to end up threatening the kind of intellect that produced it." - Edward Teller

Leaders who pursue efficiency through analytics must ask: efficient for whom? Data can optimize systems while obscuring human costs.

#Science is a story of human perseverance and intellectual audacity.

Empathy requires knowledge and feeling.

The teacher is not merely a transmitter of content, but a cultivator of context. Guided discovery fosters autonomy and interpretive depth.

“Only connect.” -E. M. Forester distilled the essence of #teaching into two words.

I visit a web site regularly use their search tool an *always* see no results. Seriously?

A blog post thinking about what John Dewey tells us as educators in w world dominated by AI:
https://hackscience.education/2025/07/30/teaching-in-the-ai-world-a-time-for-john-dewey/
#schools #AI #education #teaching

When IT doesn’t believe users, the systems will fail.

Hey IT... your users are experts on how you have your systems configured... believe them... even if you don’t like what they are saying.

Having a PhD in k-12 education puts one at odds with the leadership trends. Despite their insistence they are data-driven, they don’t appreciate having to defend data and decisions which is what one is trained to do as a doctoral student.

“... we are unable to receive truth from anyone else but must create it ourselves.” -Marcel Proust This is the single most important lesson everyone in #teacher education should learn. #highered #highschool #edchat #teachertwitter #TeachingOnline #education