The Academy Way

Thank you to the participants who joined us today for our session at the Forum for Innovative Leadership Conference in Memphis!

We hope that you have gained a greater understanding of the systems work of the Arkansas Leadership Academy’s School Support Program and learned several new collaboration and facilitation tools to take back to your own districts/organizations.

We invite you to leave us a comment here by clicking on the “Comments” link at the bottom of this post and give us your feedback from the session or ask any questions you might like to follow up on.

Again, thank you for your participation today, and we look forward to hearing from you!

According to participants, sharing resources is one of the greatest benefits of attending an Academy leadership institute. Not so long ago, a shared resource would be a book, journal article, workshop or maybe some computer software. In a relatively short period of time, we’ve rocketed to the age of free, web-based resources, most of which can be operated on pocket-size devices with a memory once required to run a computer the size of a room.

On March 22, Edublogs started the “Teacher Challenge”–

Over the next four weeks, we will present as many of the best free web tools for educators and students as we possibly can. We’ve got tools and websites of all types that you are going to love.

The “challenge” is to follow the Teacher Challenge blog, read about the new tools, and carve out some time each week to try out the tools with students; then come back and share with the Teacher Challenge blog.

http://teacherchallenge.edublogs.org/

Based on resources shared by our participants during recent institutes, there are Arkansas educators already using many of these “challenge” tools in their classrooms…

YOUR Academy Way challenge is to visit the Teacher Challenge blog and report back to your pals on the Academy Way blog about which Teacher Challenge tools you have used or are planning to use with student or adult learners in your school…and by all means make us proud by also signing up to participate in the Teacher Challenge!

Amanda Linn

While no one would ever mistake me for a mathematician, lately I’ve been pondering some numbers related to teaching and learning:

• A student starting with pre-kindergarten and ending 13 years later as a graduating senior will have experienced roughly 833,040 minutes of instruction according to Arkansas requirements.
• A teacher, after 30 years in the profession, will have been required to participate in roughly 108,000 minutes of professional development according to Arkansas requirements.

In either case, given all the possibilities for sharing knowledge that exist today, educators who value high-quality learning experiences for student and adult learners understand those minutes are never enough to exchange information. With this in mind, the Arkansas Leadership Academy launches The Academy Way - conversations about teaching, learning, and leadership.

As we designed our blog, we used the following questions to guide our efforts:

How do we continually learn? How do we facilitate/model continuous learning for others?

Prior to establishing this blog, we were still operating in the “Web 1.0″ world – pushing content out to many people via a website, email, and newsletter. The Academy Way, in addition to the Arkansas Leadership Academy Facebook page and, soon, an ALA Twitter feed will take us into the “Web 2.0″ world. By reading and responding to electronic posts, two-way communication in the online commons is created. The ideas and resources we share will come from Academy staff; however, we encourage you to share ideas and resources from your schools as well. Please submit that information to Nicole Francis, nldable@uark.edu.

We know your professional and personal minutes are precious. We hope you’ll choose to spend some of them learning with us, The Academy Way.

See you in the cloud!

Amanda Linn