A new group has been formed at my school seeking to define the best practices in terms of fostering a professional learning amongst colleagues on campus.  Our goals are influenced by research by Judith Warren Little (1981), whose definition of collegiality encompasses four specific behaviors:

(I)  Adults talk about best practice frequently

(II)  Adults in schools observe each other teaching in their native setting

(III)  Adults engage together in work on curriculum

(IV)  Adults teach each other best practices

The goal is to better define what it means to be colleagues as professional educators at Culver.  Changes will initially begin with faculty/staff meetings. I think we will begin to move from our current format, which is much more formal (imagine a room filled with faculty and staff where administrators generally provide updates and critical information), to a style which encompasses a greater portion of the school community.  The goal is to empower faculty and staff in a number of ways (which we are still hashing out), some of which are:

- empower faculty and staff by allowing freedom to choose the sessions they wish to attend

- provide avenues for greater dialogue by conducting discussions in small group settings

- create cross-curricular situations where we can teach and learn from one another’s best practices

-investigating the implementation of “Critical Friends Groups” as well as Japanese lesson studies

This is all very much a work in progress, but I am excited about the possibilities that will develop in the coming months.

I would love to hear your comments as well as how your school conducts faculty/staff meetings and/or fosters professional development.

This first video is the most recent. My conceptual physics students have been studying heat and heat transfer. Last week I decided to make up a batch of thermite and use it to illustrate heat transfer via conduction, convection and radiation. My students got a big kick out of this, even though it was very cold out when we did the demo.

Chem-o-ween from Phil Cook on Vimeo.

This second video comes from the vault. I first started “Chem-o-ween” in 2006 while teaching at Oak Park & River Forest High School. I originally had planned for these demos to be performed for my chemistry students. This very quickly turned (via word of mouth) into a large scale performance for the majority of the chemistry classes that day. Definitely a memorable experience. I miss the chemistry teachers at OPRF very much.

Hope you enjoy the videos.

Earlier this afternoon I found out (through my PLN via Twitter) that a new web app called Edmodo had just launched.  Edmodo is aimed squarely at the education community and seeks to provide a Twitter-like experience within a structured group environment.  So far, it looks promising.  It is easy enough to add groups and has basic functions that many educators will like such as “tweeting” specific tasks such as assignments, links, notes, alerts and events.  If you are in a school where laptops and/or computer workstations are common, this may be a wonderfully useful app.  I am going to test it out with one of my classes and see how it stands up.  I have been using Google Calendar to post individual daily plans and link to documents for my students to download, but this may be a simpler solution.  I am willing to give it a try.

One question though, I love the concept of the “locker” within Edmodo (check out the voicethread on their blog to see what I am talking about), but I am perplexed.  I am able to save assignments to the locker, but I cannot figure out how to move them and share saved assignments with my groups.  Any advice?  Throw it my way.  Tweet @cookp

I must say that the greatest tool that I have gained this summer is my human network.  Research was something that I had never attempted.  Not only was I intimidated (though I was excited to learn something new), but I was working with a group of researchers in the cutting edge nanotechnology sector of the Electrical Engineering department at Notre Dame.  I had no experience with engineering.  I came in as a chemistry and physics instructor who was unsure about the experience.  I soon realized that research at it’s core is fundamentally dependant upon the formation of a human learning collaborative.  Collaboration played a vital role in weekly group meetings.  Feedback and open constructive criticism serve as invaluable tools in research. If I didn’t know quite where to go next with my experiment, I relied on graducate students and my supervising professor to point me in the right direction.  No one expected me to have all of the answers…and no one presumed to have them all either.

The power of the learning network was also amplified through the many sessions of the Builiding Learning Communities conference.  Although many of the seminars that I attended dealt with specific tools or web-based products, the common thread between the tools and products discussed was that of building connections between other humans and facilitating the transfer of thoughts, opinions and advice in an efficient medium.  Whether you use twitter, blippr, pownce, jaiku, or the myriad of other web 2.0 tools out there, the strength of the tool lies in the connectivity of the humans using the tech.

I realized that signing up for twitter will get you no where, unless you make some initial connections.  Once you have established a base of people to connect with, be it three, five or more persons, you set the connectivity ball in motion.  With a bit of patience and a dedication to become familiar with using the tool, your network grows and expands as you are exposed to new people through your connections.

As an educator, this is tremendously powerful.  You become part of a collective intelligence.  No longer do you have to be an expert on everything.  You have a learning network to support you.  Need help with a lesson or just brainstorming?  Fire off a tweet.  Want a second opinion on the lab activity you are trying for the first time?  Post it to the classroom 2.0 group on ning.  The evolution of education is well on its way.  Where educators were once sequestered and secluded, ideas can flow seamlessly across borders.  Teachers can connect with professors as well as other classes hundreds of miles away.  Collaboration is fostered and can flourish.  Student work can be assessed by a multiple persons with different vantage points.

Howard Rheingold predicted much of what I have now experienced more than three years ago.  Check out his talk on TED:

Want someone to collaborate with?  I would be happy to join in on the discussion.

TwitterID: cookp