How We Think About Our Business is How We Do Our Business - Annual Conference Preview

by Robert Harris, Director of School Improvement Initiatives,  Performance Learning Systems
Roundtable Session RT2 Tuesday December 4, 2012 10:00 AM to 12:00 PM

“… We don’t see things as they are – we see them as we are”…Anais Nin

How We Think About Our Business Is How We Do Our Business

• How DO we think about our business?
• What are our goals as an organization?
• What are the core competencies of this organization?
• How does it present itself to its many constituencies?
• How does its leadership present its vision for the future so that it can move towards it and bring it about?
• How does it establish, track, maintain and predict its’ processes so that it can continuously improve and develop in all of it’ major areas of focus?
• How does it plan to build an adaptive organization with a clear identity – without which a vision and the ability to reach it are jeopardized?
• NOTE: How we think influences the ways that we work together- How we work together influences the ways that we think about that work

…moving from a singular WE to a collective WE- a community of learners

The Potential to Revolutionize K–12 Education - Annual Conference Preview

 by Robert Harris,Director of School Improvement Initiatives

 VSCHOOLZ

 Roundtable Discussion RT1 Monday December 3, 2012 10:10 to 12:00 PM

Blended learning has the potential to revolutionize K–12 education in terms of quality and cost, as it allows for a fundamental redesign of the educational model around the following:

•  A more consistent and personalized pedagogy that allows each student to work at her own pace and helps each child feel and be successful at school. Leveraging technology, blended-learning programs can let students learn at their own pace, use preferred learning modalities, and receive frequent and timely feedback on their performance for a far higher quality learning experience. As online programs capture student achievement data in real-time across the school, teachers can spend more time helping personalize learning for students.
• Productive new school models that require fewer, more specialized teachers and use space more efficiently. Schools can leverage technology to create radically different staffing structures that increase school-wide student-teacher ratios, even as students experience more personalized learning from more effective teachers. Leveraging technology in this way changes the assumptions of the traditional school model, where labor has accounted for 70 to 85 percent of costs and where only a fraction of students have access to great teachers. Teachers shifting to blended-learning models are finding that they have more time to focus on high-value activities like critical thinking, writing, and project- based learning as they spend less time on low-value, manual tasks.

These opportunities to innovate can occur even as providers take advantage of the things that leading brick-and-mortar schools do well, such as creating a strong, supportive culture that promotes rigor and high expectations for all students, as well as providing healthy, supportive relationships and mentorship.