As we all move into a new age of data-driven Professional Learning Communities. Like all new product development marketing, we have two choices.
We can do it the wrong way, which includes a lot of Powerpoint-toting, suit wearing, acronym-spewing middle managers (to paraphrase Seth Goden) with process and no substance.
Or we can learn from the inventor of the digital camera. He could have made the first camera store thousands of images, but instead chose 30 images, because it was like film worked.
Twenty five years later, film was dead and mobile phones now store thousands of images. I think he might have had something.
Click below to watch the video:
Inventor Portrait: Steven Sasson from David Friedman on Vimeo.
The point of the new data-driven PLC regime is to do what we’ve been doing–better.
Let’s not lose sight of what teaching is, while we lose sleep chasing ghosts of some new fangled methodology.
The data is to put some social-scientific meat on the bones of the core scientific method of trial and error which is, and always will be, good teaching.
PLC is not some panacea to replace the fundamental process of connecting with a child and seeing what works (and doesn’t) and adjusting.