Looking Back at 10 years of EdCamps Oh how the time flies, EdCamp Madison is turning 10 this year! It will be held Saturday, February 3rd at Sun Prairie West High School. Which can be found at 2850 Ironwood Drive in Sun Prairie Wisconsin from 8:30 am - 3:00 pm. Get more information and register here: https://sites.google.com/sunprairieschools.org/edcampmadwi/home I will always remember sitting in my first EdCamp opening session at the very first EdCamp Madison and having no clue what I was in for. So, I’d like to take this space to go over some of the basic rules of EdCamp. No One Will Pitch It for You EdCamps are unconferences. By this I mean that they have a blank slate of sessions for the day. There may be a few predetermined sessions, but ultimately the session topics are determined by attendees during the pitch & plan session that opens the day. If an idea gets pitched there will be a session on it. If a topic doesn’t get pitched, there won’t be a session on it. So, it i
When I first began teaching in my current school 13 years ago, we had something called power standards. There were specific power standards for each class. Teachers spent many professional development hours debating about them and refining the wording. These standards were eventually put onto posters to be placed on the wall. In many cases, the were just that: words that hung on a wall. It didn’t feel like anyone owned these standards. So, they had very little power at all. In John Spencer and A. J. Juliani’s new book Empower , they ask us to rethink standards. If I had been presented with the ideas in Empower 13 years ago, I probably would have argued that I need to abide by these power standards and there is little I could change. The authors reply to this is focus on the areas you have control over. They say, “Standards are the architect's blueprint, and you, the teacher, are still the builder and designer.” (pg. xxxviii) Specifically, they recommend finding