Save the Dates - Teacher Entrepreneurship Week Interviews Start August 24th

Four evenings of interviews with amazing teacher entrepreneurs, on teachers as creators and agents. All free and broadcast through Google Hangouts on Air. More information here and/or register to watch live and have access to the recordings. Confirmed interviews with:

Adam Bellow
Alice Keeler
Angela Maiers
Anne Mirtschin
Barbara Bray
Benjamin Wilkoff
Bernard Bull
Bill Ferriter
Curt Bonk
Dan Meyer
David Warlick
Erin Klein
Jon Corripo
Julie Lindsay
Kathy Schrock
Lee Kolbert
Lisa Nielsen
Lucy Gray
Nicholas Provenzano
Nicole Tucker Smith
Paul Allison
Ramsay Musallam
Rushton Hurley
Shabbi Luthra
Shelly Terrell
Silvia Tolisano
Steven Anderson
Sylvia Martinez
Tom Whitby
Vicki A. Davis
Will Richardson

Thanks to event sponsor:

"Our children need to be treated as human beings - exquisite, complex and elegant in their diversity." - Lloyd Dennis

Systems of mass production can be really good at certain things.

If you go into a McDonalds anywhere, especially in the United States, you're pretty-much guaranteed you'll be able to order something from a menu that is pretty-much identical to the menu in every one of their restaurants, and that the food (hmmm....) that you get will be pretty-much identically prepared as it would also be in every one of their restaurants.

You want that. You want to know what you are going to get. You depend on it being exactly the same. And McDonalds wants to deliver it exactly that way. So they put in policies and procedures to guarantee that this will happen. These policies and procedures are documented and detailed, can be measured precisely, and--most important of all--can be scaled.

The quality of the output can be measured in very standard ways from the top down.

And this would be exactly the wrong way to run a school system.

Children are not identical meat patties to be prepared in identical ways. They are not sent to us as completely raw material, just to then be shaped by rule-bound, low-paid employees into identical products.

So, if children are exquisite, complex, and elegant in their diversity, and we take that as a starting point, how would we create learning environments for them? What would we consider to be success? How and where would we measure that success? And who would be doing the measuring?

Discuss. :)