Best Professional Development Meeting in Years!

Today was a staff development day at my school. For the first time in years we had nearly the whole day to talk with our departmental colleagues about our challenges, our successes, and what we're doing in our classrooms. Now, just to clarify we've had days where an hour or so was spent that way, but today we had the better part of five uninterrupted hours. Within the context of the day in my department we watched four videos. I've embedded those videos with short explanations below.

From TED we watched Joachim de Posada's talk about the Marshmallow Experiment. This video was shown in the context of a discussion about "wait time" in the classroom.

From TED we watched Tom Wujec's talk, "Build a Tower, Build a Team." We watched this in the context of encouraging students to take academic risks.


In the context of a discussion about how stereotypes affect can affect student performance we watched the following video from John Stossel.


In the context of a discussion about motivation we watched Alfi Kohn vs. Dwight Schrute.