Academy Symposium

Opening by Director AST

Inside Teaching: How Classroom Life Undermines Reform by Mary Kennedy
Four hypotheses for failure of school reforms:

• Teachers need more knowledge and instructional strategie
• Teachers' personal qualities-their dispositions-impede reform
• Teachers' beliefs conflict with those of reformers, and teachers use those beliefs to justify practicing in ways that make them comfortable
• The conditions and circumstances of work in schools hinder reforms

Standards for Professional Learning – Professional Learning that increases educator effectiveness

Power of Collective Wisdom and the Trap of Collective Folly by Peter Senge

Growing Good Corn

There once was a farmer who grew award-winning corn. Each year he entered his corn in the state fair where it won a blue ribbon.

One year a newspaper reporter interviewed him and learned something interesting about how he grew it. The reporter discovered that the farmer shared his seed corn with his neighbors.

"How can you afford to share your best seed corn with your neighbors when they are entering corn in competition with yours each year?" the reporter asked.

"Why sir," said the farmer, "didn't you know? The wind picks up pollen from the ripening corn and swirls it from field to field. If my neighbors grow inferior corn, cross-pollination will steadily degrade the quality of my corn. If I am to grow good corn, I must help my neighbors grow good corn."

He is very much aware of the connectedness of life. His corn cannot improve unless his neighbor's corn also improves.

So it is with our lives. Those who choose to live in peace must help their neighbors to live in peace. Those who choose to live well must help others to live well, for the value of a life is measured by the lives it touches. And those who choose to be happy must help others to find happiness, for the welfare of each is bound up with the welfare of all.

The lesson for each of us is this: if we are to grow good corn, we must help our neighbors grow good corn.