ASCD Conference Blogs

For the next few days, I’ll be posting much more frequently, and much shorter pieces.  The timing of the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD) conference couldn’t be much worse in terms of my school calendar and recent events, but I can’t pass up the chance to attend this outstanding conference so close to home (about 40 miles).

San Francisco City Hall - photo by author

San Francisco is supposed to be pretty damp and cool this weekend, but I anticipate the energy of the conference will make up for the gloom.  I think I saw someone on Twitter mention there are 9,000 people attending.  Hard for me to wrap my mind around that number.

I’ll be attending with colleagues from my school and my local teachers association.  On the school level, I’m particularly looking for sessions and resources that will help us make progress towards effective use of a professional learning community model to support ongoing professional development.  With my union-hat on, I’ll be in search of the best information about and tools relating to teacher evaluation.  We already have some evaluation practices in place that are unusual, and more effective than typical California teacher evaluations.  With the help of a supportive administration, we hope to update the evaluation article in our contract and make further progress as an innovative district.  My particular interest in evaluation practices goes back to the study we did on that topic here in Accomplished California Teachers; the resulting ACT teacher evaluation policy report can be found here.

So, keep on eye on InterACT for some quick thoughts, take-aways, observations, resources, and maybe some quick interviews from the ASCD 2011 Conference.  For increased connectivity, follow me on Twitter, and keep an eye on #ASCD11.