Virtualizing PD not only can give us access to all of the great speakers that we want to travel to see, but do it on our terms so that we can chunk the content enabling us to apply what we learn while we are learning it.

As you prepare to break in the coming weeks, don't long for it as a break from the myriad of poorly articulated tasks and goals that have been thrown at you, or an escape from uncooperative colleagues.

For years I have tried to impress on schools that they don’t need to fly in consultants for professional development, nor send staff to far off conferences. Great professional development can be as simple as a team…

Teams that step on the gas too hard at the start of the year and forget to let up will burn out.You can preserve and build on the goodwill that every team experiences at the beginning of the year, the “honeymoon period”.

A team getting derailed three to six months into the school year is highly probable. If the team does not have a shared purpose to remind them of what they are working to achieve, they will eventually retreat to their classrooms, where they can focus on and achieve personal goals.