By The Symonds School Quest Team

Like all elementary schools, Symonds has its own distinct culture. The development and maintenance of the school environment requires intention and daily work. Social curriculum and academic collaboration require clarity and consistency throughout the building. Symonds art, music, PE, and media teachers all play a vital role in reinforcing the school culture. We do this regularly by creating opportunities to meaningfully express the foundations of our school.

We specialists (or “specials” teachers) teach every child in the school, often for five or six years. This long-term experience has several advantages:

via The Specials: Curriculum Enrichment Builds a Positive School Culture | Edutopia.

By David Slocum

2015 has already been a year of excellent and helpful publications for leaders wanting to improve themselves and their motivation and coordination of creative teams, projects and businesses. Some, like Herminia Ibarra’s already essential Act Like a Leader, Think Like a Leader and Stanley McChrystal’s powerful call for agility and cohesion, Team of Teams, highlight the importance of action-based leadership. Laszlo Bock’s manifesto for a new way of working, Work Rules!, and Heidi Halvorson’s manual for more authentic interactions, No One Understands You and What To Do About It, among others, focus on the centrality of cultivating talent and enhancing interpersonal communications. Still others argue convincingly for the relevance of behavioral economics, notably Richard H. Thaler’s instructive and spirited overview of the topic, Misbehaving, and Dilip Soman’s guide to applying its insights to create value, The Last Mile. Here is a further batch of valuable titles coming this fall.

via New Fall 2015 Readings For Better Creative Leadership – Forbes.

By Katrina Schwartz

Education has long been a hotly debated issue and with good reason — the policies and actions of education leaders affect our nation’s children, the future of the workforce and the day-to-day lives of families. But the struggle to improve the system has often left advocates in distinct camps, each believing that their solution, whether it be charter schools or blended learning or investing in teachers, is the best way to improve learning. That’s why it’s surprising to see a group of high-profile but strange bedfellows putting forward a new vision for learning, which they’re calling Education Reimagined.

The Education Reimagined vision statement comes out of almost two years of meetings where participants from very different sides of the education debate (labor representatives, charter proponents, district folks, business leaders, you name it) convened, left their individual missions and baggage at the door, and indulged in an exercise to imagine what a 21st century education should look like.

via An Unlikely Group Forms Unified Vision for the Future of Education | MindShift | KQED News.