School 2.0

One of the things that happens in schools is that people think they can divorce things curriculum and pedagogy from the other systems and structures that exist in schools - things like food service and discipline and parent relationships and hiring and the dozens of other processes and interactions that happen in schools, but it is our experience that is not the case. When you have a vision for what a school can be, it has to permeate every pore of the school. Every process, every interaction, every system needs to be held to that process. And while there are pieces of the school that may only be tangential to the mission, it is important to go through the process of stepping through how the core vision of the school affects each part of the school.

Because the thing is… when you move to a more inquiry-driven, student-empowered school, it really does affect everything. When students become empowered to ask questions and seek out answers, everything changes, and you cannot -- and should not -- think that you can leave inquiry at the classroom door. When teachers see themselves as learners and researchers and planners, they will question traditions and policies. And as a community, everyone has to learn how to bring these ideas to bear to make the school whole.

[Note One:I need to go back and re-read Moral Leadership by Thomas Sergiovanni, because I want to line up these ideas with his ideas of "The virtuous school." It's been too long since I've re-read the book. ]

[Note Two: After reading this post, I realize how incomplete it feels to me. I don't know if the post itself is greater than the sum of the words on the screen. This feels like it might be one of those ideas that feels almost ephemeral - the very attempt to write about it makes it feel like less than it should be. I hope the ideas came across. By all means, let me know in the comments what you think or what the idea of the transformative school means to you.]

There are a lot of really good schools in the world - schools where kids learn from teachers who care about them, where kids get into good colleges and learn stuff and generally have a good experience with teachers who care about them. There's nothing wrong with those schools - they generally do right by kids, teachers like teaching in them, and generally teaching and learning in these spaces are enjoyable experiences.

But there's another level that schools can achieve. Schools can transform. They can eclipse content and skills and become about something more. They can be about realizing the best versions of ourselves.

There were a few realizations that really crystallized this line of thinking for me. First, I realized as much as I care about the skills that we attempt to measure, the most powerful interactions I had, the most important things that happened in the classroom were as much about social-emotional learning as they were about Hamlet or the five-paragraph essay. For the longest time, I just chalked that up to being an English teacher - "We get to teach about life," was my trademark answer. But I saw this happening in computer science classes as kids learned sticktoitiveness. (And yes, that's a word.) And I saw it on the basketball and Ultimate fields as kids saw the value in shared sacrifice toward a common goal.

The second (these weren't really sequential…) epiphany was this - I knew I wasn't as good a person as the kids thought I was, although I wanted to be. So I tried to be. And while I think I always fall short of the ideal, I think I'm a better person for the effort. The easiest place to explain how I felt about this was, not surprisingly, the basketball court. I was not a particularly good basketball player growing up. (I know, this comes as a shock to everyone.) And when I started coaching, I quickly realized that I had to learn like crazy to be worthy of a group of young women who showed up to practice every morning at 6:30 am. I had to be better. We could lose games because the other team was taller, faster, more talented. We could lose games because our shots just wouldn't fall. But I never wanted to lose a game because I wasn't good enough - I wasn't worthy of the trust those girls put in me. The same thing was (and is) true at SLA. I knew we'd be up against some pretty long odds to succeed, and I knew we might not make it, but I wasn't o.k. that the families and faculty that put their trust in our dream might be let down because I wasn't good enough.

Finally, there was the realization that not everyone had this experience in the classroom or in their school… that in so many places, kids were happy to just do what was asked of them, teachers were willing to keep recycling "good enough" lessons out every day, and administrators were happy to see classes that were functional, never asking if the whole was greater than the sum of its parts.

And so… here are some (by no means all) of my components of the transformative school:

• The school has goals beyond the accumulation of skills and content, looking to educate "the whole child" in real, profound ways. At SLA, this is what leads us to talk about "thoughtful, wise, passionate and kind."
  
• The whole must be greater than the sum of its parts. It's not just about "great teachers" and "great kids," but rather about an entire community that is better because it is together.
  
• And the very important corollary to that - each part is made better by the whole. (Or in other words, we are made better because we have been together.)
  
• Whatever values we want for the kids, we must want for ourselves - if we wish to transform the lives of kids, we have to be willing to be transformed ourselves. If we want kids to discover the best versions of themselves, we must be willing to do so ourselves.
  
• And when this happens, it should spread well beyond the walls of the school so that the community can share in the transformation.
  
• This doesn't happen by serendipity. There has to be systems and structures that allow everyone access to these ideas. At SLA, those are the core values, the essential questions, the individualized learning plans, the capstones, Advisory and so many other systems, structures and processes that we have put in place to make our school about much more than a discrete set of classes. As so many kids have said at the end of their tenure at SLA, "You did more than teach us a way to learn, you taught us a way to live."
  
• Know that you -- the school and all the members in it - are always a work in progress, and the knowledge of how much growth is left in front of you should be a profoundly humbling experience each and every day.
  
• Know that good ideas evolve over time… transformative schools are evolutionary in nature. Schools that are healthy for all members rarely go through hard 180 shifts in directions. They change over time, often slowly, but always in ways that should make sense given the mission of the school.
  
• Never settle. Never think you are done. Never be o.k. with just being a "good school." Never stop learning, growing and attempting to be that best version of what you -- and the school -- can be. And never underestimate how hard this is.
  

I don't know that SLA is a transformative school - I like to think that on our best days we are. We certainly aspire to be. No matter what, it is a worthy effort.

There are those in the educational and political landscape these days who would dismantle the entire institution of school, and those people would use the tools we love so much to argue for the irrelevance of school itself. It can be a seductive argument especially when so many schools frustrate us with the degree to which they underserve children. However, the fundamental purpose of public school -- the idea that create physical spaces that are comitted to educating a nation -- is a good one.

There’s no question that how we conceive of school must change, but the why we have them remains as vital today as it ever has been. In an age where segmentation of markets, segmentation of society, keep people apart from those who think differently, who look differently, who live differently than they do, schools bring us together to learn from and with each other.

There is a subtle and yet vital difference in the fundamental role of school in the modern world. For the past 100 years, in most American schools, the school was important because it was where the information was... it was where the teacher was. The classroom was important because it was where people came together to get the information from the teacher. And while this is an oversimplification of the pedagogy of the past 100 years, it is, sadly, an accurate description of the dominant paradigm in American education. It is the Prussian model that Horace Mann brought back from Europe and instituted across the country with great success.

And let’s be clear - this model educated a nation with greater success than the world had ever seen - and so it is understandable to see why it has been so hard to let go of the old vision of what schools look like. Much of we see with the “No excuses” charter school model, No Child Left Behind and other current “reform” movements seem like an attempt to recapture the hazily remembered nostalgic days when students sat and patiently absorbed information from caring teachers. But to quote the song, “the good old days weren’t all that good and tomorrow ain’t as bad as it seems.”

So if the reason to come together in a classroom isn’t because the teacher is there to dispense the knowledge, why come together in a classroom?

It’s because that’s where we come together to learn.

Let’s never forget that.

A vibrant classroom, filled with active learners is a wonderful place that deserves to be nurtured. Learning can happen in many ways, and not all moments of learning have to be social, but equally, not all learning moments should be solitary as well. All over the world, there are classrooms where students learn together with caring, dedicated teachers. In these places, the social learning means that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. It is the promise of these classrooms, these schools that we must grasp onto.

And they are not as rare we think.

In every school, there are teachers who make the classroom into something special. They listen to students, push them to reach beyond what they knew their grasp could be. There are students who look forward to class those classes so that they be in deep learning environments. And in all those places, the learning goes far beyond acquisition of knowledge and skills and content. In all those places, there is meaning and wisdom and passion.

And at schools like High Tech High in San Diego and MET Academy in Providence, RI and Science Leadership Academy, students and teachers and administrators have come together to build entire communities that learn this way. And there are many, many more schools that have build powerful learning communities out there. We just have to do a better job of looking for them.

That is what school can be. As a nation, we can imagine many different models for school, but the fundamental idea that we build places where all children can come together to learn remains one of the best ideas we’ve ever had as a society.

We shouldn’t lose it. We just have to make sure our schools reflect the time in which we live.

Was it really just a week ago?

For the fifth time, SLA invited its personal learning network to come spend three days to come to our funky little school and learn with us. As conference co-chair, I'd grown to lament that I never seemed to spend as much time learning as I wanted to at the conference. It was always a great learning experience, but for me, I always spent a lot of necessary time running the conference and trying to be a good host.

This year, I was a lot less needed as the students and parents of SLA took care of everything. O.k. - it's quite possible that the difference was I was able to let go more, too. They're pretty amazing every year. But we're all getting better at doing the logistics of the conference, so that seniors are teaching younger students, veteran parents are working with new parents, and teachers continue to give up time after classes, after grading to work on the conference. So this year, I actually spent five of the six sessions in facilitated conversation sessions that were really lovely. (O.k. - one was mine, but I thought it went well.)

So what are my take-aways? There are many:

1) I love my community - both my immediate SLA community and the larger EduCon community. The students and parents and teachers of SLA amaze me every day, but EduCon really does blow me away every year. Watching our student co-chairs, Alaya and Ryan, put the work in to manage an incredible staff of student volunteers, watching Jeff and the EduConcierge team take care of what seemed like every need of the conference attendees, watching the parents take such pride in their children's school, and watch student after student give a tour, talk to adults, present their ideas and just generally take part in this amazing conversation about education just makes me proud beyond words.

2) I loved this year's Friday night panel, but the quote that stands out the most for me was Dan Barcay citing Steven Johnson about innovation meaning being willing to "chase the adjacent possible." That phrase is going to marinate with me for a while, because I think there is a lot there for us in education.

3) It was really interesting to have a Philly politician give the welcoming remarks, instead of a district official. I thought Councilman Green gave a very different perspective on Philly education and how it needs to change than previous officials have. And I greatly appreciated that the councilman and his staff spent much of the conference in sessions as learners and participants. What if more of our elected officials took the time to just learn about education and how educators are innovating, rather than listening to more moneyed voices? Wouldn't we be in a better place as a nation?

4) This year, we reached out more to educators of color to come to EduCon as it was a justified critique of the conference in years past that there were too few. And while we still have more to go on this front -- especially recruiting more educators of color to present -- this was the most racially diverse EduCon we've ever had. Folks like Kyra Gaunt and Chris Emdin spoke powerfully about race and innovation on the panels and as session facilitators, and we are better for it. And there were more educators of color speaking in sessions as participants and lending their ideas and wisdom. This is a trend we will work to see get better, and there's no question that we will be a better conference for it.

5) David Jakes is doing some really profound work with his design thinking workshops. During his "What if" session, I found myself at a science table with Bill Fitzgerald, Michael Wacker, Darren Kuropatwa and others discussion our best "What if" ideas and building from there. The design thinking manta is so easy at its root, and yet so powerful, and David is a wonderful facilitator who gets people spinning ideas quickly and powerfully.

6) One reason I love the facilitated discussion model of session is that I think it creates a situation where everyone in the room is a learner (much like SLA classes.) Pia Martin and I ran a conversation called "What Happens When the Kids Run the School?" which was about what progressive discipline (and I still don't like the word choice of 'discipline' there) and how we try to structure it at SLA. The conversation was really lively, and folks really were having some fantastic conversations in small and large group. As a result, the ideas and questions that were flowing were really great. Session participants were more than willing to push back on ideas and challenge each other and us. As a facilitator, that forces me to really listen deeply to what people were saying, both to help people hear each other but also to give thoughtful answers when I was directly asked questions. As a result, people got me to a place where I was framing some of my core beliefs in ways I had not before. For example, I was asked about whether or not showing kids empathy and care would be doing them a disservice because the real world isn't as caring. I answered with two ideas that I don't think I'd ever really framed that way before. One was, "The kids have the rest of their life to learn that people can be cruel, they don't have to learn that from me," and two was, "we should create our schools so that they mirror the world, not as it is, but as we hope it could be." Both of those ideas are going to lead to longer blog posts, as they have given me a new lens to think through a core belief. I would not have gotten that lens were it not for the really wonderful folks in Room 208 who processed their ideas aloud with me.

7) There are many educators doing incredible work that the EduCon / ed-tech world are not aware of. We try to bring those voices to the Sunday morning panel every year. Pam Moran and Chris Walsh are known to many in the EduCon world, and they were amazing on the panel, but Karen Tal, Chris Emdin and Wyneshia Foxworth are largely unknown to the EduCon world. We - all of us - really have to keep working to find amazing folks who are doing great work and amplify their voices. Chris Emdin is doing some of the most incredible work in urban STEM education, and when he said, "The problem isn't when transformative ideas get institutionalized, it is when they get co-opted," it was as if I had been hit with a 2 x 4. That was yet another lens that I'd been looking for.

Dan Barcay is cool. I mean… he was great on the panel… his session was a ton of fun… and I was lucky enough to spend a lot of time talking to him… but he's really cool because like Jeff Han before him, he had his most fun just talking to the SLA kids about math, computer science and life. And in doing so, he modeled joy of learning, humility, kindness and care in the most wonderful way. The kids in Room 521 in Friday… the kids who sat around the table in the SLA office with him on Sunday… they had an experience they will never forget. Maybe it shouldn't be amazing when non-educator folks who don't have to be kind to kids and take joy in their presence are, but Dan was tireless and we are a better school for it.

9) For me, meaning really is so often socially constructed. The conversations I had with folks in sessions, at lunch, at dinner, on Twitter were incredible. I love being alone with my own thoughts sometimes, but I also love making meaning by sharing ideas with others. I was in sessions facilitated by Kirsten Olson, Glenn Moses, Kyra Gault, Chad Sansing, Christina Cantrill, David Jakes, Glenn Moses and Michael Wacker and in every session, these incredible teachers created space for participants to take apart ideas together. I listened to a young woman in a private school tease out how she could be a better advocate for LBGT kids in her school. I listened to folks talk about moments when they were uncomfortable in their identity. I talked to teachers as they tried to figure out how they could get more teachers over their fear of change when it came to incorporating changes in pedagogy and more modern tools into their practice. Every session was filled with people making meaning together in practical and theoretical ways that I hope will have meaningful impact in their classrooms and schools.

And perhaps that should bring me to 10). I know I'm still learning. I don't look for EduCon or any other conference to provide me with the epiphany that will cause some Copernican shift in my thinking. I think I'm still open to that, but I'm pretty well-read on education issues, and I'm surrounded by some pretty serious thinkers at SLA every day, so I have a pretty deep set of beliefs about what education can be. But EduCon still provides me with the opportunity to interact with over 500 really amazing educators who push my thinking, reframe ideas for me, deepen thoughts, push boundaries and generally allow me to think about "the adjacent possible." It's up to me to make sense of it when it is over, and to figure out what the little 'e' epiphanies were and how they will impact my practice in the year to come.

Thanks to everyone who came this year and made me think. And thanks to everyone in our funky little school community who worked so hard to put the conference on.

See you at EduCon 2.5!

One of the things I'm always meaning to do on my blog but don't do as often as I'd like is break down how we do some of the things we do at SLA. So when someone asked a really good question on Facebook, it seemed like a perfect time to turn the answer into a blog post. Here's the question:

I have been involved with schools that have an advisory system -- but it seems very challenging to bring it into the public school system since teachers are not trained to be advisors. How do you suggest we work towards solving this issue?

The most important thing is this: Prioritize it. So what does that look like...

1) Schedule it with real time and don't make that time the dumping ground or the place you steal time from every time something comes us. Don't make it first thing in the morning so it is easy to skip. Treat it as a real extra class that teachers have to work to prepare for, because while it may not be as much work from a grading perspective, the time and energy teachers will spend caring for children, getting to know families, dealing with issues that come up is real. Advisory cannot be the thing teachers deal with after they have dealt with everything else or it will just be "homeroom" like it is in so many places. For us, that means scheduling time for Advisory for 50 minutes at the end of the day, twice a week, and teachers teach four classes plus Advisory instead of five classes plus homeroom as they would in other School District of Philadelphia schools.

2) Don't assume that teachers know how to care for children - teach them how to. I love Carol Lieber's book "The Advisory Guide" (published by Educators for Social Responsibility) as a foundation text. Do a book study with teachers about it. Then have a subcommittee that helps to draft a framework for the curriculum with broad themes for each year and examples of ways to execute them. Our committee has our Health teacher, our counselors and some of the teachers who are really invested in Advisory and they set the agenda (with me) on how to run workshops for our faculty.

3) Make it matter by making it a core function of the school. We don't have traditional Parent-Teacher Conferences here. We have Parent-Student-Advisor conferences where teachers all write narrative report cards which are then processed / talked about / reviewed by the parent, student and advisor together. This makes the Advisor the primary link to the families, which goes a long way toward really making the power of Advisory tranparent to families (and teachers.) If a child gets in trouble, advisors are looped in immediately. Our college counselor works with the advisors so that they are the primary school-based adults to help students make decisions about their college process.

4) Don't make it "just another class." Teachers know how to teach classes, but they may not know how to have a class that is really more group high school survival therapy than any other subject. So you have to help teachers resist the urge to create assignments that can be graded and have homework, etc... I always think of Advisory as a pressure value for kids, so if it becomes something that has a lot of homework and requires a lot of work for a grade, it defeats the purpose.

In the end, the shorthand we use for the way we think about how Advisory drives much of the way we think about the relationships between students and teachers can be summed up with two ideas - first, you have to think of Advisory as the soul of your school. Second, with everything you do, remember that you teach students before you teach subjects. At SLA, we believe there is a difference between saying, "I teach English" and "I teach kids English." Kids should never be the implied object of their own education. Advisory is the place in the schedule where that idea has its core and then it spreads into everything else we do.

[Ever since I became a principal, I've blogged much less about my personal politics. I hope folks who read this blog understand why I felt the need to write this and respect that I am asking that the comments do not become a place to argue about the case itself.]

Tomorrow morning, I'll go into our school with its incredibly diverse population of wonderful urban kids.

Tomorrow, I'll have many conversations with kids who are trying to make sense of fact that the state of Georgia executed a man whose guilt was very much in doubt. Sadly, the best I can offer them is that so am I.

Tomorrow the best I will have to offer students is that I don't have any more answers than they do. That I am as confused and angry as they are.

Tomorrow I will be reminded - even more than most days - of how troubled we are as a nation… how far we have to go in the ways we talk about and deal with race…. and I hope, as I often am, that I will be reminded of how this next generation will be more understanding, more honest, more accepting than my generation is.

Tomorrow I will share Chris Emdin's words about how urban kids can learn from what happened to Troy Davis.

Tomorrow I will remind kids to be smart and to be safe in the choices they make and to never put themselves in situations they cannot get out of.

Tomorrow the best I have for kids is that we must try to live our lives with compassion and wisdom.

Tomorrow I will believe that the way we learn at SLA might just give us a pathway to change the world.

Tomorrow I talk about how I believe that changing the world starts when we try to be the best versions of ourselves and move outward from there.

Tomorrow I will listen to kids as deeply and openly as I know how.

Tomorrow I will tell the kids how much I love them.

Tomorrow I walk back into the building that represents my best answer to how to create a more just, more kind world.

Tomorrow I will make sure the kids know that they are my best hope for a solution.

Yes folks, we are doing it again --

EduCon 2.4 tickets are on sale!

What is EduCon?

EduCon is both a conversation and a conference.

And it is not a technology conference. It is an education conference. It is, hopefully, an innovation conference where we can come together, both in person and virtually, to discuss the future of schools. Every session will be an opportunity to discuss and debate ideas - from the very practical to the big dreams.

The Axioms

Guiding Principles of EduCon

• Our schools must be inquiry-driven, thoughtful and empowering for all members
  
• Our schools must be about co-creating - together with our students - the 21st Century Citizen
  
• Technology must serve pedagogy, not the other way around
  
• Technology must enable students to research, create, communicate and collaborate
  
• Learning can - and must - be networked

EduCon takes place at the Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia, PA on January 27-29th. It costs $150 to attend for non-School District of Philadelphia folks, and $100 for Philly teachers.

This is our fifth year running the conference, and it really is, for the whole SLA community, a highlight of the year. The conference happens because of hundreds of hours of work by SLA faculty, students and parents, and then it is amazing because of the incredible good will and energy and joy that the teachers / facilitators / attendees bring to it.

This year, perhaps more than ever, as educators continue to feel like school reform is being done to them, EduCon is a chance for us to talk to each other, talk with students, talk with parents, and come together to design healthier, modern schools that are empowering for all who inhabit them. So register, and think about submitting a proposal to facilitate a session, but most importantly...

Join us.

I had the opportunity to co-curate / co-host the #140edu conference with Jeff Pulver a few weeks ago, and it was just an incredible day of really interesting talks and lots of wonderful schmoozing in the "Schmooze Room." You should definitely check out all the talk from the two days (and thank you, Meenoo, for putting that list together, but I want to highlight three that involved SLA.

This first one is Christian Long moderating a panel of five SLA alumni, talking about our school. I love listening to the five young adults talk about our community. They honor the work we all do together.


The next panel was moderated by Rebecca Levey and featured three of SLA's Home and School parents and me talking about school-parent relationships. It was really wonderful getting to share the stage with my parents and talk about what our school means to their families.


And here's the opening of the conference - I had to take a later train than I had planned, and I was tweeting my progress in the taxi, and Jeff Pulver did a wonderful job of opening the conference as I raced to get there. Jeff is about the most genuine person you could ever hope to meet. Jeff has been one of the folks building the tools and then building the communities that are changing the way we live. It was my pleasure to share the stage with him and to share this last clip with him. In my part of the talk, I kept playing with the ideas that really are driving my thinking about how these tools, married to progressive pedagogy, are changing the way we can teach and learn.



We had such a great time at #140Edu that we're going to do it again next year - July 31st and August 1st at the 92nd St. Y.

Hope to see you there.

This is just an idea that’s been bouncing around in my head for a while now, and it felt time to put words to page.

Imagine this high school:

Every morning, the first thing everyone did was read the New York Times for an hour. Now, imagine that they are using some kind of Kindle-style software so that they can annotate with ideas, questions, etc... such that at the end of the hour, the school community could see who had similar questions from the day’s paper.

And now, imagine what it would look like if the kids spent the better part of the day researching those questions and seeing where that took them, with the end of every day being a "share out" where kids shared what they learned across a variety of media.

So, let's not go any further than that for a moment - wouldn't that be a better high school experience than many of the schools across the country? Wouldn't it be an amazing way to encourage life-long learning, inquiry-based learning, research, collaboration and presentation if kids did something like this every day?

But what about math? What about literature? How would kids learn

Good questions. And maybe kids wouldn't all learn the same set of skills. But I'm guessing most kids would find the reasons they needed to learn certain math skills. I'm thinking that a subset of kids would wait every week for the Science Times and spend much of the time in the week in between designing experiences, researching all manner of questions and doing all kinds of science learning based on the questions that were raised. And I'm thinking that a bunch of kids would live and die with the Times Review of Books for new books to read. And if reading about the debt crisis this past week doesn't give you a reason to want to really understand statistics and budgeting and, well, math, then what will?

But what about the material they don't learn?

Well, if we believe that high school is about helping students to become fully realized citizens, and reading the New York Times every day for four years doesn't give you reason to want to learn something, does that start to raise the question of whether or not it is important to learn?

I'd love to think that teachers would jump at the chance to spend their time analyzing the kinds of questions kids were asking, and trying to help guide them to what they were searching for. I'd imagine that, for many teachers, that would invigorate them to be engaged in true inquiry-based learning.

I'm sure there are 1,000 reasons not to start this school... 1,000 reasons this might not work.

But isn't interesting to, instead, wonder if it could?

In case you haven't heard...

I'll be in New York City on August 2nd and 3rd at the #140Edu Conference - exploring the state of education NOW. Thanks to Jeff Pulver, it's an incredible chance to come together with educators, parents, social media mavens and the like to spend two days exploring the changing nature of education... what the promise and possibilities are right now to change the way we think about learning.

The list of speakers is incredible, with some of my favorite folks to listen to and some folks I can't wait to meet:

– Adam Bellow (@adambellow) – Founder, eduTecher
– Andrea G. Michnik (@AndreaGenevieve) – Director of PR and Social Media Marketing, International Studies Abroad
– Ann Leaness (@aleaness) – HS English Teacher, Grad Ed Adjunct and EdCampPhilly co-organizer
– Barry Joseph (@barryjoseph) – Online Leadership Program, Global Kids, Inc.
– Barry Schuler (@BSchuler) – Chairman, New Tech Network; Director, KnowledgeWorks Foundation
– Chris Lehmann (@chrislehmann) – Principal of the Science Leadership Academy
– Christian Long (@ChristianLong) – Vice President – Education, Cannon Design
– Cynthia Lawson (@cynthialawson) – Assistant Professor and Artist, Parsons The New School for Design
– Dale J. Stephens (@DaleJStephens) – Leader of the @UnCollege movement. Evangelist
– David A. Singer (@DavidASinger) – School Board Trustee, Harrison School District
– Debra Eckerling (@campusexplorer) – Senior Editor, Campus Explorer
- Don Burton (@dcburton) – Founder, eebee’s Adventures
– Donna Murdoch (@donnamurdoch) – Technology, Communication, and Education Sector, New York
– Douglas Crets (@DouglasCrets) – Director, dB C Media
– Dr. Douglas Green (@drdouggreen) – Retired Principal, Education Consultant based in Endicott, New York and blogger for DrDougGreen.Com
– Eric Sheninger (@NMHS_Principal) – Principal, New Milford High School
– Erik Endress (@erikendress) – Interactive & Social Media Specialist, New Jersey School Boards Association
– Ethan Bodnar (@ethanbodnar) – - Designer and senior at Hartford Art School (@HartfordArt)
– George Haines (@George_Haines) – Director of Technology, Sts. Philip and James School
– Gina Johnston (@NHSoCal) – Social Media Strategist, New Horizons Computer Learning Centers of Southern California
– Gregory Corbin (@JustGregPoet) – Executive Director, Philly Youth Poetry Movement.
– Inga Rós (@Inga_Ros) – Teacher, Commercial College of Iceland
– Jack Hidary (@jackhidary) – entrepreneur – business, social, political
– Janos Marton – Director, The Living Museum
- Jeff Keni Pulver (@jeffpulver) – founder, #140conf
– Joan Tiburzi (@JoanTiburzi) – current trustee and past president of the Harrison School Board
- John Mikulski (@JohnMikulski) – Middle School English Language Arts Teacher, Host of the Tightwad Teacher podcast, Classroominthecloud.net
– Karen Blumberg (@SpecialKRB) – NYCIST President. TEDxNYED, TEDxYouth@TheSchool, EdCampNYC, RoboExpo organizer.
– Katie McFarland (@Katiemc827) – Staff Development Specialist, Cattaraugus Allegany BOCES
– Kelly Sutton (@KellySutton) – Founder, HackCollege
– Kim Sivick (@ksivick) – Coordinator of Lower School Technology, Springside Chestnut Hill Academy
– Kristen Durkin (@Kristen_Durkin) – Graduate student at New York University, Huffington Post Blogger and Marketing Manager at Kforce Inc.
– Kyra D. Gaunt, Ph.D. (@kyraocity) – TED Fellow 2009. Voicing the unspoken thru song, scholarship & social media.
– Linnea Keys (@linneakeys) – Junior at Johns Hopkins University with a double major in History and East Asian Studies
– Lisa Nielsen (@InnovativeEdu) – Speaker. Author. Educational innovator.
– Louis N. Wool (@louisnwool) – Superintendent of Schools of the Harrison Central School District (and the 2010 NYS Superintendent of the Year).
- Lynn Langit (@llangit) – co-founder of Teaching Kids Programming
– Mahipal Raythattha (@mahipalr) – Founder, Brain Racer Inc.
– Marc Ecko (@marcecko) – founder, Marc Ecko Enterprises
– Meenoo Rami (@mrami2) – HS English teacher- Founder & moderator of #engchat. Teacher-Consultant for #nwp through #philwp and teacher at the Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia
– Mel Rosenberg (@MelRosenberg) – Educator, Parent, Futurist, Microbiologist
– Michael Margolis (@getstoried) – President and Founder, Get Storied
– Michele Haiken (@TeachingFactor) – Founder, theteachingfactor
– Mike Karnjanaprakorn (@mikekarnj) – Co-founder, Skillshare
– Patrick Higgins (@pjhiggins) – Supervisor of Humanities, Verona Public Schools
– Perry Hewitt (@perryhewitt) – Director – Digital, Harvard University
– Rebecca Levey (@beccasara) – Founder/Queen Bee, KidzVuz.com
– Shelley Krause (@butwait) – Academic Matchmaker & Tribe Finder, Rutgers Preparatory School
– Shelly S Terrell (@ShellTerrell) – Educator, tech trainer, Edtech, Elearning, TEFL. #Edchat coordinator.
– Steven W. Anderson (@web20classroom) – Educator, Speaker, Blogger, #Edchat Co-Creator, #140Conf Character, NOW Award Winner, ASCD Conference Scholar
– Tali Horowitz (@CommonSenseNews) – Education Program Manager, Common Sense Media.
– Tom Krieglstein (@tomkrieglstein) – Helping colleges create, increase, and measure student engagement as the founder of Swift Kick, creator of #SAchat and organizer of The NYEdTech Meetup.
- Tom Whitby (@tomwhitby) – Prof of Education. Founder: #Edchat, The EDU PLN Ning, Linkedin group Technology-Using Professors et al.
– Warren Etheredge (@thewarrenreport) – The Warren Report
– Wendy Brawer (@GreenMap) – Designer of services and products for sustainable communities, locally and globally
– Will Craig (@WillCraigatPWP) – Educational Director at Partners With Parents and Director of Educational Programming at The Handel Group

Jeff is making it only $1.40 for educators, as he really believes in this community and what we can do together.

Hope to see you there!