ideas to create a faculty culture where collaboration leads to creative growth across classrooms.

2. Deborah Loewenberg Ball, dean of the School of Education at the University of Michigan, says
the idea that some people are just born to be teachers, that the skill of good teaching is some
kind of inborn trait, runs deep in American culture.
And she says there’s this other idea that runs pretty deep too. It goes like this: “Teaching is
pretty easy,” she says. “I mean, it’s little kids, or even high school kids. The content is not that
hard.” Anyone with a college degree who likes kids can be a teacher. That’s the belief.
But Ball didn’t find teaching easy. What she was figuring out is that teaching requires a special
set of skills. “Teaching is complex work that people actually have to be taught to do,” she says.
But in the U.S. we haven’t treated teaching as a profession that requires extensive training like
law or medicine, she says. Teaching is seen as something you kind of figure out on your own;
it’s more about personality than skill. People with a gift for teaching, the thinking goes, will bloom
into great teachers and the way to improve education is to recruit more of these talented people.
HOW MIGHT WE TAKE ADVANTAGE OF THE 1,837 YEARS OF TEACHING
EXPERIENCE WITHIN OUR FACULTY TO FURTHER THE TRANSFORMATIVE
EDUCATION THAT STUDENTS RECEIVE AT COLORADO ACADEMY?
Summary from Rethinking Teacher Preparation
by Emily Hanford August 27, 2015
[part of the larger radio documentary Teaching Teachers from American RadioWorks]

3. founded & curated
by Kïrsten Blake
∙ BE OPPORTUNITY ∙
This past June, a friend asked me to guest blog on her website
Chapter Be. The topic of my comments was the realm of possibility that
might exist in the world if we think of our being as an opportunity to be
opportunity for others.
As teachers in a rapidly changing world, exceptional circumstances
allow us to be opportunity for our students in unprecedented ways.
This means that innovation is more important to the skills that teachers
need to cultivate and practice, which is both invigorating and onerous.
“Now that we can do anything, what will we do?” -- Bruce Mau

5. IDEO is a design firm that takes a human-centered, design-based approach to
helping organizations in the public and private sectors innovate and grow.
They identify new ways to serve and support people by uncovering latent needs,
behaviors, and desires.
They envision new companies and brands, and they design the products,
services, spaces, and interactive experiences that bring them to life.
They help organizations build creative culture and the internal systems required
to sustain innovation and launch new ventures.
Design thinking is a deeply human process that taps into abilities we all have but
get overlooked by more conventional problem-solving practices. It relies on our
ability to be intuitive, to recognize patterns, to construct ideas that are
emotionally meaningful as well as functional, and to express ourselves through
means beyond words or symbols. Nobody wants to run an organization on
feeling, intuition, and inspiration, but an over-reliance on the rational and the
analytical can be just as risky. Design thinking provides an integrated third way.

7. “I believe that the
more complex the
problem, the more
help you need. And
that’s the kind of stuff
we’re getting asked to
tackle, so we need to
figure out how to
have a culture where
help is much, much
more embedded.”
-- Tim Brown, IDEO CEO

8. our teaching profiles are jagged, not average
[adapted from todd rose, harvard graduate school of education]

9. would like your help in growing the
for the benefit of the community
– students, teachers, families –
e-mail: paul.kim@coloradoacademy.org
eric.augustin@coloradoacademy.org
mary.singer@coloradoacademy.org
have an idea for project x? want to open your classroom to observers?
need input on a new project? have ideas to share in the faculty newsletter?