Dailies-Allison Knox Keynote

Each day, the director of a movie checks the dailies to see if the filming is acceptable progress toward the vision he or she has for the film. Allison used the analogy to encourage us as teachers and educators and especially as leaders to continually check our progress toward our 21st century learning goals. She shared statistics showing that 99% of voters think 21st century skills need to be taught in today's schools and the greatest skill needed by employers is critical thinking--with innovation coming in fourth, just a few percentage points lower.

We need to ask ourselves if our dailies are ensuring that our students will have critical thinking skills. We need to focus on the higher levels of the new Anderson taxonomy that puts evaluation and creativity at the top. We need to continue to campaign for creativity and innovation in our schools, and to provide evidence that students are on the 21st century learning pathway. How can we do this? What practical things are we doing already? What needs to change?

Pat McGill Energizes Educators

Pat McGill started out this humorous and exciting session with stories of her own teaching experiences. Her positive energy spread throughout the room helping educators avoid negativity. One of her key points was that individuals motivate themselves; in education our job is to provide environments where the motivation occurs. Grow the gifts! Instead of thinking outside the box, she encouraged us to grow the box (story by Leo Buscaglia).

Leadership is the power of influence. Educators model, monitor, and mentor. Participants at the session then chose a psychometric shape. This shape indicated your personality traits.

Her five R's included being real, rural, ready, reachable, remarkable. She suggested we read the Four Agreements. And left us with lots of golden nuggets to reflect on!