To paraphrase David Foster Wallace’s modern parable: Two fish are swimming along when they encounter another fish heading in the opposite direction. “How’s the water?” the solo fish says as he swims by. The two fish swim a little further until one turns to the other and says, “What the hell is water?”

How do we get stakeholders energized around improvement work?

This is a question we spend a lot of time thinking about. It’s a question that’s relevant to Impact Academy fellows who are building leadership skills to support individual and organizational learning, and to participants in the Common Indicators System who are working to collect data on candidate knowledge and skills and program performance using common instruments in order to support cross-institutional learning.

Why do you have so many guns?

My heart broke the moment I was asked this question. It happened four years ago while I was on a fellowship in New Zealand, on a day where I’d driven to one of the more remote areas of an already very remote island in the South Pacific. The elementary school I was visiting, Te Kura o Hiruharama (Hiruharama School), serves Maori children living in poverty, and they weren’t used to visitors from faraway places such as America. So to kick things off, I asked them what they most wanted to know about my homeland.

Today we launch the application for the third cohort of Impact Academy, our year-long fellowship for deans in educator preparation. Impact Academy…

The events of this past year have magnified differences in our culture, and produced conflict – but active efforts, including protest, can lead to reform. In many ways, this idea animates all of the activities we undertake at Deans for Impact. We believe in the power of helping existing and future educators practice better pedagogy with all students, so that over time, our work – and the work of so many others – will join together such that the stark racial segregation we witnessed during one school visit will seem an unconscionable aberration, rather than an accepted norm.

Texas recently announced it would make educator data available to the public in order to meet the requirements of a bill passed during the 85th Regular Session, which concluded on May 29, 2017.

From Sara Quay’s very first day in college, she knew where she was headed: to a career in higher education. What she didn’t know was just how…

At Deans for Impact, we’ve published a number of posts debunking common misconceptions about how our brains work. And we’ve also learned how to present our arguments more effectively in order to better persuade our readers about the myth of learning styles. So when I came across Stephen Brookfield’s article in the journal Adult Learning about the “myths and realities in facilitating adult learning,” I was more than intrigued.

If you’re a mentor teacher hosting a student teacher in your classroom, you might have questions about how to help those pre-service teachers get ready.

Feedback is a critical component in developing teaching skills. But what if teacher-candidates are resistant to hearing that feedback?