11 Questions that Need Answers

You may have seen the blogging homework floating around your PLN. Bloggers are sharing info about themselves, then tagging other bloggers to do the same. I have now been tagged by 3 friends, so I decided it's time to write a post. Thanks Jaime, Craig, & Jill for sending this my way. I'm going to play along, but I'm not going to play by the rules. Instead of sharing 11 random facts and sending 11 questions to other bloggers, I'm going to ask 11 questions that need answers. These are the questions that keep me up at night.

I'll tag 11 bloggers in my post in the hopes of getting a conversation started around these 11 issues. Time and again, my PLN has come through for me in searching for answers to questions and, more importantly, finding the right questions to ask. So here goes...


1. How can we cultivate a risk-taking, innovative learning environment in a high-stakes testing culture?

2. How can we recruit promising prospective teachers and keep effective educators in the classroom?

3. How can we increase the amount of connected educators who actually do what they blog and tweet about?

4. If we know that collaborative planning is powerful, why don't we create time and space for teachers to do that regularly?

5. How are schools empowering teacher leaders?

6. How should we really be measuring educator effectiveness?

7. What kinds of support do K-12 schools need from teacher educators and educational researchers?

8. How can we empower educators to use classroom assessments to inform instruction rather than externally controlling the assessment environment in our classrooms?

9. Why do we insist on teaching kids to hate reading by pushing programs that use extrinsic rewards?

10. What do the best school administrators do? How can we spread that to less effective administrators?

11. How can we expand collaboration across schools so that we continually help each other better meet the needs of our students?


Responses from my PLN:

Derek McCoy, North Carolina principal and valuable member of my PLN, posted his responses to my 11 questions here. Check them out and post your own response to keep the conversation going.

Jennifer LaGarde, librarian extraordinaire and North Carolina Educator-on-Loan, developed 11 questions (about libraries) that need answers. Her questions for teacher librarians are thoughtful and urgent, particularly for libraries today.

My dear friend, North Carolina high school English teacher and #coflip co-founder Andrew Thomasson, posted his responses to my 11 questions here. As with everything Andrew writes, his responses are thoughtful and well-written. Andrew is also giving me grief about my posting questions without first answering someone else's, so I'll have to see what I can do.


In the spirit of the bloggers who tagged me in their posts, I'm tagging the following 11 bloggers that I hope will engage in this conversation with me. There are plenty of other folks who are non-bloggers that I hope will join the conversation.

Kurtis Hewson

Andrew Thomasson

Steven Anderson

Melissa Edwards

Andy Marcinek

Michael Maher

George Couros

Bill Ferriter

Jeff Carpenter

Steven Weber

Derek McCoy