Jim was in the media lab. Garrett was live. The Bok Choi agriculture technology was apparently advancing in the background. Maybe it has to do with preparation for an agriculture program deep dive coming soon? A secret? Maybe! Another week, another show.
Here is what you missed.
Question of the Week: Do We Give Teachers Time to Prepare for Game Day?
Think about any professional sports team. The NFL game is three hours on Sunday. The preparation for that three hours is the entire rest of the week. Film review, installation, practice, rest, travel. Ninety-five percent preparation, five percent game.
Now think about teachers. Monday morning, you are on the field. Forty-plus hours that week. When do you recover? When do you install the game plan?
Jim broke it down and it landed hard. Garrett added what comes up constantly inside Thinkering fellowship conversations: the number one thing teachers say is holding them back from doing something meaningful is time. Not motivation. Not ideas. Time.
Drop your thoughts in the comments. We want to hear them.
What should we discuss next week?
Headline: Humanizing Teaching Practices
There is a great piece circulating right now on self-paced mastery-based learning and how it shifts what a teacher actually gets to do in a classroom. Less timeline management, more relationship. Less coverage, more depth. We will drop the link in the comments on every platform.
Garrett made the point that sits underneath all of it: until assessment changes, innovative learning is always going to hit a wall. Every great idea gets flattened by the question of how do we quantify this for the report card, the principal, the board, the county. Bethany from the community put it perfectly in the live chat: what we choose to measure shapes how teachers teach. So how do we change the measurement? Measurement is tied to funding. That conversation is bigger than one episode and we are just getting started on it.
ISTE Content Is Dropping
We sat down with a ton of folks from Edmentum at their booth in Orlando, including Michelle Geyer, principal of a virtual school. If you have never heard the word bisynchronous before, go watch that interview. Michelle talks about how a virtual learning environment, done right, can actually serve every learner type better than a traditional one. It is a good conversation.
More interviews from ISTE and Deeper Learning are still coming. We have more content in the back catalog right now than we know what to do with. Stay close.
Where We Are Headed
October is going to be a lot.
Marvelous Education Alliance Symposium, October 7 through 10.
MassCue in Massachusetts, October 14 and 15, which happens to be Garrett’s birthday.
EdTech Leaders Alliance in DC, October 18 through 20.
National Forum to Advance Rural Education, October 19 through 24, San Antonio. That one has a bigger partnership announcement attached to it.
Canadian EdTech AI Summit, October 28 and 29.
Come find us somewhere in all of that.
Thanks for Watching
Bethany and Rae, Teachers Deserve It were in the live chat this week keeping things honest, as usual. If you want genuinely strong, human education takes, go find their substack and follow along. These are good people.
We will be back. See you on the next one - WEDNESDAY at 11:30 EST - LIVE on Substack and Linkedin!
