The Power of Protocols: An Educator’s Guide to Better Practice (the series on school reform)

An excellent book and must read for anyone looking for step by step methods for communication, discussion and exploration of ideas. Using it for nearly all of my staff engagement activities.

Bought this book for my daughter who just became a principal of an excellent school. She is always interested in reading about best practices.

Book came promptly and this is what I was looking for. Good source for the book from my point of view.

Excellent

Using the protocols in this volume do lead to better practice.Several years ago, I attended a series of training sessions conducted by the authors on using protocols in professional development situations and experienced the "power of protocols" first-hand. Since then, I have used them or variations in several ways that have lead to powerful insights for all involved. Most recently, in a graduate education course in technology use, my students (prospective or practicing teachers earning a Master's degree) used a modified version of the Tuning Protocol to give and receive feedback on their final projects. All the students commented on the contrast to typical final presentation sessions, and how this experience made them better listeners as presenters and audience members. We also used the Provocative Prompts protocol as a final class activity.I've used these protocols in working with teachers and administrators in schools. These protocols give people structured opportunties to talk, and to listen -- especially useful in situations of inherently unequal power, such as in meetings with a principal or district-level administator and teachers.This is an excellent addition to your library if you are a facilitator of any kind (principal, teacher educator, lead teacher, etc.) and is a good companion book to David Allen, Tina Blythe, and Barbara Schieffelin Powell's book "Looking Together At Student Work."

This is an excellent book for educators, whether classroom teachers or professors such as myself. I use it constantly as a reference and include it in online learning environments as well.

This book was not quite what I expected. Silly me, I had expected something about how protocols would lead directly to school or academic improvement. Instead, this is a book about how to run reflective teachers' meetings in schools. The book presents about four dozen "starting points" for teacher in-service trainers, and ways to "run" the conversation(s). It really was not bad, but I had a hard time seeing why the authors used the word "power" in the title.I suppose this sort of thinking has some place in American education. I had a hard time seeing exactly how this would lead to "better practice," however, or why a teacher in-service educator would pick a particular protocol over another, because most of the protocols seemed roughly similar.

It is astonishing how culturally embedded the use of protocols are in the states, both for student learning and adult. This book has a lot to do with that in that it both caught and fed the tide of events. Having worked in support of schools for many, many years, it would be fair to say that the quality of adult learning practices is remarkably poor. Ask any teacher what they think of 'meetings' at their school and the answer will be uniformly negative. These are the spaces when we bring adults together to learn from one another - and we have made them into 'meetings'. THAT is why this book should be required reading and resource for all adult educators...and for all teachers, too.

This is a great book for educators looking to enhance their pedagogical choices with intentional learning through pedagogy.