Are you inspired by the promise of innovation in theory but exasperated by how hard it is in practice?  Have you ever tried re-organizing your job to improve communications with colleagues but only found out that you’ve added new chores to your workload without any increase in efficiency? Do you ever worry that the most honest and productive conversations on educational challenges among your colleagues happen after work rather than in the professional learning communities that you have been working laboriously to establish in your school or system?

Drawing upon his book entitled The Mindful Teacher, Dennis Shirley will share his international experience with teachers in this interactive workshop about these and other new ways that teachers are recovering the grandeur of education by providing students with opportunities for generating their own research questions into areas of personal interest and social significance.

Educators increasingly are recognizing, and research is persistently revealing, that the jobs of teaching and leading schools are too demanding for people to work in isolation from one another. But calls for collaboration often fall on deaf ears because teachers and leaders do not have job-embedded ways of developing their lesson plans, revising curricula, and improving their assessment tools. So, how can educators better support each other while coping with the busy, everyday pressures of life in schools?  And because no system in perfect, how can we weigh the trade-offs involved in different models of collegiality and shared learning to understand which model is best for our schools?