If you haven’t yet seen Education Week’s now yearly Leaders to Learn From report, I’d say it’s worth your time to head over to the main page and check out the 2014 honorees. In particular, Curriculum Matters readers may be interested in these impressive curriculum-minded folks:
- B.J. Worthington, the director of schools in Clarksville, Tenn., who spearheaded an effort to get teachers out into STEM “externships” over the summer. Now teachers bring what they’ve learned shadowing architects, city planners, and firefighters back to their mathematics and science classrooms, and use their new skill sets to create inquiry-based projects.
- Curriculum specialist Aaron Grossman of Washoe County, Nev., who’s helping teachers drive the curriculum-writing process under the Common Core State Standards. He worked directly with the writers of the common come to help his teachers understand the standards’ origins, and set up working groups of teachers to test new pedagogical strategies in their classrooms.
- Gail Pletnick, the superintendent in Arizona’s Dysart Unified school district, who is focused on personalized learning. She helped her district become one of the first in the state to implement a competency-based pathway to high school graduation, in which students move on when they are ready rather than just putting in seat-time.
- Philadelphia Superintendent Dennis Creedon, a champion of arts education. Creedon, a singer, emphasizes that the arts can reduce stress in students, and therefore improve achievement, and has helped bring public and private support for the arts into underresourced schools.
There are 11 more education leaders to read about, so make sure to browse through the full report when you have time.