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ac		trying out new ideas

language is power good schools for everyone making alliances working and learning together finding a focus trying out new ideas how schools are organized how are we doing? opening the school doors things to avoid		WON'T SCHOOLS get better if teachers simply learn new classroom techniques like cooperative learning, in which kids collaborate on tasks that result in new skills and understanding? Doesn't the answer lie in new policies like site-based management, which gives schools more say over their hiring and budgets?
		reflective practitioner
		"Why do I teach as I do, and what difference does it make in the learning of my students?" Teachers who are reflective practitioners raise these questions regularly and find ways to look at their work, even as they do it. They may keep journals about their teaching, or videotape it, or ask colleagues to observe their classes as "critical friends." And they talk with peers, not just about classroom techniques but about their roles in change throughout the school.
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		School reformers once thought such innovations would be enough, especially if the system would back them up with new policies. In fact, a whole Federal bureaucracy grew up to develop and fund "replicable programs" that people at top levels thought would help.
		authentic assessment
		Instead of relying on tests to find out whether students are learning what they teach, many Challenge teachers give students rich tasks drawn from the real-world uses of academic learning. These more complex authentic assessments take more time and resources to complete than ordinary tests, and they are scored using clear rubrics, or descriptions of what good work looks like.
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		But such "quality control" talk in school reform emerges from a factory-like model, in which the boss imposes innovations on the plant floor in order to insure a better product. Because school change is an ongoing process, not a package or event, it works only when school people keep talking out how to connect their every day actions with their vision of high-quality learning. The Annenberg Challenge asks local school not to adopt packaged reforms, but to create school-level initiatives out of those conversations-to use their own inventiveness in addressing the difficult issues that continually shift as people and situations change. If they decide to try out promising practices, they also take time to evaluate them together. A central technique of these conversations involves looking collaboratively at student work, using it as the basis for evidence of student learning and therefore of how well the school's approach is working.
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