In a recent conversation with my Head of School, Sheila Culbert (@loomissheila), we came up with what I think is a good idea. Hopefully, you will agree! As the director of the Kravis Center for Excellence in Teaching, I am responsible for a significant portion of the ongoing professional development at my school and am always looking for ways to get interesting blog posts or articles about education out to our faculty. Not all of them are avid Twitter users (not yet at least!) so they do not see many of the resources that I tweet out on a fairly regular basis.

What if I composed a brief weekly missive every Friday that included four of the most interesting items that I ran across during the past week? Sounded like a good idea to me. In addition to e-mailing my weekly “Friday Four” to my colleagues, I plan on posting them here on my blog in case there are others out there who might be interested. So here is my first installment of the “Friday Four”.

1. Recent blog post by Grant Wiggins about what constitutes effective feedback. Some of you may know Grant from his work with Jay McTighe on Understanding by Design.
2. NYT piece by Paul Tough “What if the Secret to Success Is Failure?” Very interesting piece on the topic of “character” and predictors of long-term student success.
3. Blog post at Connected Principles on homework. A favorite topic of discussion these days!
4. Review of one of my favorite reads from this past summer. Daniel Willingham’s book “Why Don’t Students Like School: A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom”

I hope you will take a few moments to check out these items and pass them along to any of your colleagues.