Photo courtesy White House.gov

Great news!! -- Our U.S. Department of Education has hired a group of educators we can trust to advise them on how to turn our nation’s school system around! Teachers helping to suggest ways to measure student’s success, how to assure a strong, talented teacher force is in place, and how to free teachers to do the work they love to do with joy and a focus on really relevant learning instead of rote memorization of irrelevant content. It has really happened!

It started with the question to them by the USDOE: “What would it take to make America’s most important profession also America’s most valued profession?”

  • From their website --- the USDOE says: “To answer this question, 16 Teacher Ambassador Fellows — active classroom teachers working temporarily for the U.S. Department of Education — have been listening to teachers all over the country."
  • They have held over 200 roundtable discussions with thousands of their colleagues to talk about how they envision a transformed teaching profession.
  • The result is a teacher-written vision document that you can download. We invite you to review and comment on the newly-released vision statement for the RESPECT Project. The new vision statement has been divided into sections so that readers are able to comment on a particular part of the vision at a time.

On this journey with you and as we develop The Ignite Show, this is exactly the kind of “lost” information we want to bring to your attention!

Check out The RESPECT Project: Envisioning a Teaching Profession for the 21st Century. (Recognizing Educational Success, Professional Excellence and Collaborative Teaching). Let’s all contribute to their conversation and if you don’t mind, tell them I encouraged you to do so --will you?