They're still NSDC to us (smile) but we're beginning to adjust to the new name of the National Staff Development Council: Learning Forward. At their annual conference in Atlanta this week, the professional development association honored TLN  charter member Bill Ferriter and co-author Parry Graham with their award for Staff Development Book of the Year.

Building a Professional Learning Community at Work: The First Year is — as Bill says in this blog post commenting on the award — "a practical book designed to support schools in their first year of PLC implementation by sharing stories, approachable research and a heaping cheeseload of handouts." And that's so true - the book is supported by 30 reproducibles that any teacher or principal can download free from the website. You don't even have to buy the book.

Bill, by the way, is a middle grades teacher in the Wake County (NC) Public Schools, where he and his principal Parry Graham led the development of a high-functioning professional learning community at newly opened Salem Middle School. The resulting book from Solution Tree (publisher of the DuFour series on PLCs) grows out of that authentic experience. Or, as Bill might say, it has cred. The folks at Learning Forward obviously thought so.

 Teacher Kenneth J. Bernstein, better known to DailyKos readers as "teacherken", supplies our latest TLN contribution to Teacher Magazine, which is literally the story of his finding The Courage to Teach and finally meeting Parker Palmer, an important teacher in his own "student" life.

It's a good choice, we think, for the 200th article contributed by members of the Teacher Leaders Network as part of a partnership with Teacher Magazine and edweek.org. You can read a sample of other TLN contributions at this index page on the Education Week website. Congratulations and thanks to all the teacher-writers who've helped us reach what would have once seemed to be an impossible milestone.

[Hint for first-time visitors to TM: All the Teacher Magazine content is free, but you need to register once as a guest to access these articles.]

Writing at On the Shoulders of Giants, TLN blogger Ariel Sacks wonders about the promise of wireless classrooms, and some of the barriers as well:

My mind's been trying to imagine what a paperless classroom would look like and how it would run.  I found a great post on the blog, teachone2one.com, called The Changes, that explains some of the major ways the laptops have changed practice and learning in the classroom.

One of Ariel's wonderings has to do with the affordability of 1-to-1 laptop schools and classrooms. While this may not be a solution in Ariel's situation -- an urban charter school -- I recently interviewed the superintendent of a small city district in Alabama that has gone completely wireless and completely one-to-one.

What's most intriguing about the Piedmont City Schools story is how the move is being conceptualized by school and community leaders as both a way to prepare their rural students for the 21st Century and a potential investment in economic development for a community that's suffering from the job losses so epidemic in the South.

  What's a "Teacherpreneur"? Find out in this excerpt from the upcoming book Teaching 2030, written by a team of accomplished teachers in partnership with Barnett Berry, president of the Center for Teaching Quality and a long-time advocate of advancing teaching as a profession.

The excerpt, which appears in a new issue of the Education Week publication Professional Development Sourcebook, describes Teacherpreneurs as

...teacher leaders of proven accomplishment who have a deep knowledge of how to teach, a clear understanding of what strategies must be in play to make schools highly successful, and the skills and commitment to spread their expertise to others—all the while keeping at least one foot firmly in the classroom.

   If that sounds in any way familiar, it's because the authors have identified some of the best teacher leadership practices in play today (in scattered settings across the nation), combined those practices into an advanced, hybrid teaching role — and then super- charged the result to produce part of their solution to improving American schools.

Read the excerpt, then visit this webpage to find out more about the book's contents and how to pre-order. Teaching 2030 will be available in bookstores in early December!

Several members of the Teacher Leaders Network were invited to be in the physical audience at NBC's Teacher Town Hall "interactive" experience two Sundays ago in New York City.

Two reports have now been posted: Ariel Sacks, a teacher in Brooklyn, shares her before and after impressions here: Teachers as Spectacle. And Elizabeth Stein, a teacher on Long Island, offers her insider observations at our TLN Teacher Voices blog.

Interestingly: TLN is a virtual network most of the time, and Ariel and Elizabeth have never met. Although both attended, they didn't come across each other in the crowd. Yet compare their impressions.

For another view, of a TLN member who was invited but opted for his godson's masquerade party (any metaphor is entirely unintentional), see Jose Vilson's post "The Union Said I Couldn't Wear My Favorite Color (and Other Absurd Assertions in Education Nation)."