Darla Smith

Renewal! I always think of the end of the school year as a time of renewal, which sounds strange since we are focused on ending the school. But as we do all of the end of the year paperwork and shutter our classrooms/schools for summer, teachers and administrators are thinking ahead to the next school year and how to make it even better than the previous year, hence, renewal. I think one of the issues that drives this sense of renewal is our absolute focus on helping students to be the very best they can be. As educators we want to make a difference in the lives of those we serve and work with and as a result we often reflect on how to do better next year. So as I am thinking about my own renewal for next school year, I am thinking deeply about the work of Robin Fogarty, Gene Kerns, and Brian Pete in a new book called “Unlocking Student Talent: The New Science of Developing Expertise” (2018).  I love the whole premise of this book, that our job as educators is to build expertise and ignite passion in our students.

In January of 2019, Learning Forward Kansas has invited Robin Fogarty to be our keynote speaker at our annual conference and she will share ideas from this book helping us see how these ideas are at the heart of the Kansans Can Vision – helping our students to become successful adults. In the book, she and her colleagues see this process as driven by three actions.  The first is to motivate our students and to ignite the “spark of passion”. To do this, we need to help our students find sources of inspiration and listen to strong voices around them. For me, a source of inspiration was always my grandparents. They grew up with very little materially…read more