The Professional Development Committee gathered the results of the surveys that the faculty took earlier this year relating to Professional Development needs and interests of the faculty.  One of the topics that surfaced for a great majority of the faculty was a need to learn more about Differentiating Instruction in the classroom.  As a result of this, one of the Summer Reading Groups is Differentiated Instruction - Leading and Managing a Differentiated Classroom by Tomlinson and Imbeau.  As I was browsing through this book, I came across a statement that I think will be worth remembering as we begin the school year: 

Two principles that benefit learners and learning are that (1) working diligently and intelligently leads to growth and (2) growth ultimately enables individuals to achieve and exceed most goals.  This is the essence of a growth mind-set - a fundamental underpinning of differentiation....

Generating and engaging in conversations around the correlation between that of a Growth Mind-Set and Differentiating Learning for our students will be well worth having.  I will be interested to hear from this Differentiated Book Group in the fall.

As you begin chapter one....a reflection: "Be honest with yourself...Where do you fall in your belief about whether intelligence can be attributed to genes or the environment on a scale of 1 (genes) to 10 (environment)?

I'm going to see if our summer reading can become a blog…hoping to be able to share our reading ideas and experiences with each other if we wish to do so.  I am absolutely new to this… have never even tried this blogging venue but it may be worth a go - giving us all a format to respond to our reading.