The 10% Solution

Ah! A summer off!

I know that there are a lot of people in the private sector that envy us teachers during June, July, and August; not so much during the rest of the year. The great teachers I know are usually individuals who are interested in so many varied things, that if they didn't have three months in the summer to explore them they would go crazy.

Believe it or not, a welcome summer vacation activity for me is to attend a week long AP conference. Two years ago I was able to attend a week long AP Calculus AB conference in Connecticut and a week after that attend a week long AP Physics C conference in Denver. I enjoyed meeting with and observing some very good teachers 25 to 30 years younger than myself, teachers that were both knowledgeable in their subject matter and enthusiastic about teaching.

As we start the new school year, if you are a teacher, I hope you are thinking about what you will do differently this year to improve on the good job you did last year. A few years back I had the opportunity to be part of a team of mathematics teachers, working on behalf of the University of Northern Iowa, that were involved with a grant to provide professional development to the math teachers that teach on our military bases around the world. About seventy-five teachers that teach for the Department of Defense would come to the Iowa campus for a week in the summer, and the UNI staff would work with them during that week. Then at one point during the school year we would travel to their schools to team teach and work with as many of them as we could in their own classroom on the military bases. In my case the bases I visited were in Germany and Japan.

Throughout that process Jack Wilkinson, who directed the project for UNI, stressed a concept he called the "10% Solution". The "10% Solution" refers to trying every year to change 10% of what you do in the classroom to improve your teaching and the classroom experience. While I think I probably had done that during most of my years of face-to-face teaching, I never had heard it expressed as elegantly as it was with the simple phrase "The 10% Solution".

In two weeks, I'll post a blog talking about the changes I'm making in my online courses for the 2009-2010 school year.