Professional Learning Quotes

Professional learning does not advance ... through the inexorable confirmation of previous certainties, but through a systematic challenge to our present conceptions ~ Douglass B. Reeves

Geniuses and prophets do not usually excel in professional learning, and their originality, if any, is often due precisely to the fact that they do not. ~ Joseph Alois Schumpeter

In America, the average person will spend 90,000 hours at work, or about a quarter of his or her adult life. Job satisfaction, then, can have an enormous influence on quality of life. ~ Oran Tkatchov, Proactive Professional Learning: Creating Conditions For Individual And Organizationa

response to intervention (RTI) is our best hope to provide every child with the additional time and support needed to learn at high levels. RTI's underlying premise is that schools should not delay providing help for struggling students until they fall far enough behind to qualify for special education, but instead should provide timely, targeted, systematic interventions to all students who demonstrate the need. To achieve this goal, we remain equally convinced that the only way for an organization to successfully implement RTI practices is within the professional learning community (PLC) model. ~ Austin Buffum

From both my personal and my professional experience, I had come to believe that the fear of death is always greatest in those who feel that they have not lived their life fully. ~ Irvin D. Yalom

even if Noam Chomsky were right about everything, the Islamic doctrines related to martyrdom, jihad, blasphemy, apostasy, the rights of women and homosexuals, etc. would still present huge problems for the emergence of a global civil society (and these are problems quite unlike those presented by similar tenets in other faiths, for reasons that I have explained at length elsewhere and touch on only briefly here). And any way in which I might be biased or blinded by "the religion of the state," or any other form of cultural indoctrination, has absolutely no relevance to the plight of Shiites who have their mosques, weddings, and funerals bombed by Sunni extremists, or to victims of rape who are beaten, imprisoned, or even killed as "adulteresses" throughout the Muslim world. I hope it goes without saying that the Afghan girls who even now are risking their lives by merely learning to read would not be best compensated for their struggles by being handed copies of Chomsky's books enumerating the sins of the West ~ Sam Harris

If people take the film and screen it whenever possible for their social and professional networks, we can continue to make a difference. It is one more element we have to use in the ongoing effort to take back our country. ~ Robert Greenwald

You can either keep peddling, get off the bike or fall over. ~ Cynthia Lewis

Your professional physicist opinion?" I ask.
She smiles. "I believe the cat to be alive. And what says my esteemed colleague?"
"Alive," I say. ~ John Green

Women have always been healers. They were the unlicensed doctors and anatomists. They were abortionists, nurses and counselors. They were the pharmacists, cultivating healing herbs, and exchanging the secrets of their uses. They were midwives, traveling from home to home and village to village. For centuries women were doctors without degrees, barred from books and lectures, learning from each other, and passing on experience from neighbor to neighbor and mother to daughter. They were called "wise women" by the people, witches or charlatans by the authorities. Medicine is part of our heritage as women, our history, our birthright. ~ Barbara Ehrenreich

Second, and far more important: tuck your chin. You're going to get hurt, so expect it and be ready. You may as well see it coming. ~ Elizabeth Haydon

Major league baseball players and owners should meet immediately to enact the standards that apply to the minor leagues, and if they don't, I will have to introduce legislation that says professional sports will have minimum standards for testing. I'll give them until January, and then I'll introduce legislation. ~ John McCain

Let's face it. My career is now professional vampire. ~ Cassandra Clare

The United States has become a place where entertainers and professional athletes are mistaken for people of importance. ~ Robert A. Heinlein

As Christians, we are all engaged in the business of discerning and obeying God's call, and this usually means that soon enough we find ourselves out beyond our own competence, frightened at what God demands and feeling cosmically abandoned, left in the lurch with a job for which our own resources are completely inadequate…Sooner or later, the panic touches each one of us who accepts God's call and heads, eyes wide open, straight into some difficult and mysterious work - like pastoring a church, teaching a class, going back to school, learning a language, creating a work of art. The panic descends on everyone who accepts God's call to do something that engages our heart and wracks our soul - like making a marriage proper through better and worse, raising a child and letting her go into adulthood, enduring a terrible illness, growing up, growing old. In fact, being called out far beyond our own competence is part of our regular experience with God. ~ Ellen F. Davis

Learning should be a joy and full of excitement. It is life's greatest adventure; it is an illustrated excursion into the minds of the noble and the learned. ~ Taylor Caldwell

The term 'role model' is so odious, but the truth is it's a very strong writer indeed who gets by without a model kept somewhere in mind. I think of Keats. Keats slogging away, devouring books, plagiarizing, impersonating, adapting, struggling, growing, writing many poems that made him blush and then a few that made him proud, learning everything he could from whomever he could find, dead or alive, who might have something useful to teach him. ~ Zadie Smith

When we say yes to the grace of God, we are learning how to die. ~ Joni Eareckson Tada

She crossed the room to him, put her arms around him, clung to him, turning her face to the side, learning all at once that it was awkward to show a person all of one's love when one's nose was broken. ~ Kristin Cashore

When Scythrop grew up, he was sent, as usual, to a public school, where a little learning was painfully beaten into him, and from thence to the university, where it was carefully taken out of him; and he was sent home like a well-threshed ear of corn, with nothing in his head. ~ Thomas Love Peacock

We dole out lip-service to the importance of education - lip-service and, just occasionally, a little grant of money; we postpone the school-leaving age, and plan to build bigger and better schools; the teachers slave conscientiously in and out of school hours; and yet, as I believe, all this devoted effort is largely frustrated, because we have lost the tools of learning, and in their absence can only make a botched and piecemeal job of it. ~ Dorothy L. Sayers

We're all like children. We may think we grow up, but to me, being grown up is death, stopping thinking, trying to find out things, going on learning. ~ Mary Wesley

Learning is the gradual replacement of fantasy with fact. ~ Gifford Pinchot

Refusing to feel desire is the only thing more painful than failing to get what you want, and that learning not to yearn, far from preventing disappointment, ultimately guarantees it. ~ Martha N. Beck

The American people are as devoted to the idea of sin and its punishment as they are to making money - and fighting drugs is nearly as big a business as pushing them. Since the combination of sin and money is irresistible (particularly to the professional politician), the situation will only grow worse. I suppose, if nothing else, I was ~ Gore Vidal

If you stare at an object, as you do when you paint, there is no point at which you stop learning things from it. ~ Wayne Thiebaud

The art schools seem to be trying to turn people out as "professional." But I don't know what the word "professional" means any longer. "Professional" would be somebody who was trying to push painting to a point that nobody else could do as well as he could. That would be my ideal professional. ~ Lawrence Weiner

The world is constantly changing. You're constantly learning and you have to be willing to get off your mark, and get off your spot and take that knowledge you have not to fix yourself into a place but to keep going. ~ Abel Ferrara

Philosophy abounds more than philosophers, and learning more than learned men. ~ William Benton Clulow

Okay... well... learning the two-step is like learning to ride a bull. It ain't easy. You gotta feel the bull's rhythm and move with it. Let the bull lead you. Alright... put your weight on your left foot." I do as he says, knowing without him needing to further illustrate, that I'm the bull rider and he's the bull. ~ Giorge Leedy

The sign of the amateur is overglorification of and preoccupation with the mystery. The professional shuts up. She doesn't talk about it. She does her work. ~ Steven Pressfield

Maybe you've noticed what I've noticed, and thought it strange, or dismissed it as youthful foolishness or that you were missing some critical piece of information that would reveal itself with age and wisdom – that is: every single teacher believes feverishly in the importance of the content of their class, and furthermore, believes that their assessment of you in their class is a direct measure of your capacity for future success, while simultaneously not having a clue as to the content of virtually any other discipline in the school. They will boldly state things like, That's math, I'm an English teacher or That's literature, I'm a biology teacher, practically admitting out loud that nothing learned in school is important (except, of course, the course they are teaching). ~ Brian Huskie

Neil Young does throw in a major seven chord here and there, so if you're a new guitar player learning Neil Young songs, you'll learn some seven chords, and some different positions. Nothing too complicated, just enough to kind of open up your knowledge a little bit. ~ Jesse Harris

To benefit from what the best teachers do, however, we must embrace a different model, one in which teaching occurs only when learning takes place. Most fundamentally, teaching in this conception is creating those conditions in which most
if not all
of our students will realize their potential to learn. That sounds like hard work, and it is a little scary because we don't have complete control over who we are, but it is highly rewarding and obtainable. ~ Ken Bain

With our ignorance, they win, we lose. ~ Ted Agon

Success is in the student, not in the university; greatness is in the individual, not in the library; power is in the man, not in his crutches. A great man will make opportunities, even out of the commonest and meanest situations. If a man is not superior to his education, is not larger than his crutches or his helps, if he is not greater than the means of his culture, which are but the sign-boards pointing the way to success, he will never reach greatness. Not learning, not culture alone, not helps and opportunities, but personal power and sterling integrity, make a man great. ~ Orison Swett Marden

I want to keep developing. I want to become relaxed in my own work and go deeper. Just growing and studying and trying new things and hopefully having professional access to work that's good and interesting. I don't want to be on the treadmill of artificiality. ~ Gale Harold

Science aims at constructing a world which shall be symbolic of the world of commonplace experience. It is not at all necessary that every individual symbol that is used should represent something in common experience or even something explicable in terms of common experience. The man in the street is always making this demand for concrete explanation of the things referred to in science; but of necessity he must be disappointed. It is like our experience in learning to read. That which is written in a book is symbolic of a story in real life. The whole intention of the book is that ultimately a reader will identify some symbol, say BREAD, with one of the conceptions of familiar life. But it is mischievous to attempt such identifications prematurely, before the letters are strung into words and the words into sentences. The symbol A is not the counterpart of anything in familiar life. ~ Arthur Stanley Eddington

trying to do things they can't yet do, failing, and learning what they need to do differently is exactly the way that experts practice. ~ Angela Duckworth

Knowledge comes from learning. Wisdom comes from living. ~ Anthony Douglas Williams

That was the day I realized that he could not cope and I could not cope and, emotionally, he could take me down with him. And I discovered in myself an awful determination not to let that happen. From that moment, I was determined to get him out of his apartment and under professional eyes, or, failing that, to protect myself. How to protect myself, I didn't know. Hire help over his objections? Take him to court and seek to have him declared incompetent? Report him to Adult Protective Services? Use my ownership of his apartment to force him out? All I knew was that, at that point, I believed myself capable of doing such things, or even of washing my hands of the situation if he would not listen to reason. I imagined telling an indignant world that I had tried my best and could do no more. You have no idea what a thing it is to have that sort of conversation with yourself about a parent. ~ Jonathan Rauch

While it is wise to learn from experience, it is wiser to learn from the experiences of others. ~ Rick Warren

The Public School, then, was right to eject a child who did not learn. Because what the child was learning was not merely facts or the basis of a money-making or even useful career. It went much deeper. The child learned that certain things in the culture around him were worth preserving at any cost. His values were fused with some objective human enterprise. And so he himself became a part of the tradition handed down to him; he maintained his heritage during his lifetime and even improved on it. He cared. ~ Philip K. Dick

Love seldom haunts the breast where learning lies,
And Venus sets ere Mercury can rise. ~ Alexander Pope

Rationalism is an attitude of readiness to listen to contrary arguments and to learn from experience ... of admitting that "I may be wrong and you may be right and, by an effort, we may get nearer the truth." ~ Karl Popper

Ask broad questions and you'll get more than one answer. Ask specific questions and you'll get no answer. ~ S.D. Lawendowski

The bridge between the words glamour and grammar is magic. According to the OED, glamour evolved through an ancient association between learning and enchantment. ~ Roy Peter Clark

I remember first learning about death quite vividly.

I'm not sure how old I was, but I remember the conversation like it was yesterday. My grandfather had died, and my mother was trying to explain it to me.

'Sometimes, when someone gets ill, and they're very very old, they don't get better again. They just get iller and iller and then... then their body stops working.'

'I don't understand.'

'What's in them just goes away, and doesn't come back.'

'Grandpa isn't coming back?'

'No,' she said. 'Not ever again.'

'Grandpa said he was going away and not ever coming back after he held Grandma's head in that cotton-dump outside of town and kicked Skeeter seventy-three times.'

'Grandpa was very drunk. That's not the same as being dead. Grandpa's dead, son. He's not there anymore.'

And I remember saying, 'Hold everything right fucking THERE.

'You went to all the trouble of conceiving me, and giving birth to me, and raising me and feeding me and clothing me and all-- and, YEAH, whipping me from time to time, and making me live in a house that's freezing fucking cold all the goddamn time-- and you make me cry and things hurt so much and disappointments crush my heart every day and I can't do half the things I want to do and sometimes I just want to scream-- and what I've got to look forward to is my body breaking and something flipping off the switch in my head-- I go through all ~ Warren Ellis

Images are taking over, and writers are a dying breed. The Norman Mailers of today are reduced to writing pun-filled captions for paparazzi photos. Blogs
which were threatening enough to professional writers
are being replaced by video blogs. We writers need to embraced the Second Commandment as our rallying cry for the importance of words. In a literally biblical world, all publications would look like the front page of the Wall Street Journal. Or the way it used to look, anyway. ~ A. J. Jacobs

I learned early on that I could get a lot of attention by singing and writing little songs, so it was like throwing nuts to a monkey ... I just couldn't get enough. ~ Dolly Parton

All but a few of the organizations do not specifically promise to deliver superior investment performance although it is perhaps not unreasonable for the public to draw such an inference from their advertised emphasis on professional management. ~ Warren Buffett

Children teach you that you can still be humbled by life, that you learn something new all the time. That's the secret to life, really: never stop learning. It's the secret to career. I'm still working because I learn something new all the time. It's the secret to relationships. Never think you've got it all. ~ Clint Eastwood

Someone taught me how to eat properly. Learning from others is important when it's not working for yourself. ~ Geri Halliwell