2017 was an amazing year for us here at Four O’Clock Faculty! We had the opportunity to continue to connect and share with many brilliant people, and continue to learn from books and podcasts. Below are some of our favorites. In addition, we decided to share some of our favorite posts from #4OCF this year! While not our most popular posts, they were some of our favorites to write! Looking forward to an awesome 2018!
Rich & Trevor
Books
A More Beautiful Question – Warren Berger explores how we can use questioning to ignite change and innovate within our world. Children are excited Questioners, but our schooling system often drives this out of them. Find out how we can inspire better questioning among students and ourselves.
Finish – Ever started a project, but not been able to finish it? Jon Acuff helps us to become consistent finishers, not just starters.
Empower – Aj Jiuliani and John Spencer followed up their book Launch by asking what would happen if we empowered all students and prepared them for anything! Awesome book to inspire your shift in educational thinking.
Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls – This book serves as perfect inspiration for our daughters, sharing the stories of 100 rebel girls and how they changed the world. Each story is illustrated by different female artists to create a beautiful book as well.
Podcasts
Start Ed Up – I (Rich) fell for this podcast hard this year! Don Wettrick and Hunter Stone interview a variety of innovators, entrepreneurs, and educators to discuss ideas for innovation. Two of my favorite episodes are Dave Burgess talking about disrupting the education publishing industry and Seth Godin talking about Creativity and the Future.
Song Exploder – The creative process intrigues both of us, and this year, we started listening to Song Exploder, where artists talk about their particular process for writing songs. One of the most interesting episodes involved Rivers Cuomo from Weezer talking about how he writes songs. Simply fascinating!
Podcast PD – AJ, Chris, and Stacey each month deliver a PD worthy topic and share what they are learning or also provide other podcast recommendations. I (Rich) always walk away with an excellent resource to explore after each episode.
The Tim Ferriss Show – Author Tim speaks to experts and leaders in their fields to find the routines and habits that can help all of us. A favorite episode includes Mike Rowe from Dirty Jobs fame.
Seth Godin’s Startup School – Although these episodes are created from a Seth Godin conference in 2012, they still offer a number of worthwhile pieces of information that can help us as educators in 2018 and beyond.
Favorite Posts (Rich)
Abracadabra – What did I learn from my son as he learned to perform magic tricks?
WWHRD? – A simple question: What would Henry Rollins do?
Customer Service – An early morning trip to the grocery store before work taught me everything I needed to know about customer service!
What He Said – A student’s words completely changed my day. What did he say?
I am not making a difference – How do you approach the day when you feel like you are not making a difference?
Favorite Posts (Trevor)
Unresponsiveness – What if oncologists didn’t try to exhaust every possible treatment? What can we as educators learn from this?
5 Skills Students Can Practice by Viewing Art –
Time to Tinker – Let’s tinker with the idea of tinkering…
Prove Engagement – We spend a lot of our time as educators trying to prove that students are learning. What if we tried to prove engagement instead?
What Business Are You In? – We should be in the business of getting kids to LOVE learning!