Opportunity Knocks! Just when I thought my information interviewing and networking was not being fruitful, an interesting opportunity dropped in my lap.

On Thursday I will be presenting a talk on "Best Practices in U.S. Education" for the Egyptian Ministry of Education. They are looking at improving their public education and are sponsoring an international dialogue of best practices. Several countries will be presenting before me and then the World Bank.

I have been asked to describe best practices relating to k-12 and to teacher staff development. They are also interested in distance learning, creative teaching and learning approaches, and curriculum development. All in one hour!!! I have been cruising the net for days and have been fascinated by all of the information available...way too much for one hour. Since this will be a preliminary discussion, the Egyptian officials, wisely, want to study best practices from all countries and pick and choose the practices that fit their situation. It is possible further partnerships will develop from this dialogue.

Even though MCLI isn't exactly k-12, it is an exemplary model for promoting innovation and change. So I am going to describe your model for them. Clearly, many of these ideas can be transferred to all learning environments. Since the time is so short, I will mostly be show and telling. I have copies of Web pages. Can you think of anything special you would like me to say? I hope you don't mind if I describe myself as an international internet consultant to MCLI. Since it appears that I won't find much paid employment here, I have decided that collecting fancy job titles is just as important.

Will keep you posted on the outcomes. This is very exciting because it offers me the opportunity to share with the Egyptian children and teachers and to learn from their improvement initiatives. It is a challenging task to transform public education in Egypt and I would feel fortunate to be in the right place at the right time, so that I might participate in this transformation.

Any ideas, thoughts, encouragement...will be appreciated. Sorry for the short notice, but I just found out this week. Sometimes being the understudy pays off. I figure I cannot lose....if nothing develops, I will still have met and learned from other international educators and have participated in an inside look at how governmental departments look at change.

Stay tuned for the Cairo updates.......