Week 5 #IMMOOC - Mini Blogs

What are the few purposeful areas that we are focused on?

As a staff, we are clear on the revised professional learning programme that the school has implemented this year. The move away from ‘one size fits all’ meetings, where information is disseminated and objectives are misaligned with personal strengths and passions, is welcome. One key area for the staff to focus on has been the revision of the curriculum, particularly in the lower school. This has led to PLN groups of teachers who have a special interest in reading and mathematics in particular, to join together to look at ways learning in these areas can be developed.

The second area is meeting the need for our school community to be able to articulate clearly what we mean when we discuss good learning. Without a good understanding of what good learning looks like, we’ll never move forward as a community. It’s imperative for us to get this right, with the whole community buying into this vision. This makes it a key focus for us.

How do we share openly and regularly to further our own learning and development?

I’m interested if this is as a community or as individual. 250 words is a lot, so I think I can cover both! As a community we utilise a virtual learning platform for all classes. The expectation is that all assignments are listed as tasks within this platform. All class spaces on the platform are open to staff, giving each staff member a window into others’ learning spaces. We have also embedded our school hashtag #bsjbytes in a feed on the dashboard of every user, be it parent, student and staff. The PLN opportunities detailed in the next post also give opportunity for staff to share their own learning in more depth.

As an educator, I rely on my blog posts, my twitter feed and one to one relationships to share what I am up to. As a Learning Technology Coach, I get to interact and talk with all members of our community specifically around learning, and learning with technology. This puts me in a privileged position, and I relish it.

Do our professional learning opportunities mirror the learning we want to create for our students?

Well, we need to have a clear and shared understanding of what learning looks like at our school. That might sound an odd thing to say, but we currently have a task force working on defining what our school agrees is good learning. Even so, our professional learning is evolving this year. Teachers are choosing a focus for them to come together and learn about. They were also able to offer something they were interested in as a focus as long as that related to one of the school focuses for the year, or on learning directly. These were shared, and the teachers signed up to what they were interested in learning more about.

These PLNs are given times to meet, discuss, plan, try out and reflect on new strategies and approaches. In addition, teachers are expected to pursue learning of their own choosing. This could be their masters course, something offered by our Learning Technology team or an externally offered course, such as an MOOC. As these opportunities are driven by passions, interests and strengths I think they are reflective of the direction that we wish our students’ learning to go.

#IMMOOC 4 - A real influence

So I had been plowing a fairly lonely furrow as a classroom teacher. I had taken bits and pieces from various books and twitter chats and started to redesign how I organised the learning in my classroom. Most of what I was changing was giving much more control and choice to the students. But I felt vulnerable to accusations of experimenting without evidence that what I was trying would have a positive impact on the students’ learning. I knew it was working, and I knew I was on the right track. But I struggled to articulate this convincingly to those people who would ask about what I was doing.

Then came my validation and then some. From my PLN I kept hearing about this Pirate Book. Not the teach one, I’d been put off that by the ‘theory without real life application’ reviews. But the ‘Learn Like A Pirate’ book. It was a revelation. The confidence it gave me inspired me to continue exploring what I was attempting. It also encouraged me to take it much further with the practical suggestions really supercharging the changes I made and the experiences my students had in class. I write about it in more detail here.

For this, I tip my hat to @PaulSolarz, many thanks indeed sir!

#IMMOOC Starting from empathy.

My response to chapter 4 and 5 of ‘The Innovator’s Mindset’ has been one of reflection. Reflection on what I need to do more of, what I need to do next, and how I need to offering the folk I work with what they want, and what they need.

This is a fine balance in the role of a coach. What people want, and what they need are not always the same. Often, they want a quick fix, they want it to work instantly, without knowing why it went wrong or how to fix it next time it goes wrong. And I resist this. Caught up in my priorities I want them to do it themselves, I want them to muddle through and to find their own work-arounds as much as possible. I want them to learn through experience. I feel like I am facilitating their independence, their development and their ability to innovate and improve further.

But on reflection, have I really been thinking about this the best way? Have I really thought, if I was them, what would I want from my Learning Technology Coach?

So, in response, I am going to do something. I am going to put myself in the environments of the people I serve more regularly. Experience the unfamiliar classrooms and recognise the challenges that they face on a daily basis. Noticing where their struggles are and being more able to support them in improving their efforts in the classroom. I’ll be speaking to the students, finding out what works, what is done well already, and build on from that, in small steps.

#IMMOOC If you were to start a school from scratch, what would it look like?

Each learning community has specific needs and a specific context. What better way to create a school that meets the needs of the community than to get the community to create it’s own school.

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What is a school? In my mind, school is a community of learners. Each working to improve their own learning, but also that of the other members of the community.

Experienced and enlightened leaders would facilitate the organisation and development of the school in whatever form the students and teachers decide. The financing, construction and planning and all the other necessary organising will be done by students who are completing courses offered by the teaching community on a sign up basis. Students and teachers can request courses, which are then designed by members of the community with expertise in these areas.

I’m a believer in authentic audiences and having a real purpose to learning, I can think of nothing better than creating a school to be a worthwhile learning experience. I have no idea how it will look. Whether it will have a physical presence or not, or how it will achieve its aims, but that’s what I think is the beauty in this kind of project.

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Each year, the community would decide what needs changing for the following year, what mistakes would need improving on and how new ways of doing things better could be explored. This could be completely remodeling the whole thing, to just tweaking processes. If it should grow, once the organisation get to over 150 members, it can choose to split,and a new school planted.

Sure, there are some practicalities that would need ironing out, but the relationships built, the mistakes made and the consequences of their decisions will have a lasting impact on the students, and the community way beyond a ‘normal’ schooling experience.