#IMMOOC Week 4: Building Up Strengths

As a school librarian, I serve my students, my fellow teachers, and everyone at my school. I still feel new to working in education (four years in), and I'm constantly moving my bar for what my work should look like. In reflecting on the ways that I unleash the strengths of the people I serve, I keep coming back to a story George Couros shares in Chapter 8 of #InnovatorsMindset:

"As a beginning teacher, rather than encourage a student's enjoyment of physical education, I would threaten to keep them out of P.E. class if they did not finish their 'work' in another subject area... my students often begrudgingly finished their assignments..., but the incident always diminished the relationship between the student and myself."

Couros goes on to argue that we need to build on strengths and passions, not operate on a deficit, compliance-based model. In my first year, I made classroom management my professional goal, and focused my daily reflections for the whole year on behavior. Like Couros, I've learned a lot since then. Overall, my school operates on a compliance-based model at the moment, but it's not 100%, and I do believe it will change over time.

While I'm not in a direct leadership role, I am doing my best within the model to create an environment for my students where they can pursue (or discover) their passions. One way I'm doing this is by facilitating passion projects for all 5th and 6th graders not involved in band while their homeroom teachers have a much needed middle-level meeting. Previously, this time was an open "catch-up" block, and with a little direction our students are now using the same time for: planning fundraisers for the humane society, building mountain bike trails, learning to code, creating 3D-printed skateboards, painting a series of watercolors of abstract soccer players, editing videos, and more (that's just half of my group!). Another way is our yearly STEAM event for 5th grade---two days of hands-on, practical workshops on STEAM topics like water rockets, LEGO robotics, programming, digital animation, e-textiles, and more. I also provide safe haven for those who love to read---I make sure I know my readers, curate a collection that has an abundance of enticing materials, and provide challenges to keep them motivated by sharing their reading. At the moment, I feel I'm doing an especially good job supporting students in the upper grades and I could invest more effort in those who are younger. It is also a professional goal of mine to become a better leader of my colleagues, and #edci325 at UVM is an important step towards that goal. In the future I intend to provide regular professional development opportunities, both for technology and for passion-based reading.

Technology in Education and ISTE's Essential Conditions

The International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) has created a set of Essential Conditions as a tool for educators and leaders to analyze the ways they and their institutions are leveraging technology in education. They provide an online tool that allows you to look closely at how, to the best of your knowledge, your institution is meeting those Essential Conditions.
The last active technology plan expired in 2015, so my survey input and analysis comes partially from what is expressed in that six year old plan and partially from my own impressions of the use and support of technology for education in my day-to-day experience. The state of Vermont has no longer has an active mandate for the creation of a technology plan, but they suggest that creation of a digital learning plan is valuable and that core elements of digital learning could find a place in the required Continuous Improvement Plan. Unfortunately, this makes it unlikely that a deep, district-wide conversation about technology in education will be prioritized unless it somehow becomes urgent. The results from my completion of the ISTE Essential Conditions survey are below:

In looking at this data, a few things jump out immediately:

• Bright spots: Access, Policies, and Funding
• Challenges: Community Engagement, Empowered Leaders, Shared Vision

It is true that access and funding are bright spots. We have a district technology department that supplies and maintains 1-1 devices for all upper grade (3-6) classrooms, and a regular replacement schedule for devices. We have robust, yet not overly restrictive policies for technology use.
I was very surprised to see that, based on my survey data, we are meeting the condition of ongoing professional learning. I think, perhaps, I was not specific to technology in my thinking when answering survey questions, as my district has excellent, supportive professional development policies. However, as a district we do not offer any ongoing professional development specific to the technologies that are provided to our teachers. To me, this is also where there is a bit of a leadership vacuum. There is no longer a district-wide technology integration committee, and there are not tech integrationists working in all school buildings. As a district staff, we aren’t talking about how we are using technology in teaching and learning. Without those conversations, it becomes challenging to engage the community and build a shared vision.
However, this challenge also represents an opportunity. If we were to integrate elements of a digital learning plan into our state-mandated Continuous Improvement Plan, we have the opportunity to begin a conversation about technology and learning among our educators. We could draft a goal that related directly to professional learning and fostering conversations among professional staff about their use of technology to support and empower our learners.

#IMMOOC Week 3: What If?

Last week in UVM's #EDCI325, we made an artifact to articulate our vision for school in the future---the school that our children or grandchildren would attend (my artifact is the video below, still a draft, without a clear conclusion).  I feel really invested in reimagining education right now, both professional and personally, as my son is a year and a half old and I already get negative feedback about how physical he can be at daycare.

The vision that I created is my WHAT IFs for education, deeply informed by my reading of #InnovatorsMindset.

• What if our schools not only acknowledged but engaged with the natural world? If learning cycled with the seasons? If we spent learning time outside every day, observing and interacting with our world?
• What if learning was experiential and authentic? If it was designed to equip students with practical, transferable skills that are necessary in all work? What if what students learn was guided by their passions? What if anyone who was part of a school was expected to be constantly learning and growing? As George Couros wrote:

We all need to develop the skills and mindsets that will help us thrive, not only in the classroom but also in our lives beyond the school walls.

• What if students moved at their own pace, and there was never the constant undercurrent of "but there's not enough time!"?  Could we create a system where everyone gets what they need when they need it? Where students are empowered and have the skillset to articulate their needs? Where they have the time to reflect on what they have learned?

In this vision, how does the teacher's role change? What would a classroom look like? What do we need to do to get from here to there? Couros has some sage advice:

To move forward in education---to create a vision for education that then comes to life---we must take more than a top-down or bottom-up approach; we will need all hands on deck.

#IMMOOC Week 2

In Chapter 2 of The Innovator's Mindset, Couros poses the following “Critical Questions for Educators:”

• Would I want to be a learner in my own classroom?
• What is best for this student?
• What is this student's passion?
• What are some ways we can create a true learning community?
• How did this work for our students?

This set of questions is powerful, and it is important that not only teachers, but all people who are responsible for making decisions about how our educational system operates, ask themselves these questions in the course of their thinking.
Too often we have no reason to look at our work from the eyes of a student. I was particularly struck by the anecdote Couros shares in Chapter 5 on a veteran teacher's experience shadowing students for a full day (full blog post here). What if every person who makes decisions about education---not just teachers, but administrators, school board members, legislators---was required to experience school TODAY through the eyes of a student? My husband Marty recently served a brief term on our new unified school board, responsible for governing a union of schools serving about 1500 students in rural Vermont. The school board visited each school in the district over the course of the year, but the visits took place at night, when the schools were just buildings, not the vibrant learning communities that exist during the school day. The educational experience of most people serving on the school board is even more distant than those working in schools---many of Marty's colleagues knew the schools as parents, but were not intimately familiar with the day to day life of the school. Yet these people are responsible for making major decisions about school budgets and programs, trying to do more with less. Marty was deeply impressed by the potential impact of shadowing students for the school board when I recounted Couros's anecdote to him.
Teachers have day-to-day power over students' experiences in their classrooms. School board members have large-scale power over student experience---they determine what our schools will look like in broad strokes. As innovators, we need to advocate for both micro (teacher) and macro (school board/policy maker) level innovation. Couros's questions, and the idea of shadowing students, are powerful tools in helping conceptualize innovations at both levels---and potentially more powerful for those with less direct experience in our schools. However, perhaps we need a slightly modified set of questions for the macro level... I propose:

• Would I want to be a learner in this school?
• What is best for learning?
• How can we build a system to build passion in our students?
• What are some ways we can create a true learning community?
• How did this work for our students?
• How can we make this system simpler, and better?

What do you think about innovation at the macro level? Do we as educators have a place in directing the thinking of our school boards and legislators? How can we best advocate for student learning?