To help encourage conversations and dialogue about learning and adapting, our topic/question for the dinner table is: How are you willing to adapt to help others learn? A Willingness to Adapt (Week of 3/12/17) (This is an anonymous Google Form)
After a busy and exciting week of learning, I have to admit that the frigid Saturday morning made it difficult to bring forth the energy that had been carrying me through! Even with the cold temps, I was able to summon up the energy to go for a run and embrace the elements - as it typically does, the run and time to think and reflect did the trick. I enjoyed going to WPI to cheer on the MHS girls basketball tournament game against Hopkinton (congrats to the team, Mark, and Ellen) on Saturday, and we then had a great time with Katie's dad at the Celtics game Sunday afternoon.
As noted above this past week was a great week of learning at Blake and for the entire Medfield community. From dissections in 7th grade science to our continued work with Colby Swettberg and Zach Kerr to foster a safe learning environment for our LGBTQ students, staff, and families to #DLDMedfield to conversations with students, staff, and parents about all of these endeavors to Friday's MassCue conference at Holy Cross (#MALeads17), my head is full of ideas, questions, and reflections. It may sound trite and overly simplistic, but I think that is what the essence of education and learning should be - a vehicle for growth and reflection. In the continued spirit of sharing and collaboration, I am sharing some of the mindsets, questions, reflections, and notes from the PD this past week - as I read, reflect, and write I am energized and inspired by the connections and relevance that are made with our mission and essential question - in essence, 'the willingness to adapt'.
Mission: Blake Middle School believes in a living mission statement, based on the concept that our community seeks and respects knowledge, integrity, character, wisdom, and the willingness to adapt to a continually evolving world.
Essential Question: How can we cultivate and curate the progression of student learning and growth?
#DLDMedfield Notes (Keynote, Panels, and Sessions)
- How does an idea get published and broadcast?
- What's the thing that I do that I engage in online?
- EdX revolution - sealed classroom vs online learning
- Shifting the 'turn it in culture' in schools
- What is the 'grammatical parsing' of today?
- For at least 150 years, two 'poles of conversations' - Science of Learning and Education is Life Itself (How do we reconcile these two themes?
- Kids need teachers
- 'Cognitive Load' Theory
- No one knows the right balance - but we need to keep trying and looking
- Go and interview your students - most powerful learning experiences in schools (field trips, special event days in schools)
- It's hard to grow in your individual rooms
- Set 'right-sized goals' - pursue that goal until you have evidence you are successful
- Address goals as a community (Coherence) and Renegotiate the Unwritten Contract of Radical Teacher Autonomy
- Secret sauce is having a blast (joy is the secret sauce)
- Two things will happen when computers enter schools: Either kids will learn to program computers or computers will be used to program kids
- Can’t get better at things unless we measure them
- Persevere in the face of challenge
- What are our problems of practice?
- Engage parents - how can we make our practices more transparent?
- Honor skepticism
- Repetition, iteration, and failure are central to learning
- Productive failure - connections to standards based reporting
- How do we assess learning in makerspaces?
- What are the tasks we are asking students to do? (Rich? Interesting? Compelling? Are we leveraging that?)
- Iteration, Coherence, and Shared Responsibility (Collaborative learning)
- Less important to get the one right system - it’s important to get one system right
- Shared language and spheres of influence
- 'The work is too big for one person'
- Involve students, staff, and community - start the conversation
- No grades, portfolios, student-led conferences - you see the impact right away and the students see it as well
- Hacking Assessment: 10 Ways to Go Gradeless in a Traditional Grades School
- Applaud and value creativity
- Be vulnerable
- Be open to students’ awesomeness
- Invite voices in
- Mastery = Application in new situations (proficiency for mastery)
- Cultivate a calling
- ‘Know Thy Impact’ - John Hattie
- A change agent never rests
- Classrooms redesigned as studios
Justin Reich's keynote at #DLDMedfield helped affirm our efforts and I highly recommend following him (@bjfr) and his blogs for Education Week. I remember hearing his words at the iPad Summit in November, 2015 and feeling equally moved (my blog post following that conference is here - Reflecting and Pushing Forward). As with any productive learning endeavors, I find myself with more questions and a desire to push myself a little bit deeper. I hope we can continue to foster these endeavors for our students and one another. As you read through the posts below, please keep some of these questions in mind...
- How can pushing yourself through discomfort help you learn?
- How can discomfort help you learn?
- Should learning be comfortable?
- What does a willingness to adapt look like?
Deeper Learning—for Teachers
by Andrew Miller in Edutopia
Miller pushes all educators and administrators to think about how we shape and design professional development. His words underline the importance of employing sound practice for all learners (students and adults) and speak to the importance of shared language, coherence, and collaboration.
Say “project” to someone, and they might recall a truly valuable experience or perhaps a complete waste of time. However, we know that when we adopt the mindset and essentials of project-based learning with students, we can improve upon existing projects or create new and better ones. Can we use PBL to improve professional development?
When you design project-based PD, you should be sure to begin with the end as well as timely milestones and benchmarks in mind. Leverage self, peer, and team assessments to make the project more meaningful. These assessments are great opportunities to give and receive feedback and build a culture of collaboration. We have an opportunity to reinvent PD using the PBL method to create not only engagement but also deeper professional learning.
4 Cultural Signs You’re Ready to Push Educational Innovation
by Randy Ziegenfuss (@ziegeran)
Ziegenfuss is a Superintendent in the Salisbury Township School District (PA) and shares that it is important to reflect on this question: What cultural signs foster the adoption of innovations (the uncommon dots) in education? His words push me as an educator, leader, and parent and I look forward to embracing these 4 cultural signs with the Blake and Medfield community...
- Inquiry is king.
- Understand that innovation is relative to context.
- Iteration is accepted and expected.
- Current innovations are spotlighted.
The Greatest EdTech Generation Ever – LIVE Blog of Justin Reich’s Keynote (iPad Summit 2015)
by Beth Holland (@brholland)
This post is Beth Holland's (@brholland) live blog of Justin's (@bjfr) keynote from the iPad Summit in November, 2015. Justin's keynote at #DLDMedfield this year carried forth many of the same elements and ideas, and I strongly encourage everyone to read, reread, and come back to these words. They push me to reflect and also affirm our endeavors at Blake and hope they do the same for you. I particularly like his 'call' to make sure we maintain a focus on learning that helps students to acquire and grow these skills...
- Solving Ill-Structured Problems: solving the problems that require imagining novel solutions.
- Complex Communication: anything that requires social interaction with a human being. Think about the role of automated customer service. Any time a computer tries to pretend to be humans, it becomes laughable fairly quickly.
What this says to all of us, and to our students, is that this is the most exciting possible time to be a learner. No matter what you may choose to learn, you can do so via YouTube and other media. Increasingly, the perspective that young people, and people of all ages, bring is the notion that all learners exist within a learning commons. This perspective is shaping formal learning as well.
As educators, one of our most critical challenges is to develop students into these learners who can take advantage of both formal and informal education systems. In order to do this, people need two skill sets: be employable in the near term and be prepared to learn and adapt over time. In many ways, schools need to accomplish the goals of both vocational systems (prepare for specific tasks) and liberal arts systems (prepare to be thinkers).
Justin then tells about the peer-learning strategies employed by Eric Mazur of Harvard. Abundant evidence exists that actively engaging students in learning experiences is more effective than having them passively receive information via lecture.
“Given our results, it is reasonable to raise concerns about the continued use of traditional lecturing as a control in future experiments.”
That statement essentially makes it unethical to use lecture as a control in experiments because it is so ineffective. All learning should be active as it has been proven to be exponentially more effective.
To make this happen, the first challenge is to come together and set together the right-sized goal. It can’t be a trivial goal like “we’re going to make everyone turn on their iPad.” However, the goal of “we will all embrace 21st-century skills” is too big. The challenge is to find a goal that can be systematically implemented at the right level for the community and stakeholders. We need targeted goals that can be met and then pursue those goals until they have been achieved. To do that, we need to collect evidence, and there is not a single test to measure and assess ill-structured problems. The second thing that has to happen is that we have to address these goals as a community, and the hardest part is going to be rewriting a contract that has never been written. Right now, there is an unwritten contract of radical teacher autonomy. While that is attractive, it is not a robust system for making schools better. Instead, we need teachers to come together and share their learning as well as be able to share that learning as a way to get better.
I hope we all as a community of learners (students, staff, parents) can find forums to share our own learning, progression of growth, and questions. I do recognize that we are 'stretching the rubber band' and that we need to all embrace some discomfort to allow authentic learning to be realized. If we 'lean towards yes' and maintain and foster the willingness to adapt, we can embrace the messiness within the context of our mission. Please know that my door continues to be open to discuss, listen, question, push back, and process - I welcome the dialogue.
I look forward to the work that lies ahead for all of us.
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Take care.
Nat