Innovation Week Day 5 – Taking Flight

cc licensed ( BY NC SA ) flickr photo shared by Andy.Schultz

“Once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been, and there you will always long to return.”
― Leonardo da Vinci

I have always loved this quote. In conversation with George Couros at our Innovation Week wrap up he talked about the scene in the Matrix with the Red and Blue pill. Both are fitting, I find mine a little more eloquent though.

But I’ll come back to that…

Yesterday was our final day of our Innovation Week. We finished the week with an Open House, with each individual or group set up at tables to show case their work to the rest of the school and to the parents and members of the community that attended. It was a really great couple of hours with students proudly displaying their projects, walking each passer by through each component, and eagerly explaining the step-by-step processes that took place to complete them. For these students, they became the star of the show, as the people walked around to see just what they had done. It felt great to see that our project was able to make celebrities out of learners.

After the Open House we finished with an assembly just for the students involved in Innovation Week. We rode our Principal in on a hovercraft built by three Gr. 9 students (trust me, there will be a post about these three young men and their project). We had a selected number of groups come up and show their projects, and gave them the microphone to talk about their experiences during the week. There were many cheers and a great deal of excitement, especially when our Principal let them know that there would be another Innovation Week coming sometime this school year.

While there are things we will do differently, we were very pleased with the event (see post from our happy Principal here). I think a lot of great learning came out of this week for us as a staff and we have a lot of sharing and reflecting to do when we return from the break.

Which brings me back to my conversation with George…

As we walked around the Open House, we talked about the impact the event would have on our students. George talked about how after an event like this, any type of “old school” lesson just wasn’t going to cut it for these kids anymore. I have to agree, and I believe our next step is to pursue ways for us to implement Innovation-style activities into our day to day teaching. Whether it is in a one hour class, over the course of a unit or in a week long project, ensuring that students have a chance to choose what they study, how they do their work, or what they produce, will foster the innovative learning we are hoping for.

I would hope that if you are reading this and you have an Innovation activity that you have used or read about that you would share it here, or if you have ideas or tips for our next Innovation Week those would be great as well. Josh Stumpenhorst, the creator of Innovation Day, and Matt Bebbington, who ran his own Innovation Day in England, both helped me a great deal in bringing Innovation Week to our staff and students, and we would love to help anyone else looking to run a similar event. Please feel free to contact me if you would like to discuss any of the details further. There will be more Innovation Week posts to come, as there is so much more to reflect on and discuss, but as for the week recaps, that’s a wrap.

 

Innovation Week Day 3 & 4

Sled

New and Improved Toothbrush

Rebuilt RC Car

Wow. What an amazing four days it has been. New learning experiences for students that are bound to be ones they won’t soon forget. Novel opportunities for students to be successful, and proud of their accomplishments. Positive, growth-provoking interactions between student – teacher, student – student and student – community where learning was the end goal and motivation was never in question.

I believe the biggest reason why this week has been so successful is because it has provided so many of the goals that we strive for in our teaching throughout the year, only those goals have happened almost completely without a great deal of teacher involvement, input or design. So often we strive for a learning experience that will provide our students with choice, challenge and curiosity. We try to provide opportunities for all of our students to enjoy success. We work so hard to meet our students at their level, and then do our best to help them improve and grow. Innovation Week has done some or all of these things for a number of our students.

As I said in the previous post, I will try to write about all of these topics and more in the coming weeks, as we break down the week and reflect on all aspects of the project. For now I want to continue along the lines of providing ideas on how this could be done in other buildings, and discuss some of the issues we dealt with during the week.

Flexibility

As the week progressed, some students finished their projects earlier then they had planned. Other students had difficulty with staying focused and on task for such a lengthy period of time. In a couple instances, groups decided to scrap their projects. The way we decided to tackle this was by being flexible with individual student needs. Students were able to go back to their classes for a short period of time, for the entire morning or afternoon or even for the rest of the day and then allowed to return to their project at a later time. Some students left their Innovation Week projects and helped other groups, attended their gym classes, or wrote tests their classes were having. Doing a project for the first time with 260 students ranging from Grades 5 to 9, we expected there would be some of these challenges. The key of course was having flexible staff who were able to handle the flow of students in and out of their classes while still maintaining a positive learning environment for those students who were not taking part in Innovation Week.

Lack of Assistance in Certain Areas

Specifically technology. We have a pretty dynamic staff, and while we are lucky to have a few teachers who excel in the arts, a couple teachers who are great with hands-on type mechanical work, and a number of staff who know their way around a computer and an iPad, we were still short with help a lot of the time. It didn’t take long for us to realize that in many cases, the best helpers were the students themselves. We quickly identified who was good with certain devices or software, who had recorded music before, who had built and launched rockes before, and those students were enlisted to help other students. They did it willingly, and certainly drew a sense of pride from being the “expert”. I think if any school were to do an Innovation Week style event, identifying “In-house Experts” would be a good way to bolster your assistant numbers and to give those students a chance to be the teacher to others.

Opportunity to Connect with Community

We didn’t do enough when it came to this… really, I didn’t do enough. A colleague, who also happens to be one of our Learning Coaches in the building, suggested this project would have been a good opportunity to connect with “Experts” in our community, even if it meant taking the students TO THEM. In a couple instances we did that, with a group heading to a bakery to learn and ask questions for their baking project, and other groups that had people come into the building to help them. What we should have done was make “Outside Experts” a component of the proposal process. With enough time, every student could find someone to meet with, either at their place of work, in our school, over Skype or at worst over the phone. Connecting our students to resources outside of their day to day lives would be a valuable learning experience for when they encounter issues in adulthood, either at their job or at home.

 

Tomorrow we have the students present their projects in an Open House-style setting, and we will see how many of them were able to create projects they are proud of. Day 5 will be a big day, and one I’m sure I’ll have lots to write about when its over.

If you are reading this and you have any questions or comments, please leave them. While we would love to help other schools do this, we are also already starting to plan Innovation Week #2 and we would love input on how to make the next one even better for our students.

Innovation Week Day 1 & 2

Well two days are in the books. I’m tired, but it’s a good tired. We started the week off strong and the wave of energy and enthusiasm continues. We can only hope that the kids and the staff can keep it rolling.

When it comes to writing about our Innovation Week project its one of those rare times when I have an overly abundant number of ideas I could write about. I could tell you about the way the staff of our school have done such an amazing job of inspiring and motivating our students’ learning regardless of the certain mental and physical fatigue all us educators feel in the last week before the holiday. I could tell you about the amazing engagement and excitement coming from our students, the outstanding depth and magnitude of their projects and the way they are pulling together, helping each other out and working as one large and effective learning community. I could also write about how initiatives like Innovation Week, and so many others like it, are the antidote to the status quo and the way forward if we are truly going to help our system break free from the old model of prescribed curriculum and standardized tests. I could write about all of those wonderful topics (and probably will at some time) but in these posts I really just want to give you an idea of how we are making Innovation Week work, and how you might improve on it and run your own in your building.

Managing The Space

When all was said and done we had nearly 260 of our 540 students involved in Innovation Week, which meant we needed half the classrooms as well as the use of some of our more specific work spaces (Gymnasium, Foods Room, Flex Lab). We also needed to ensure we had adequate work spaces for the students who did not take part in the week. Because our staff was so behind the project, they were very flexible with giving up their spaces and sharing the responsibilities of supervising students. We decided to group the students by the theme of their projects and to a limited degree by grade level. We have Building Rooms, Performing Arts Rooms, a Writing Room, a Cooking Room, Tech Rooms, a Display Room, a Sewing/Craft Room, a Research Area, as well as a few other targeted work spaces. Students start their days in this room (following a daily opening assembly) but are not limited to working in these spaces. They are, however, responsible to the supervising teacher in their workspace and keep that teacher informed on where they are choosing to work. There have been some difficulties to overcome including creating a supervising schedule of teachers (we made sure everyone was a part of Innovation Week for at least one day) and creating a gym schedule (to create prep time for teachers and provide physical activity for the students in regular classes) but so far it has seemed to work. I think the keys to making this work in a building are obviously the support and flexibility of the staff, as well as being comfortable with the learning becoming a bit geographically messy.

Sewing Room

Writing Room

Display Room

Display Room

Optimizing The Impact

It is important to us that the students are getting the most out of this learning experience, so to try to ensure we were having them capture part of their own learning process we purchased everyone of them an Innovation Week Journal. In this journal, students will reflect throughout the day on what went well, what was difficult, and how the learning process evolved throughout the week. Because the supervising teachers in each Innovation Work Space, we are also having the teachers provide constructive feedback and thought provoking questions in the student journals. This gives the teacher coming into the room the next day an idea of what feedback has been given so far and how they can help the students with their projects. On Day 1 we found the reflections to be a little on the light side in some instances, so we provided some writing prompts at the end of the day to better provide direction for our students on what they could be reflecting on.

Opening Assemblies/Community Focus

Each day, we are starting with an assembly to get the ball rolling. We have shared videos on innovation and creativity to inspire our students for the day. We have gone over house keeping issues such as break times, safety and shared use of technology. We have talked about how Innovation Day began, and what the idea behind it was all about. These assemblies have been very useful in our first two days for a couple reasons. One being that this is our first Innovation Week and issues have been popping up throughout the first two days, and this gives us the ability to talk about these issues with all 260 students at once rather than trying to do PA announcements or spreading the word room to room. The other reason is that we have been able to get a bit of a community feel to develop. The students in the assembly are all there for Innovation Week and there seems to be a shared pride in that. When we started the first day, they cheered at being told it was “time to get started”. Today when we asked everyone to think about their fellow Innovation Week participants and share the technology in our building, we noticed a much smoother day when it came to sharing the Laptops, Desktops and iPads.

 

I haven’t had as much time as I had hoped to get into classrooms and see the projects, speak to the students and teachers and really get a feel for how each persons experience was going. I am going to try to get to more classrooms tomorrow, and document more of the week. When this is done I hope we will have a great deal of video to share as well.

For now, I will leave you with a plea to please disregard any typos, spelling mistakes or poor writing in this post, I am going to go ahead with it without the usual proofreading and re-writing. More will come, hopefully separate reflections from Days 3, 4 and 5 and hopefully with a bit more care and attention. Its 11:30pm and my wonderful experiences of the past two days have worn me ragged. I need sleep.

 

Ok, They’re Excited…

cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Nagyman

255 approved applications. 255 excited kids ready to start working on projects they chose, on topics they care about, and under their own direction. They are excited. Excited about learning. How great is that!? Really, if that was our goal, we’d be done! And it wouldn’t have been a bad goal, to get nearly half of our students excited to learn. We could probably have let the project run its course and slept well when it was over.

But the truth is, there is a loftier goal. We have to aspire to more than just excitement about learning. We want Innovation Week to be more than a week of excited kids. We want Innovation Week to be some of the best learning these kids have ever experienced. We want Innovation Week to be some of the best learning that has ever taken place inside the walls of Greystone Centennial Middle School. You see, if we want education to move forward, its projects like this that can help that happen. We need to show the public that amazing things can happen when we break free from the old routines and tired practices. If we ever want to get away from prescribed curriculum and standardized tests, its not enough to complain, we have to provide alternatives. Projects like Innovation Week and others like it, (see here and here) help us build our case for change and for a better way.

So this coming week, even though our students have been given the chance to choose their project, plan their learning and direct their own activities, it will be us, their teachers, that will guide them towards deeper learning. We will push them to get the most out of the week, challenge them to take their projects further and help them find the real learning that exists in the week.

Imagine! Students choosing to learn about what they are interested in, and teachers there to guide them to quality learning experiences. Maybe we might be on to something…

Innovation Week

cc licensed ( BY NC SA ) flickr photo shared by Geoffery Kehrig

I love this picture. Maybe it is because I have a 5 month old daughter who seems to be discovering something new every day. What ever the reason, as we prepare for our “Innovation Week” event at our school, we are bouncing around words like innovation, creativity, and discovery a lot, and it is images like this one that remind me what is at the heart of our event. Like this girl with the flower, we want our students to discover something: a passion for learning.

We are well underway with our planning for our Innovation Week, a 5 day period in our last week before the winter break where students are going to have the opportunity to create their own learning experience. During this week, students will be given the time, space, support and necessary materials to work on a project of their choice. Our hope is to provide students with a meaningful experience that will help develop a passion for learning by giving them the chance to pursue their own learning interests. Similar projects have been run in the United States and England and have been met with great success when it comes to student engagement and impactful learning experiences. The students will not attend their classes during this week, instead they will work in the Innovation Week area for the entirety of their school day. Staff members from our school will be supervising and assisting in the Innovation Week area all week. We are hoping every staff member will get the chance to be in the Innovation Week area for at least one school day. On the morning of final day, we will have each individual/group present their project and give a summary of their learning that occurred during the week.

We were given a great deal of support from Matt Bebbington, whose Innovation Day project and subsequent blog posts were the inspiration behind our school’s Innovation Week project. Matt shared with me his student proposal forms, his presentation to his students, his posters and more, and offered to assist us along the way whenever we needed him. I am needing some more support, but not from Matt. I am looking to my PLN to help us make the most out of this event. We are hoping for some feedback from you when it comes to three specific areas:

Student Motivation

We are hoping our students will look to take their projects way beyond the walls of Greystone Centennial Middle School. We want them to look at this as an opportunity to not only do a project on something they are interested in, but to make it have reach and impact. We want students to aspire to create something of importance. A comic book that would connect with an audience, a video that will go viral, an invention that will make someone’s life easier. We want them to reach for the stars, but we also want them to be as self directed as possible. So… how do we do both? We have some ideas, but I am guessing those of you reading this will come up with far better ones.

Project Start-Up

We all know our students can get excited about something, a project, an activity etc. but often they have trouble with where to start. We all know that our inspiration, our creativity doesn’t just come to us in a dream, there has to be some background, some foundational knowledge or experience that guides us towards work in that area. We are interested in a certain topic because we have had some experience with that topic, or we have developed some initial understanding about the topic. We know our students are going to need to start the week by developing a direction to their work, with some vision for where it could go.

To do this, our students are going to need to do some initial research and planning. We want them to start this way, but again we want this to be as self directed as possible. So… how do we get kids to temper their excitement and lay the ground work for what could be a powerful project? We don’t want to mandate a “Research and Planning Day”, so do we coach them with some advice for start-up? Do we provide them examples of where great ideas developed from? Do we let them go completely and let their struggles be a major component of the learning experience?

My Project

Selfishly, this is the big one for me. To model the experience for my students, I too am going to create a project. I decided on producing a piece on innovation. I am hoping to Skype/Facetime and interview people about their thoughts on creativity and innovation in schools. I plan on basing my interviews around these three questions:

1) Do you feel that innovation and creativity are important skills to tackle in education?

2) What activities do you believe best challenge and develop these skills?

3) How would you suggest schools do more to develop these skills in their students?

Whether this ends up being a written piece or a multimedia presentation, I am not quite sure, but I am going to need some assistance. I am going to need people to interview, and advice on who to interview and how to best make that happen. I started by developing my wish list on who I would like to comment on this topic. Sir Ken Robinson, Daniel Pink, Diane Ravitch, people from innovative places like Google, Apple, Ivy League institutions, education people from my PLN all were on it, but who else do you think would be a valuable person to interview? Do you have connections to any people that would help make my project even better?

We are discussing starting each day of Innovation Week with a guest speaker over Skype, so it would be great to get some VIP’s for that role as well.

Really, we believe that this event will be great, but it will be better if we get input from all of you bright minds out there. If you have some input on our Innovation week project, please leave a comment or contact me directly @jmclean77 or jessepmclean@gmail.com. We look forward to hearing from you, and we look forward to sharing how our event goes with you!

Why School? – Book Review

“This isn’t about delivery. In a word, its about discovery”

I recently read Why School? by Will Richardson, a great book looking towards the future of education and I thought I would put together a quick review of my thoughts on it. If you are anything like me, you are hoping that we are on the precipice of major change in education. I am hoping that we can break free from many of the traditions we have continued for far too long. Of course I am not bright enough to point us in the right direction, but I am ready and waiting to be a foot soldier for the cause.

This book does a lot to inspire more foot soldiers like me to take up the cause of meaningful school reform. In the past few years I have gone from believing in a prescribed curriculum, to believing we need to have a more freeing minimalized curriculum, to the point now where I wonder (often to myself for fear of being dismissed as going to far) if we need a curriculum at all. This book definitely validated the idea, and provides a great deal of the “why” behind a change in this direction.

Here is a run down of some of the major themes of the book along with some quotes from these sections.

Abundance vs. Scarcity

One of the big ideas of this book is the competing views of abundance vs. scarcity. Will talks about how the Internet has changed the way we need to look at the availability of information and learning:

 “In a nutshell, here’s what happened during the last 15 years with regard to information, knowledge, teachers, learning, and getting an education. Thanks to the Internet and the technologies we use to access it, we’ve moved from a world where all of these were relatively scarce to one where they’re absolutely abundant.”

This change in access has an obvious impact on our education system and what we should be aspiring towards. Will provides a quote from Michael Wesch, a professor at Kansas State University, on what this abundance should look like:

“ubiquitous computing, ubiquitous information, ubiquitous networks, at unlimited speed, about everything, everywhere, from anywhere, on all kinds of devices that make it ridiculously easy to connect, organize, share, collect, collaborate and publish.”

While we are not at the point that Michael Wesch talks about, it is important to keep in mind all the advantages this new age of abundance provides us. In a chapter called “The Upside”, Will comments on what this type of access can do for education.

“But consider the incredible upsides for learning and education if we have that access – and if we know what to do with it. We have an amazing array of tools we can use to create and share beautiful, meaningful, important works with global audiences. We have vast opportunities to connect and learn from and with authors, scientists, journalists, explorers, artists, athletes and many others. We have immense storehouses of primary-source information that we can literally carry in our pockets. This new landscape transforms our ability to work together to change the world for the better. And don’t forget that all of this has happened in little over a decade.”

“Better” vs. Another Way

So with this new world of abundance, Will talks about two ways it can be used to move forward. One being to simply use this abundance to keep doing what we are doing but BETTER. He talks about how corporate and political influence point to this being the way forward.

“They see schools as places where technology is increasingly a tool to better deliver content, where a growing emphasis on passing a test becomes a business proposition, one tied to competing against other countries, schools, classrooms, teachers, and students. In this view, we focus on the easiest parts of the learning interaction – information acquisition, basic skills, a bit of critical thinking, analysis – accomplishments that can be easily identified and scored. Learning is relegated to the quantifiable: that which is easy to rank and compare.”

In this chapter Will ends with a great point and question, one that should be fundamental to our thinking and help us push against the perpetuating models of traditional education delivery.

“This, then, is what schools look like to those who see abundant content and connections through the “let’s deliver the old curriculum through new tools” lens of reform. It’s old wine – or, in this case, old thinking about education – in new bottles. How does this serve our kids at this moment of abundance?”

It’s in Will’s words about “Another Way” of change that this book really inspires and motivates me to push for change.

“There is a second narrative, however, that presents a much different vision for what schools can and must become in this moment of huge change. This vision is being co-created by thousands of educators around the world, who recognize a different future for their students and understand deeply how technology and the Web can enhance learning, both in and out of the classroom. This isn’t about delivery. In a word, its about discovery.”

“This narrative focuses on preparing students to be learners, above all, who can successfully wield the abundance at their fingertips. It’s a kind of schooling that prepares students for the world they will live in, not the one in which most of us grew up.”

“The emphasis shifts from content mastery to learning mastery”

Will doesn’t try to make it all sound wonderful and easy though. He is clear that there will be difficulties as we try to change what we do while still trying to be accountable to our stakeholders.

“There lies the tension. This second path is simply not as easy to quantify as the first. Developing creativity, persistence, and the skills for patient problem solving, B.S.-detecting, and collaborating may now be more important than knowing the key dates and battles of the Civil War (after all, those answers are just a few taps on our phone away), but they’re all much more difficult to assign a score to.”

Assessment

While re-thinking what we teach, how we teach, and the learning experiences we provide for our students, Will also addresses the idea of changing the way we assess our students. 

“Education author Jay Cross, says that ‘knowledge is moving from the individual to the individual and his contacts’… It’s not what I know, it’s what we know. And my reality is that I would suddenly become much dumber if you told me I had to disconnect when seeking answers or solving problems… Remaking assessments starts with this: stop asking questions on tests that can be answered by a Google search. Or, if you have to ask them, let kids use their technology to answer them.”

“In other words, let’s scrap open-book tests, zoom past open-phone tests asking Googleable questions, and advance to open-network tests that measure not just if kids answer a question well, but how literate they are at discerning good information from bad and tapping into the experts and networks that can inform those answers. This is how they’ll take the reali life information and knowledge tests that come their way, and it would tell us much more about our children’s preparedness for a world of abundance.”

“Let’s also shift our assessments of students’ mastery to ones that examine mastery in action. Performance-based assessments, where students actually have to do something with what they know, tell us volumes more about their readiness for life than bubble sheets or contrived essays.”

Rethinking Teaching

The last third of the book focuses on how we can change our teaching to better fit with this new world of abundance. Will presents 6 strategies to follow when it comes to unlearning and relearning our practices.

1. Share everything

“We can raise the teaching profession by sharing what works, by taking the best of what we do and hanging it on the virtual wall. Many would argue that it is now the duty of teachers to do so.”

2. Discover, don’t deliver, the curriculum

“…we have to move away from telling kids what to learn, and when and how to learn it. We have to stop not only because it drives away any passion our children have for learning, but alos because – especially now, when curriculum is everywhere – it’s not a very effective way of going about our business. When you think of how we learn once we leave school, developing our own paths to learning the things we want to, why wouldn’t we let kids do that in the classroom?”

“Teachers need to be great at asking questions and astute at managing the different paths to learning each child creates. They must guide students to pursue projects of value and help them connect their interests to the required standards. And they have to be participants and models in the learning process.”

3.  Talk to strangers

“The reality is that the kids in our schools will interact and learn with strangers online on a regular basis throughout their lives. “

4. Be a master learner

“If we’re to develop learners who can make sense of the whole library, we must already be able to do that ourselves. In other words, the adults in the room need to be learners first and teachers second.”

“People who model their own learning process, connect to other learners as a regular part of their day, and learn continuously around the things they have a passion for.”

“And they have to exhibit the dispositions that will sustain their learning: persistence, empathy, passion, sharing, collaboration, creativity, and curiousity. Most important, they have to be willing to learn with my children.”

5.  Do real work for real audiences

“I’d rather know that my kids were creating something of meaning, value and I hope, beauty for people other than just their teachers, and that those creations had the opportunity to live in the world. That they were thinking hard about audience. That they were learning how to network and collaborate with others. That they were developing ‘proficiency with the tools of technology’, learning to ‘design and share information for global communities to meet a variety of purposes’, and becoming literate in the process.”

6. Transfer the power

“If we expect our kids to be able to own their own learning, find their own teachers, create their own classrooms, and find other students to learn with, then we need to make sure they have opportunities to do these things in school.”

“Don’t teach my child science; instead, teach my child how to learn science – or history or math or music. With as many resources as they have available to them today (not to mention what they’ll have tomorrow), kids had better know how.”

As I have said, I have been ready to be a part of change in education, but I have never felt like I knew exactly where to go, what to do or how to do it. I am not suggesting that this book is a “How-To” guide to instantly changing education systems all over the world, but I do believe it gets us asking the right questions and reflecting on the right parts of our practices.

Some people may read this and say that this is a book of ideas and not enough in the way of practical guidance. To me, this argument always puzzles me, because anything new has to start as an idea before it can be implemented. Some people will read this and argue that the change is too radical given the restraints of our system. To me, I wonder how people could keep plodding along knowing that there is a better way to serve our students. When it comes to leadership and change, we should always make our decisions based on principles. The guiding principle in education should be “What is the right thing to do for our students?”. What Will’s book tells us is that a monumental change to our education system will be difficult, but it is most definitely the right thing for our students.

I hope you will spend the $1.99 to download this book and sit down and read it with an open and reflective mind. Take what is said and weigh it against what you believe is right for our students, and how your practices assist your students to learn. Then, if this book inspires you, share it, and join the conversation. We are lucky to be working in a profession at the most exciting time to be in this profession. Let’s embrace the change and see just how great we can make our schools for our students.

We Have No Excuse

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cooper.gary

I have been very lucky. I have had so many people help me in my career, so many mentors who have helped me shape my philosophy, sharpen my pedagogy and given me the confidence in myself to tackle projects and take on different positions. It was a conversation with one my mentors last week that helped me past a bit of writer’s block. I have had some trouble with deciding about what to share and how to share it. As we talked about a big project we are starting to work on, he asked me why I thought it would be successful in my school at this time. At the end of our conversation, he advised me to share on my blog what I shared with him. Sounded like a good idea…

We are looking at doing some work along the lines of innovation, something similar to Josh Stumpenhorst’s Passion Projects and Matt Bebbington‘s Innovation Day. To take something like this on, and expect it to be successful, you would of course need to be confident in the timing, the people involved and leadership supporting it. We are ready for this project for three reasons:

Our Teachers

I could spend multiple blog posts bragging about my colleagues. We have a staff that is driven by its desire to help students learn, not for a test or a statistic but for the joy and importance of learning. They model this in their openness to try something new if they believe it will help their students. Our staff prides itself on pushing their pedagogy and collaboratively working to improve their teaching together. What goes on in our building is student-driven, messy and impactful learning. For this reason we know we will have their support, their belief and their passion when we roll out each phase of our project.

Our Leadership

Our principal is an inspiring, committed and driven leader who has no desire to continue worn out practices or resting on her laurels. Her school has won awards and drawn a great deal of positive attention in the past few years, yet she continues to preach progressive thinking, innovative teaching practices and constant improvement and growth. While technology isn’t always her best friend, she is always trying to learn and grow and understands that technology will never replace good teaching, but will work to assist it. For this reason, we know we can move forward with her support, and whether it is a successful endeavour or not, she will insist it was worth the experience.

Our Students

The students in our building are creative, engaged and enthusiastic about learning. Of course a lot of their exuberance is a product of our amazing staff, but they deserve a great deal of credit as well. We are constantly amazed by what they are capable of and the directions that they can take an experience when given the flexibility and freedom to lead their learning. We want to provide them with more opportunities to direct their learning,  as they have shown that this type of challenge is a beneficial one. I believe our students are ready to really flex their creative muscle and that it is the right group of kids at the right time.

So when I was done my long winded rant about how ready our school is for a project like this, I realized that we really have no excuse. With a staff as dedicated and driven as ours, with a leader always pushing for growth, and with a group of students so excited about learning, we have no excuse but to do everything we can to help make their educational experience the best we can. If self direction, risk taking, and critical thinking are our goals for our students, we have no excuse but to try to take our teaching to new places, whether we succeed or not. We owe it to everyone already doing all they can, to do everything we can ourselves. We have no excuse, so now its time to get to work.

Audience

cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by orkomedix

We are back! Schools are open, kids are registered and in classes and teachers are eagerly setting up their classrooms for an exciting year. I am excited as well for yet another new job (Will I ever have the same job for more than one year!?) and one of the big things that got me excited was our first three days back for professional development. The first day was spent with an opening presentation by our division and then two and a half days spent with our own staff on a retreat. I was pleased to hear how often the topic of sharing what is going on in our classrooms came up.

Most of you will know the name George Couros, he is Division Principal in my division and he gave the Keynote address at our opening day. His presentation was amazing, and one of the big take-aways for me was the idea of giving our students an audience. He talked about how students who practice weeks and weeks for the Christmas concert always seem to fool around, not take it seriously, and make you think they may just bomb, but when the day comes, they are amazing. The difference of course being that you provided them an audience, and they performed.

At our school’s retreat, we discussed at great length the importance of home school communication and meeting our parent community needs by providing multiple avenues for connecting. Facebook, Twitter, Blogs, text messages, email and of course phone calls and school visits all came up. It is great how creative and flexible our teachers are with finding and utilizing all these methods of communication. Keeping our parents aware of what is going on in our building is an important part of what we do.

But George’s speech and our time at retreat had me thinking about who our audience really is. With our students, we know that any blog post, project or tweet is going to be aimed at their friends or their parents. With our staff, their number one concern will always be the parents of their students. If this is the concept of audience our students or staff have, then it will definitely shape, and more than likely limit the message they share.

The advantage technology provides us when it comes to sharing is that there is no limit to how far our message can reach. It is for this reason that we need to start considering this when we write a blog post, send a tweet or post a video clip. When our students blog or tweet, we should emphasize that they are speaking to anyone and everyone. We of course need to facilitate an active audience, both by sharing their work ourselves and using support like the hashtag Comments For Kids (#comments4kids). It is when someone they DON’T know comments on their blog or responds to their tweet, that the power of their audience can really impact them.

With our colleagues, the same is true. We do want our teachers sharing with the parent community as often and effectively as possible, but they too have so much more to offer than that. Sharing what is going on in our classrooms with our local community can garner support, can inspire involvement/volunteerism, and can model transparency in education. Our community pays the taxes that fund our schools, and involving them through sharing only seems right. Sharing with educators in our division and province/state can facilitate collaborative endeavours, can improve teacher practice (ours and others), and can promote sharing from others. Sharing with educators all over the world can help us all learn and grow as we collaborate across time zones and borders to grow education everywhere.

Last summer, as the school year came to a close, I read a tweet and blog post by Matt Bebbington about Innovation Day, a day where the students are given the entire day to work on whatever they choose after making a proposal and having it approved. Matt had his Innovation Day at his school March 8th, 2012 and took the time to share the process of planning, putting on and reflecting on the entire endeavour. Matt is a PE teacher in England, and while he had a big impact on the students of Wilmslow High, he had an even bigger impact as his sharing has led to Innovation Days all over the globe. We plan to run our own Innovation Week this coming December.

By blogging and tweeting with a global audience in mind, Matt had a huge impact on a number of teachers and schools. This year, as you and your students use technology to share what is going on in your classroom, keep in mind who your audience is. There are hundreds of stories of students and teachers creating huge movements all over the world, but that isn’t the only reason we should share in this manner. Knowing who your audience is shapes the message, and inspires the author of the message to produce the best work they can. If you and your students share every message like its show time at the Christmas Concert, your audience will get what they deserve, and your audience will have had an impact on the learning of your students and you.

School Should Never Be Real Life

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I haven’t been able to peruse Twitter as much lately, coaching and parenting have dominated my time, both very rewarding and a lot of fun but both are big commitments that will keep me from things like Twitter and blogging. Yesterday, I did get a chance to pop on, read a few interesting articles and blog posts. One post I saw talked about how a certain activity was more like “real life” and then comments about how school SHOULD be real life.

Real life. When we are talking about how we want to prepare our students for the “real world” or for their future careers, I get it. We are all for creating the “target context” and for developing practical 21st century skills. We are all on board when it comes to helping our students become well rounded, creative, active learners who will be successful in life when they leave us and contribute in a positive way to society. When it comes to those ideas of “real life” then there will be little argument from most educators.

But “real life” or the “real world” has a lot going on that I never want to see in our buildings. As we try to bring more and more of everyday life into our schools and make them more and more like the world our students will enter we have to be cognizant of ensuring we still provide a place that our students can grow and learn. We need to ensure our buildings remain safe, fair, supportive, collaborative and welcoming to all students.

Our world is not safe, especially for minorities, and while that is “real life” we all work hard every day to protect our students from bullying, intolerance, and abuse. Our society is far from fair, competition is everywhere and its ridiculous to think everyone begins the race from the same starting line. There are many workplaces where support and collaboration go against the very goals they strive for, whether its sales numbers or innovation, but pushing that type competition into our schools is to take away a huge asset to development and learning.

Don’t get me wrong, I know our job is to prepare our students for the world of tomorrow. They need the skills and knowledge we help develop to be successful and to contribute in a meaningful way, but learning can and should get messy. Our students will make mistakes and learn to move past them, but in a place where the care, the support and the guidance is there to help them get beyond their difficulties. They have to feel safe, supported and cared for and they need to trust their guides that put them back on the right path. That requires a place that creates those feelings and provides those guides. School should never be real life, because many of our students won’t find those feelings or those mentors anywhere except school.

Work On Your Game

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This past March, I said goodbye to my basketball team for the offseason, having exit meetings with each player before they headed out for their exams and then their summer. I told them that every off-season of college basketball they have, the should make it their goal to add one more skill to their arsenal. Whether it was a new post move, a higher vertical jump, a new attack from the perimeter, they need to add one more tool to make themselves into a more complete player. I explained that if they play four seasons, and have three summers away from the team, they should be able to add 3 new aspects to their game and be the best player they can be in their fourth year.

There is no reason that this philosophy can’t work in our teaching careers either. If we teach for 25 years, that’s 24 summers to develop 24 tools to make us better educators. For me, this summer I plan to learn about video capture and editing, using my computer, iPad, iPhone and video camera. Our school wants to look at making the learning in our building more public, to share what is going on at Greystone with our parents, colleagues and our community. That is one tool I can definitely make good use of and will sharpen my game as an educator.

What part of your teaching game are you going to work on this summer? What weapon will be added to your educational arsenal? How are you going to come back stronger and model for your students the ideas of lifelong learning, goal setting and self improvement? Please share them with me, your summer improvement plans may inspire others to follow your lead!