A Fun Method to Create a Vision For Schools

Yesterday, we had our annual September Professional Development day with my staff at Sa-Hali.  It was the culmination of a few weeks of planning by the large and dedicated bunch known as our PD committee, and each of us was excited to see how the day would play out with our staff.   Having gone through and led visioning activities before, I feel that activities such as these need to be approached very carefully.  When done without thoughtful consideration and planning, vision exercises can become nebulous, ethereal and, well, vision-less.  However, when done with a focus on engaging the participants in an exercise that is tangible and meaningful, visioning activities can lead to guiding principles that can set the course for the entire organization.

Or at least that's what I've heard.

However, there was just one tiny problem I was having heading into the planning of this day.  I wasn't totally sure how to do that.

But one thing that I was totally sure of--as a group, WE would know how to do that.

When the PD committee met, we decided we wanted to create activities for our staff that REQUIRED learning, and that REQUIRED their participation.  Not in a "thou shalt" way, but in a way that built on our theme for this year--we do things TOGETHER.  And suddenly it started to happen.

We started with our English Coordinator saying that we needed to do some team-building at the start.  Then another teacher said "How about a scavenger hunt?".  Our Technology Coordinator jumped in with "We need to keep them touching technology, so let's make it a QR code-based treasure hunt!".  A member of our Learning Assistance department chimed in and said "We want them to be creative, let's have them design a costume and team T-shirt!".

The juices were flowing.

We turned to visioning, and our Art teacher said "If we are going to create a vision, we need an authentic visual--let's make a life-sized "Sa-Hali Grad" with the body parts containing attributes that we want our students to be equipped with when they leave!"  But we needed to get people in the mindset, and another person suggested a YouTube video of something--I said how about watching Sir Ken Robinson and "Changing Educational Paradigms" while modelling a literacy strategy to ensure that participants would be engaged and have something to take away.  Our English Coordinator jumped back in and said "Speaking of a literacy strategies, how about a multi-perspective carousel activity where groups create those body parts filled with the attributes of a Sa-Hali grad?"  He then came up with some guiding questions...

• What do we think employers want of our grads?
• What do we think society wants of our grads?
• What do we think post secondary programs want of our grads?
• What kind of attributes and personal empowerment do we want them to have?

Wow.  This was getting really cool.

But I wanted to make sure that we didn't just leave with a picture, we needed to leave with a plan.  And we came up with an activity that allowed us to:

• reflect on activities we do in our classrooms that require students to demonstrate these attributes
• get specific with looking at the tasks that we felt required the demonstrate these attributes by describing what it looked like, sounded like, and felt like in descriptive (rather than inferential) terms
• design and implement an activity that we could do to elicit these attributes from our students in each of our collaborative groups to bring back to the December staff meeting to share.

And so it came to be...

We worked with QR codes in our staff scavenger hunt (here is one of the sample clues)

We had unbelievable team building, tremendous creativity and a whole lotta laughs:

Utilized literacy strategies in our activities such as Save the Last Word and Multiple-Perspectives Carousel 

Designed a visual aide to guide us in terms of our vision of attributes that we want for our graduates.

We met as collaborative groups to design an activity that we could do to require students to demonstrate a positive attribute.

And, as challenge to myself, I created a video archive of our day with Movie Maker, just to see if I could do it while we were working (and over lunch).  I presented it to our faculty as a "Thanks for all of your hard work" at the end of the day--I hoped they enjoyed watching it as much as I loved making it.

In the end, while this format for beginning to develop a vision may not work for another school in its entirety, I believe the important elements of this day can be applied to any school situation. By using tasks that  

• are co-created by numerous staff members;
• are built intentionally to require participation of each of our colleagues;
• are built specifically to require learning in a meaningful (and fun!) way through their design;
• model ready-made literacy strategies that can be used in each of our classes tomorrow to engage our students;

we can meaningfully engage our faculty in vision development.  My evidence?  We now have built a collective vision.  We now have a document that will guide us to design and implement the tasks that require students to demonstrate the attributes that we want for our graduates as they cross the stage and graduate from our school.  

And we had a great day continuing our theme of "Working TOGETHER".  Is there anything better?

Self-Organized Learning

It has been nearly three years since I decided to become a "connected Principal" -- an educator using social media for the purpose of improving my own practice as a school-based administrator.  I wrote a post a couple of years ago called "The Evolution of a Twitter User", and since that time, I feel like I have continued to evolve in my use of social media to learn.  I used to evaluate new applications on a nightly basis and see which ones I might be able to recommend or pass along to others.  However, over the last 18 months or so, I have streamlined my approach to new programs and apps:  I find myself gravitating to tools that allow for synchronous and asynchronous collaboration on projects large and small with people that have similar interests to me.

Recently, I watched the latest Sugata Mitra TED Talk called "Build a School in the Cloud".  I had seen his "Hole in the Wall Project" TED Talk back in 2010, and enjoyed it tremendously. This was an extension of his project which also included a piece on Self Organized Learning Environments, a concept that seems to capture where I am going with my own professional learning, and where I think we could be moving with both student learning and professional development.  Sugata Mitra uses a graphic to illustrate three elements he feels are key to creating these Self-Organized Learning Environments:

The first two pieces of this equation are relatively self-explanatory--connectivity to the internet and some sort of mechanism than enables individuals to assemble in collaborative groups are things that we can understand.  However, the piece that struck me as unique was around what Sugata Mitra calls "encouragement and admiration".  If you have seen the TED talks, you will recall Mitra's reference to what he affectionately calls "the Granny Cloud":  he enlisted 200 volunteer grandmothers to act as 'tutors' to assist students on whatever topic they were working on.  But there was one important feature about the grannies in "granny cloud":

They didn't know anything about the topics that the kids were studying.

Hmm.

All they did was sincerely encourage the students, and continuously ask the students to tell them more about what it was they were learning about.

And the kids learned. And learned. And learned some more.

Cool.

After watching "Build a School in The Cloud" I began reflecting on my approach to my own professional learning through the lens of a Self-Organized Learning Environment.  Twitter allows me to connect to people with common interests.  Facebook lets me learn a little bit more about them (I am starting to look at LinkedIn, but am not completely immersed in this technology yet).  Diigo allows me to bookmark and catalog their ideas.  I use different Google applications and Drive to share and to work on things collaboratively with them. I am starting to use Google Hangouts to set up synchronous meetings, and will look forward to making a YouTube channel as a repository for some of these meetings. Jing and Screenr help me to capture authentic artifacts that I can share with those that are and are not connected.  Dipity lets me to keep a running timeline of the project that we work on (albeit Dipity seems to be degrading a bit).  Blogger allows me to share my reflections, get feedback and grow personally and professionally with different projects that I may be working on with them.   And while I know that many people use more, different and better applications for to accomplish these and other tasks (and I am always eager to find out what might be more functional for me, so please share your ideas if you wish), these are the tools that I am currently using.

Yet these are sort of the "hows" for me, and I starting thinking about the motivation behind the "whys"--why do I even bother doing this self-organized learning?  I would suspect that I'm as busy as the next person---my school fills my day, my family fills my evenings (a three and a five year old can certainly keep you on the move), my hobbies and interests fill my early mornings, and all of the above fill my weekends in various amounts. But what gets me back to my laptop at night, after the kids go to bed and before I slump over into my keyboard?

It's a bit of a shout-out from my peers:
 

It's a kick in the pants to be a part of a group:

It's a comment on a post from an expert like Bill Ferriter (@plugusin) that makes me stretch my thinking and links me to other resources:

Each of these falls under that 'encouragement' piece that is suggested in Mitra's model for Self-Organized Learning.  It's my 'granny cloud'.  And like the kids from the "School in the Cloud", I keep learning, and I keep going back to find out more.  Even when I don't have time.

This is the type of learning that I want for my own children.  I want them to self-organize and connect to others who have similar interests (not necessarily similar points of view) and to provide them with as much encouragement as I possibly can to keep learning and to tell me what they have learned.

And extrapolating from that, I am going to spend some time seeing how I can work with our staff and other educators integrate ideas around this concept of Self Organized Learning to parts of our own Professional Learning Communities model.  George Couros (@gcouros) wrote a post on Blended PLCs, and I think this could dovetail nicely into the SOLE idea.

Broadband.  Collaboration.  Encouragement.  It seems too simple.

Yet it seems to have worked for me, and I wonder if it can work for others.

So either I am simple (highly probable) or we may be on to something here....

Stay tuned.

Restructuring (not Remortgaging) to make Collaborative Time for Teachers

Early in my career as a high school Principal, I caught myself complaining that we needed “more money”, “more resources” and “more time” to implement new initiatives to improve student achievement. But four years ago, I had a revelation:  the money is the money, the resources are what we have, and there are 24 hours in the day.  In order to change student results, our school needed to investigate a high-yield strategy that utilized our existing resources.  For our school, developing a Professional Learning Community was that strategy.  The PLC journey that we have been on has been chaotic, tumultuous, and at times incredibly challenging, but it has become the most satisfying journey I have embarked upon in my career.

Four years ago, we began looking at a PLC model.  The ideas of creating time within the timetable for teachers to work interdependently to develop common emphasized curricula and assessments, to utilize the resultant data to modify instructional practice, and to create an intervention system that ensured the success of each student were very topical for our school.  Staff collectively determined that our student achievement data needed improvement. Teachers learned about the concepts of collaboration.  An exploratory team attended a PLC Conference, and we created a PLC pilot project for staff.  We ironed the logistics of embedded collaborative time and creating our academic intervention program.  And then we were off:  it seemed so straightforward!  I thought people would relish collaborating with their peers, we would react in a timely and effective manner to ‘promising learners’ who were not able to demonstrate learning outcomes, achievement would go up, and parents would be thrilled with our results.  How naïve was I! 

Many people didn’t want to collaborate. If they were collaborating, it often turned into sharing or complaining sessions. Our reaction to our ‘promising learners’ was inefficient and costly. The set of interventions had staff working harder than the students.  The local teacher’s association was complaining that we didn’t address the loss of preparation time created by altering our timetable for collaboration time.  It was chaos!

After these initial hiccups, we have found three things to be essential in developing our learning community:

• Consistent support on collaborative techniques for team leaders: As a result, teachers collaborate in their subject areas to determine emphasized learning outcomes, use data to find “stumble points” at each grade level, examine promising practices in to address these points, and modify their teaching methods as a result. 
• Confronting ineffective assessment strategies: Consequently, we have moved away from grading practices such as late marks, averaging of terms, and zeroes.
• Reorganizing existing time in the school day: We created a timetable with additional time for students to meet the learning outcomes in their courses AND to provide time for teachers to collaborate.



Our school timetable with the mandatory study block and teacher collaboration block



During the Collaborative Time, our students are able to access subject-specific tutorials so that they can receive one-to-one or small group instruction.  The libraries, gyms, and computer labs are open for those students who have completed their work and wish to have self-directed time.  Teachers can direct students to these tutorials if they feel that students are not meeting the learning outcomes for their course.  This time is to augment the mandatory study block for each student in the building.  Should teachers feel that students need even more additional time, students are directed to our after school Academic Intervention program (AI), which takes place Monday thru Thursday from 3:10-4:00.  To supervise this time after school, we replaced a portion of time that teachers were required to supervise our school bus areas with time to supervise AI.  It is very popular with our staff, and gives our teachers a means to enforce assignment deadlines without having to resort to using toxic grading practices such as taking off late marks.

By utilizing these structures, we have seen a continual drop in course failure rates each year since beginning our pilot PLC project!

Our overall failure rates for all courses has decreased consistently over the last four years--95.4% success!

Our school continues the journey to becoming a Professional Learning Community.  For those who wish to begin down this path, there are many challenges that will occur along the way.  However, through the development of an unwavering vision of collaboration, a commitment to adopting assessment strategies targeted at discovery of student knowledge, the development of a timetable that includes intervention structures for students who require additional time and support, and the creative thinking of an entire school community to do this at no cost, we have found the PLC journey to be a trip most worthwhile!

If you have other ways that you have created collaborative time for educators, please share your model and your ideas!