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Congrats to all of our members in this year’s Cohort 21 experience. It was truly a wonderful celebration of learning, thinking, reflecting and shifting within and of our practice as teachers. Upper Canada College provided the ideal working space for us, and we are very grateful for Ryan Archer’s hosting.

 

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A Beautiful Setting for our Final F2F

The Cohort 21 experience brings teachers along a journey. It begins with larger questions about the current pedagogical landscape in Independent School Education, such as “What is technology’s role in the classroom?” and “How do we know what to teach our students in order for them to succeed in their lives?“. But as the journey progresses, connections are formed, and participants move into tailoring these questions to make them more meaningful, personal and purposeful for themselves. This is the value proposition of the experience: teachers are given the framework upon which to build and personalize their professional growth, while gaining the support of a rich & robust PLN. This results in rich and deep research across a broad spectrum of areas within the current educational landscape.

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Here is an infographic depicting the Journey of Cohort 21 participants

Here is what our members researched: CLICK HERE We categorized each participant under umbrella terms. This year looks much different than last years too! This is because we responded to shift in the educational landscape – moving away from lenses (like SAMR, TIM, and TPACK) because they are well known within our context, and towards building culture within schools in different areas: Professional Development, Mindfulness, Flourishing and the like.

We are particularly thankful to our great coaches (@danielleganley, @aaronvigar, @shelleythomas @brenthurley @timrollwagen) who have supported and provided resources, as well as provided excellent blog posts. Here are a few to highlights: “It All Comes Down to Feedback” by Tim, and “Skills vs. Content in a Multi-Text Classroom” by Brent. The role of the coach is a very fluid one, and we appreciate all the work they put into the face-to-face sessions and twitter chats between sessions.

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Another great day of sharing, supporting and collaborating

Of course, we recognize the great work of our facilitators (@ckirsh, @lmcbeth and @ddoucet) who have provided support, encouragement and invaluable feedback and design of the face-to-face sessions. All three of them were active before, during and between each face-to-face sessions. They provided Twitter Chats and Google Hangouts…check these out: Twitter Chat Archive, and Google+ Tuning Protocol.

We look forward to our members continuing writing and contributing via their blogs, twitter and google+. Thanks for a great year, and thanks for being such an important of Cohort 21 now and moving forward.

But this is just the end of the beginning. The journey continues as our members will be “Bringing it Back” to their own schools to help build that culture. We, the coaches and facilitators, know that this can be daunting. However, we also know that what each participant has accomplished here has meaning, and that it should be shared.

 

2 thoughts on “The End of the Beginning…

  1. It was a great year, indeed! I hope that everyone stays active on the blogs, on Twitter, Google +, and of course, in person!
    Thanks to you and Justin and Jan for making it all possible. Our lives are all richer because of Cohort 21.

  2. Cohort 21 continues to be an inspiring opportunity to connect with, and be challenged by, likeminded teachers. Humbled by the facilitators and grateful to be involved!

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