Episode 3.1 – The SHORT of the long of it!

Image courtesy of Emerge Positive

Taking a webpage out of Seth Godin’s blog, I have decided that this is going to be a SHORT post (because the last post just might have been way too long…) #failfastrecoverfaster;result=growth with hopefully a decently long reach…

(Link above is to one Leigh Epsy’s posts on her site Project Bliss called “Embrace Failure on the Path to Growth” but my own personally developed hashtag <insert winky face here!>.)

This morning @tcatallo and I hosted another whole-group PD session for the staff at Villanova. Our goal for where we head with PD this year revolves around 2 main focus points:

1. Departmental/Subject Area Action Plans
2. Meaningful Staff PD Sessions (rooted in feedback from last years survey)

Today’s session was a change of a pace; a step back from the awesome action plan development that the faculty have been fostering and developing so far this year. We decided as a PD Committee to look at the bookends of our classes–the first 5 minutes and the last 5 minutes of class, with the meat being an activity about learning styles through the lens of VARK (Visual/Auditory/Reading&Writing/Kinesthetic). Leading by example, we did activities for the first and last 5 minutes of our 45min session that would hopefully spark both innovation and reflection among our faculty.

Can you guess the opening activity? If you were at the 2nd F2F last weekend, you definitely can! We had our whole staff play Four Corners, borrowing heavily on the Cohort21 exemplar, and asked our faculty to consider a couple of conversation starters, then delve into both our new learning management platform (Edsby) and our classic report card system (Maplewood). It was really interesting to see the groupings and where people felt comfortable moving to–but my favourite moment of the activity was when we asked our staff “Who would feel comfortable coaching someone on how to use Edsby’s Gradebook?” This question was a direct spin-off of this past weekend’s question about who would feel comfortable hosting a Google Hangout. It was great to see teachers conversing about what it means to coach/teach vs. just knowing how to do it yourself or being able to learn it from someone else (and a great discussion among staff ensued during this part of the activity!).

We then had a final question that we used to sort teachers into learning styles (Visual, Auditory, Reading/Writing, or Kinesthetic). We asked them “If you were teaching students about wilderness/nature parks, would you a) take them to the park, b) have a guest speaker, c) give them a pamphlet or d) look at maps of the park” and then based upon the corner they picked we sorted them into groups. The idea was to have them identify with their own learning styles and then once in groups we would start the ‘meat’ of our session and have them come up with an activity in the learning style they associate with first (followed by one that put them in their growth zone).

However, we got immediate feedback that many teachers would not have picked the pamphlet option if they knew it was the reading/writing learning style overall. Some told us they picked what they picked because they don’t like being outdoors, but would prefer to teach using a kinesthetic approach for most lesson plans (additionally, over half the phys-ed department was there–it was fascinating)! And clearly it was a mini-fail for us, in the ambiguity or different interpretations of the sorting question. A mistake that we can harness so that we ’emerge positive’ for the next session. 🙂

We still had a great overall response to the morning, and the last five minutes showcased our three new mini-initiatives we plan to have at every meeting from here on forward (which also work well as class-enders):

1. Video of the month
2. Application of the month
3. Blog of the month

In true collaboration style, thanks to everyone (from Cohort21) who has shared these awesome resources (and more!) with me over the past few months!

1. Video – we showed the Rubik’s Cube Google video we saw this past weekend at the F2F

2. App – I talked about Recap (the awesome formative assessment video app @jwood told my group about at the 1st F2F)

3. Blog – you guessed it! Non other than Seth Godin’s blog… seriously, share this guys words with anyone and everyone you can! We looked at one of the many awesome ones!

So although this morning’s session wasn’t perfect – it was fruitful, and overall I believe we, as a school community, are “emerging positive”!

When the session ended, I had an English teacher ask me where they could get the link to Seth’s blog. I then had a discussion with our Middle School French Teacher. She asked when she could book time with me to learn more about Recap. We talked about meeting early next week to get her started on it (FYI – part of my role this year is to be a tech-integration liaison for teachers!). Sweet!

After period 1 I spoke with @smastromonaco who had already tried a handwritten exit ticket. Her response “I know it was only handwritten” was countered by my “cool, it was handwritten! That’s awesome!”

Midday I received an email from @lisapicerno who had already tried Recap and had this to say about it:

Plus: Easy registration

Minus: If the student messes up, they don’t get another chance to re send it

I thought this was really interesting, and I would love to hear from @jwood or @lmcbeth or anyone else from the @cohort21 community who has experience with this app and it’s quirks!

(And another teacher just popped in to tell me that you can set the videos to be 30s, 60s, or 1min!)

So that’s the update. My two take-aways when reflecting upon what I’ve written are:

a) Cohort21ers are Cohort21ers and go-getters for life (everyone who took action at my school after this morning’s PD was a cohortee except for one teacher!)

b) This still isn’t that short, but if you compare it to my previous entry, it’s an improvement- let’s call it a work in progress! 🙂