Long Time No Post…

I was lucky enough to participate in Cohort 21 3 years ago and thoroughly enjoyed it.  It was some of the best professional development I have done throughout my career over the last 15 years.  Being involved in the program reignited my intellectual curiosity for teaching and learning having been stuck in somewhat of a professional rut.  My various teaching experiments during C21 led me to engage in a few other PD courses around project based learning, critical thinking and leadership, which ultimately pushed me to begin my Masters degree with Queen’s University last academic year.  As part of this program, I am currently working on a Collaborative Inquiry course. For one of the assignments, we are asked to engage with a professional learning community and begin contributing our ideas – I thought what better opportunity to reconnect with Cohort 21?

While involved with the program 3 years ago, I found the blogging element particularly beneficial.  It gave me a chance to reflect properly on what I was working on. Being forced to put my ideas into writing made me consider my thoughts and observations with much greater clarity than my usual GO train downloading process on my way home from school.  This time around, I saw my assignment as a way to reconnect with the C21 community this year and find out what you have all been up to so far. My intention is to share some of my own experiences since being part of the program and offer some suggestions to other bloggers as they work towards the final F2F in April.  All this has been made possible because @gnichols responded to my random request message over the weekend – thanks again Garth!

For fans of Community, I am hoping to ‘go meta’ as Abed would say by working on my collaborative inquiry project by being involved in a collaborative inquiry project!

Laura