Awesome, awful, goal, wish.

When a school sends one of their teachers to Cohort 21 as a participant they may not know what to expect to gain from it. Is it professional development for the educator, their department members, the whole faculty, or all of the above?

I have agreed to share what I learn with my colleagues at Rosseau Lake College. To that end, I have taken a small part of our first Cohort 21 face-to-face meeting and distilled it down to its essence. I will share it here and now in the hopes that it will be useful for other educators.

We had a small group sharing session using a placemat activity that really helped me to focus in on the good times, the bad times, and what I would like to see happen, both for my own goals and for the system within which I work. I have called my student version of this Awesome, Awful, Goal, Wish, because that is ultimately what each corner of the placemat was all about. The prompts are intended to be immediately useful with students, either as conversation starters within groups as was the case with us, or to help a teacher collect feedback about their class.

I have also had some luck with interviewing students for our first official homework assignment. To help me track their answers and keep them separate as individual points of data I developed 3X3X3 and used a fresh copy of it as a place to write when I interviewed each student. Now that I have the data I need to consider my next step, and I thought this would be a useful blog post in the interim. Thanks for reading!