{"id":91,"date":"2015-03-04T17:40:16","date_gmt":"2015-03-04T17:40:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/lesliemcbeth\/?p=91"},"modified":"2015-03-05T22:47:25","modified_gmt":"2015-03-05T22:47:25","slug":"bring-it-back-design-thinking-teacher-growth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/lesliemcbeth\/2015\/03\/04\/bring-it-back-design-thinking-teacher-growth\/","title":{"rendered":"Bring it Back: Design Thinking + Teacher Growth"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Process1\"<\/a>Over the past several months, I have been thinking and talking with colleagues about how I will “bring it back”. No, I don’t mean acid wash jeans or 80’s power pop music<\/a>. Rather,\u00a0I have decided to focus my action plan on how I will bring the Cohort 21 experience back to my colleagues at my school.<\/p>\n

Both the Klingenstein Summer Institute experience\u00a0last summer and the Cohort 21 model have given me a better understanding of the what makes effective professional development\u00a0and have sparked an interest in me to learn more<\/a> about the topic and share my learning with other teachers.<\/p>\n

One way in which I have brought the Klingenstein program back to my school\u00a0is through implementing a “Critical Friends Group” PLC during our staff PD time. Using the same tuning protocol<\/a> that we used in our last Cohort 21 Google Hangout<\/a>, a small group of teachers at my school\u00a0have been meeting regularly to critically analyze each other’s action plans. This builds on professional development we did as earlier in the year\u00a0on\u00a0having “collegial conversations.” So far, the response to the protocol has been incredible – teachers are truly learning from each other and making tangible changes in their classrooms to improve.<\/p>\n

In order to get a better handle on how I can bring the Cohort experience back, I invited Edwin Bryson, my\u00a0Vice Principal of Teacher and Staff Development, to attend the most recent\u00a0Cohort 21 Face to Face<\/a> session at MaRS<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Leading up to this Face to Face, inspired by\u00a0conversations with Christina<\/a>\u00a0and Derek<\/a>\u00a0I had expected my action plan to focus on developing Professional Learning Network (PLN)<\/a> within my school to encourage collegial conversations among teachers using Twitter and\/or Google+. This course of action is still something that I am interested in; however, my debrief with Edwin after the F2F led me to another plan of action: to bring the design thinking process to teachers at my school.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

For some\u00a0time now, I have been using design thinking in my classroom<\/a> to help my students build problem solving skills and investigate issues in urban planning, design and sustainability. And I have been inspired by the creative ways that\u00a0both\u00a0Ashley<\/a>\u00a0and Melissa<\/a>\u00a0are bringing\u00a0design thinking in their classrooms. However, in\u00a0developing the design thinking framework<\/a> for the Cohort 21 action plans, I realized how this process can also be applied to teachers wishing to push their practice forward.<\/p>\n

\"IMG_0147\"<\/a>At the MaRS session, it was powerful to see teachers like Tia<\/a>\u00a0and Elissa<\/a>\u00a0making shifts in defining their problems. Moving from “I want to use Twitter in my classroom” to “I want to increase student engagement in the classroom through the use of social media” is the perfect example of how the “empathize” (with your users) and “define” (the problem) can move teachers away from\u00a0concentrating only on how to use technology, to using the frameworks (SAMR, TIM, TPaK) to think about WHY we use technology in the classroom.<\/p>\n

In speaking with Edwin, I\u00a0realized that the design thinking process could also be applied to individual teacher growth goals for teachers at my school. Edwin\u00a0agrees that introducing teachers to design thinking as a tool for developing their goals could\u00a0result in a shifting teachers from from what they want to achieve to WHY they want to do so.<\/p>\n

Moving forward, I plan to continue to work with Edwin and hopefully invite a small group of teachers to self-select and\u00a0participate in a pilot program that would have them use design thinking to address areas for improvement in their practice.<\/p>\n

In many ways, this action plan is not only about bringing Cohort 21 back to my school, but also about bringing my experience from my former career\u00a0at\u00a0the Design Trust for Public Space<\/a>\u00a0back to my teaching. So while I might not be venturing back to the late 80’s, I am making journey back to my roots from the early 21st century.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Over the past several months, I have been thinking and talking with colleagues about how I will “bring it back”. No, I don’t mean acid wash jeans or 80’s power pop music. Rather,\u00a0I have decided to focus my action plan on how I will bring the Cohort 21 experience back to my colleagues at my […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":64,"featured_media":102,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"wds_primary_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[14,21,27,2],"tags":[19,22,16],"class_list":["post-91","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-action-plan","category-desigh-thinking","category-effective-pd","category-klingenstein","tag-collegiality","tag-design-thinking","tag-effective-pd"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/lesliemcbeth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/lesliemcbeth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/lesliemcbeth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/lesliemcbeth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/64"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/lesliemcbeth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=91"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/lesliemcbeth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/lesliemcbeth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/102"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/lesliemcbeth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=91"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/lesliemcbeth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=91"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/lesliemcbeth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=91"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}