Trading Card Conversations

“I wish I had a day to work on whatever I wanted to”

When Justin highlighted the fact we indeed had time to do just this at our last F2F session, it really hit home. I had the entire day to reflect on my practice, discuss my action plan with partners, and really, spend more time thinking (instead of a day of working through a to-do-list at a frenetic pace!).

Although my HMW question has morphed over time, I am continuing to strive to promote deeper, and more challenging authentic learning for high achieving students in my world issues class. This is really something I have continued to work on since beginning to teach at UTS 3 years ago, and the incremental strides I have made to achieve this goal are starting to crystallize. This is largely due to having dedicated time to reflect in conjunction with the support of other educators at Cohort 21.   

Indeed, I have been fortunate to be able to focus on a “good” problem, but a challenging one nonetheless. Students at UTS demonstrate high levels of achievement across the categories of learning in the world issues course, including possible solution based approaches. However, much of our study revolves around academic based research, presentations, student-run seminars, and discussions around global issues (both online and face-to-face). Indeed, few problems studied in the course directly impact students, making it more difficult to authentically simulate working through a real crises or fostering legitimate empathy (vs. sympathy). Adam Maingot @amaingot and I discussed our common quest to strive for authenticity of learning over and above prescribed curriculum expectations. Indeed, both of our subject areas (entrepreneurship and world issues) are largely based on abstract and theoretical models. The integration of “real experience” is thus something we are both working toward integrating into our respective pedagogies.

In my humble opinion, place based learning has the potential to bring students deeper into the fold in this regard. Furthermore, those affected by global issues are most often in the best position to make suggestions about how to move forward. Although my students are aware of the importance of this localized and culturally valuable knowledge when striving to think about and react to problems facing the planet, I believe that seeing this out through experience is really at the forefront of where deeper learning through practice/experience takes place.

After our second F2F session, several colleagues supported my action plan with ideas about how to better leverage technology and the wider school community to achieve my goal (see photo below).

Although I was initially drawn to continue to experiment with applications that connect classrooms around the world (see my previous post), I am beginning to realize that there are valuable learning resources available within my own school community.  Both alumni, and the University of Toronto have assisted with facilitating place based integration of learning (or experiential learning), thus further engaging my high achieving students into the learning process. Briefly, I have been able to use alumni (previous world issues students) to inspire current students to embark upon optional service learning journeys for part of the course independent study unit. Furthermore, colleagues and I are currently exploring how to better leverage and form partnerships with the Munk School of Global Affairs for more authentic and challenging learning opportunities (https://munkschool.utoronto.ca/gii/). Lastly, I became aware of a WE chapter that operates at UTS. There is exciting potential for collaboration here, and perhaps even a section of world issues that incorporates a service learning component as a unit of study. There are so many “one off” trips that occur from year to year in all of our schools, and capturing some of these for more intentional cross-curricular integration seems a logical next step. Tim Rollwagen @trollwagen and I discussed this as a common overarching goal for our respective action plans.

Overall, our last F2F session was seminal to my thinking around pedagogical shifts I have made over the years, and plan to make down the pipe. Speaking and listening to a wider network of educators on a regular basis through the Cohort has had the intended effect of making me a more thoughtful and reflective practitioner. Trading cards were a creative and simple tool to foster connections and memories from the conversations of the day. These actually acted as my “minutes” from the session, and I have used them to guide much of this blog post.

More broadly speaking, I was particularly interested in talking to a primary teacher in the Cohort as this directly related to the learning of my own children.  But my conversation with Lisa @lwoon also shed light on some of the similarities between pedagogy at both ends of the K-12 spectrum. I have a lot to learn from primary educators! 

Allison @acampbellrogers and I also had a great conversation about how reusing items should be at the forefront of the 3 Rs, and her tips about virtual reality use in the classroom also inspired me to begin to explore this learning tool. Small conversations can indeed be very impactful. 

All in all, I am gleaning new ideas about teaching and learning from each face-to-face session, #Cohort21 Blogs, and feeling energized and inspired to be an educator in this interesting and fast changing time in the field. I am also realizing that my action plan will always be a work in progress…. a tough pill to swallow for someone who has traditionally been a big picture, results oriented thinker. I look forward to hanging out with my group members via my first google hangout next month, and also to our final session in April!