The Power of Community

 I am one of two faculty members that have launched a new course at LCS this year (mine is the SVN 3M Environmental Science). The last new course to be introduced at LCS was 4 years ago (a new one that I was also fortunate to launch at that time as a fully online course for the Lakefield Summer Academy… SES 4U Earth & Space Science using iTunes U). Launching a new course is enormously time-consuming, professionally exciting and offers true growth and many lessons in humility. The big goal for the Environmental course was to focus on “What Can We Do Now, What Might We Do Next?” …given the current political, economic, social, cultural and scientific understandings that we have today. We also had the added challenge to implement the course in both a blended learning modality (for our evening section) as well as a slightly more traditional format held during the regular daytime rotary schedule. Many great things are happening in this course as a result of adopting the mindset and pedagogical curiosity that Cohort 21 promotes. I have literally taken many of the ideas that I have heard and read about through the Cohort experience and applied them to the course. Both Travis Fuchs (@TTHFuchs) and I have jumped in and figured out how to get them to work for our situation. I have truly benefitted from having so many other Cohort alumni at LCS around to help out with this process… @timrollwagen, @ddoucet , @su11armstrong, @mrathier and @brenthurley (now at TCS).

I am truly trying many new things on for size and efficacy. For example, we recently took the Environmental Science class through a “Design Sprint” and we believe it was modestly successful at getting students to think in ways that helped them understand how this process can be used to support their upcoming project on renewable energy (the goal is to have them make something). During the design sprint, students reported that “They never thought that they could come up with as many new ideas as they had in such a short space of time”. Others reported that they “enjoyed tackling an issue that they were passionate about and being given the opportunity to think about it more deeply”. During an earlier project this year, Travis and I used twitter and the hashtag #LCSEnviro to have student teams create a social media campaign to advocate for how to protect old growth forests while preserving jobs in the ‘new economy’. Tech wonderfully supported their choice and voice about forest management practices and real issues that are happening on Vancouver Island today in Walbran Valley. We have used gamification (ElectroCity) as a means of engaging students in learning about issues surrounding building sustainable cities, and we thank @mikefarley  (a Cohort 21 alumni), for further introducing us to using this style of learning through changegamer. We now both have a first-hand view of how gaming creates engagement and learning amongst students that is quite different from our original bias. We also designed our culminating task to be authentic and tie in as many different aspects of the course as possible. Students were given their culminating task on the first day of the course and have had opportunities to submit small components throughout the course as formative assessments. Their goal is to apply what they are learning throughout the course to the place where they come from. We are excited to see the final results.

Since reading Will Richardson’s book “From Master Teacher to Master Learner” last summer I have explicitly focused on the student learning experience. Travis and I have seen some very real growth in how students express themselves as a result of many of the ideas that we have tried out and implemented. One example is the online discussion forums using Piazza as the vehicle to host threaded discussions about topics that have no ‘right answer’. Our objective for this part of the course was to provide a ‘messy problem space’ for students to research, discuss and debate topics important today and into our mutual future. At the end of this course in June, I need to unpack what we have done to a much greater degree and am planning to sit down with Travis to do a major reflection on what we have done, and directions for future professional growth and learning.

We have also tried to go entirely paperless, using the Google platform of tools as the main vehicle to distribute, assess and organize the course. We adopted an iBook (I think that this is a first for LCS) as the main text to support various aspects of the Environmental Science course. I am hoping to move closer (next year’s iteration) to the course becoming more entrepreneurial in nature. Not sure what that looks like yet, but I know that Design Thinking will be a vital part of the mix. I have also been intrigued by how I can take Computational Thinking and apply it to all aspects of my work as an educator. As well, a recent article that appeared in the Harvard Business Review titled “The Innovative Power of Criticism” by Roberto Verganti is expanding my ideas about how I might extend design thinking in the classroom.

In short, this has been a powerful year of exploring and taking calculated risks. We cannot thank everyone enough for the support and power of community.