{"id":56,"date":"2016-04-19T03:22:07","date_gmt":"2016-04-19T03:22:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/mikearsenault\/?p=56"},"modified":"2016-04-21T16:18:45","modified_gmt":"2016-04-21T16:18:45","slug":"final-reflection-starting-with-the-end","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/mikearsenault\/2016\/04\/19\/final-reflection-starting-with-the-end\/","title":{"rendered":"The Beginning is Just Ahead"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"The<\/a>\u00a0 In preparation for our second Face-to-Face session the Cohort 21 facilitators sent us a survey. One of the questions was \u201cAt this early stage, what (if any) of the following areas are you interested in learning more about?\u201d. There was a list of 12 options and I remember thinking \u201cI want to click all of them, but perhaps I shouldn\u2019t because it would make me seem na\u00efve and a little bit nerdy.\u201d So I clicked most of them instead. Throughout this entire experience, I have had an almost insatiable appetite to sample, read and learn about a wide variety of topics. These interests turned into emails I would send myself or links that I bookmarked that included; Assessment, Blended Learning, Design Thinking, Gamification, Innovation, Inquiry-Based Learning, Leadership Styles, Misconceptions, Modern Learning, Personalized Learning, Online Learning, Pedagogy, Project Based Learning, Disruption in the Classroom, Visible Learning and Google in Education. Each folder contains dozens (even hundreds) of articles or links to promising ideas that I wanted to dive into more deeply. I knew that I had finally \u2018arrived\u2019 when I was able to relax if I had lost an opportunity to read something I felt was important for me. I could honestly tell myself \u201cIt will either appear again or I will hear about it somewhere or I can simply look it up when I need to access that idea.\u201d Great ideas have a way of making the rounds numerous times\u2026 the universe will provide.<\/p>\n

Granted, I might have been a little obsessed with personal and professional growth prior to Cohort 21, but I am now certain that I have reached new heights. Rarely has a day gone by that I am not somehow thinking or reading about topics that have really caught my attention on some social media platform. Rarely has a week gone by where I have not found other educators that I now follow that feed my growing interests. I cannot count the number of times that I have used something that I had recently read about and applied it in a conversation with a student or a colleague, and felt like I had something meaningful to contribute. I continue to add new subscriptions to educational feeds and podcasts and have now arrived at the point where it is just beginning to feel like an unhealthy obsession. Cohort 21 has provided me with an opportunity to indulge my inner \u2018teacher geek\u2019 and to know that there are others out there that share the same passion.<\/p>\n

I have loved being a little fish swimming in the ocean of big ideas. I have really come to appreciate that this year-long PD opportunity helped me feel like I was not trying to swim in a tsunami. It has made me bolder in the classroom. It has given me deeper empathy for my students and the creative confidence to try things that I have not done before. It has launched me into using technology not as an end but as a means to provide new opportunities for students to collaborate and express themselves. I have been embracing ambiguity, I remain optimistic and I want to continue to iterate as I go. From the beginning, I have taken to heart the message that both @gnichols<\/a> & @jmedved<\/a> have been promoting which is “This is simply the beginning”. I truly feel that this is a beginning\u00a0and that I have much more swimming to do. Over the next few days, I will be posting some of the specifics about what has been happening this year.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0 In preparation for our second Face-to-Face session the Cohort 21 facilitators sent us a survey. One of the questions was \u201cAt this early stage, what (if any) of the following areas are you interested in learning more about?\u201d. There was a list of 12 options and I remember thinking \u201cI want to click all … Continue reading “The Beginning is Just Ahead”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":116,"featured_media":59,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"wds_primary_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-56","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-action-plan","category-face-2-face-sessions"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/mikearsenault\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/mikearsenault\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/mikearsenault\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/mikearsenault\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/116"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/mikearsenault\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=56"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/mikearsenault\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/mikearsenault\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/59"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/mikearsenault\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=56"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/mikearsenault\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=56"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/mikearsenault\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=56"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}