joeteft

November 1, 2016

First Draft

I’ve been working on a brief fifteen minutes sense of place presentation for a conference in a couple of weeks. Most of what I focus on is images, and after going over this a couple of times. I really notice that my font choice needs a lot of work (that will come in the next two weeks for sure).

Regardless it’s allowed me to really think out what I believe and try to condense that down into fifteen minutes and I need to entertain other educators as well. The process is really helpful and this is now my fourth presentation and I can feel my story becoming more focused and clear.

One of the benefits of me doing an image focused slide show is that it helps me tell a story, and the images work with the words to create some new neural pathways. One of the detriments is that it doesn’t make much sense without the story. However, I’ll embed it anyway.

Deep learners is one of my favourite conferences because after the two fifteen minute sessions people choose what they want to spend an hour on in the afternoon. So the deep dive will be more hands-on based where we can try to sell our favourite places, and maybe dig into some conservation photography.

October 27, 2016

Rebranding

Some rights reserved by flyingkiwigirl

This year we are changing some of how we do Professional Development. What we are thinking of doing is offering drop in sessions during Recess and Lunch and making it more relatable to what the teachers need on demand. We are always here to help, but this is a less intimidating way to work with larger groups of people.

We are calling our sessions >Towards Wicked (based on the New Horizons Report). What we are looking to do (eventually) is address some of the truly wicked problems we as teachers face. So the name came from there.

I’ve been spending more time outside with teachers as well. We are getting more buy in for the mix between environmental education and technology integration, so that is really exciting. We have many teachers out there using the iPads to uncover some of what they could be learning in the classroom.

Happy days.

October 4, 2016

Why Quantitative?

Some rights reserved by Ken Whytock

This week I’ve been thinking a lot about how to actual see where we are in our learning journey. I know that many schools have a focus on quantitative data. We use standardised tests to make sure we are learning at the right time. We focus a lot on quantitative data because it is easier to show a big picture with lots of data at the same time (I think anyway).

So, how can we present more personal qualitative data to parents. Right now we are entering conference time, and we want to share the stories and make it personal, so I wonder how our teachers are doing that, and what the parents are thinking.

I was reading this article about Modern Learning and wonder how we can use qualitative data more effectively. We can use it to paint a bigger picture and a more complete story, but how do we use it to enhance our teaching practice. How do we use it to drive inquiry?

Way too many questions this week.

September 19, 2016

Peer feedback and teaching

Some rights reserved by Ken Whytock

Just came back from a google pd thing. It was just okay, well just okay for me, I think some other people really enjoyed it. Too often in PD we just lecture, and it’s pretty boring for everyone (especially someone who spent all weekend sitting and listening). How can we leverage real time feedback with our peers.

As I present more and more I think this question is going to be at the forefront of my mind. How are people truly engaged in what I am saying? How do I gather evidence of this? How can adults learn in a more productive way through PD?

September 5, 2016May 26, 2017

Launching our Enviroed

A group of us here have been working on reading this book for a book club. We’ve started chapter one, and it talks about some of the barriers to growing, but also to the opportunity for success. We need to make learning real, and meaningful for our students. The authors suggest that one of the best ways to do this when making something is to actually release it to the public.

As always I think back to how does that work for environmental education. What does that mean for people who don’t have a product?

So I thought that instead of launching a thing, we launch our place. We need to get our community involved in our place, and how we grow with it, and for it. By bringing in parents, grandparents and people throughout the community we are sharing our learning and wondering in a more real way, something that transcends the classroom.

I’ve been thinking a lot about intergenerational learning in an international school. Can we show different gardens from around the world, have people walk through their gardens on skype or something and talk about them, why they grow what they grow, how they do it, what their soil is like, how to know when to harvest.

Bringing people together is so important, with the Launch mindset we need to somehow launch our learning space, and our ideas, get feedback from the community and work on building our community, rather than building a product.

August 29, 2016

Shaping our class

Some rights reserved by Matt Stratton

I was just talking to one of my colleagues about this lately. How can we shape our classroom, and our classroom culture differently.

I was mentioning Lakoff, and how metaphors help shape our reality. Today reading Creating Cultures of Thinking I came across the same idea. Often we refer to school as work, especially for students. How does this shape how they go about their day?

I remember Sir Ken Robinson talking about teachers as gardeners.

How powerful can we be if we start changing our metaphors? How do we start this?

When we think about vision of a school and the places we want to go, we don’t often address how we shape our school through language. When we think about brands and story telling and the whole image of school, we as teachers need to start shaping it through our daily interactions, the metaphors we create and the language we use.

I’m not sure gardening is the best metaphor (although it fits nicely with my environmental beliefs) but the idea that growth is always possible and that there are seasons of better growth really resonates with me (actually now I wonder if this is something we have to differentiate as well).

August 27, 2016

Unity and standards: What are we aiming for?

Some rights reserved by Chris Devers

Thanks again to the Place Being Resonance book I’ve been stuck in a world of wondering. I apologize in advance. I know at times I am not clear in my writing, and this thought isn’t fully formed, so it might not make the most sense.

While reading it talked about what our destruction of the world looks like, and it looks like progress, parts look like sustainable development, parts look like social justice. It looks like we are supposed to be doing the things we are doing because that’s how people develop. In order for humans to be unified (economically, socially, etc.) other things have to (and do) suffer. So, when we are looking at unity, we are often just taking an anthropocentric view of what we need (and people would argue why wouldn’t we think of humans first) and we forget about what our system (The Earth) needs. While we are going for unity, I’m not really sure we know who we are unifying with, and who (or what I suppose) we are excluding.

It’s really difficult for anyone to step back from themselves, deconstruct what they think, challenge the dominant culture and make a difference. Where do those ideas even come from? So how can we expect people to actually protect our planet when we don’t even know what we don’t know.

While I was pondering this, I started thinking about school, and how we are trying to hit standards and go through curriculums, and just race through to show progress. My mind kind of paused for a second, what and who are we progressing and for what end? Place Being and Resonance wants us to challenge how we teach, why are we moving towards more data? What is growth? Who benefits from our current system of education, and who suffers? I think deep down we know the answers to these questions, but it is difficult to challenge a system that wants to engage and enlighten our learners. When we have public school systems that want to bring up literacy are we focusing too much on a specific type of reading? So much was flying through my head.

I’m not really sure where to take it from there. I know I have to listen more (not just to humans, but I need to be aware of the voices not being heard or acknowledged). I know I have to slow things down and encourage actual thinking, and actual listening in my students. I know I have to encourage students to be aware of a multi-vocal, eco-centric (as in not just anthropocentric) view of our planet.

I guess the real question is how can we see the system we are in and try to fight for that system, while being aware of the multi-faceted aspects of our world. How we can honestly unify through diversity?

August 5, 2016

Checking out the back end

Some rights reserved by Umang Dutt

Orientation week is always interesting when you have been at the same school for awhile. You get a sense of what people will be stressed out about, you kind of understand what might help them, but for the most part you just are there to respond to specific stresses and develop and manage relationships.

This week has been reconnecting with some team leaders and admin and has been really good. I’ve worked with some of my new teachers which has been great and I’ve been diving into the backend of our learning management system.

So far it’s alright, making some sites, working on my.cis and trying to get things sorted for the upcoming year. It’s interesting to see how (well a limited how because I’m not into code or anything yet) something works. It is great when working with teachers and having to break things down, it really reinforces some good teaching practice. You have to respond to a knowledge gap, fill things in at their level and try to support them as they make sense of a new world. Also it’s interesting to work with some higher level people and say, well here is how I’d work through it. I don’t fully know your answer, but here’s how I would find out. I think I’m going to adapt this with more of my students this academic year.

It’s also interesting to see a lot of technostress, some teachers are so stressed out about not understanding. Not knowing is such a huge part of my world, so it’s strange why people would be stressed out about it.

July 28, 2016

Diving into a new year

Some rights reserved by AdamCohn

I’m pretty excited about this new year. A lot of things will be going on. Some of my grade three teachers will be going one to one with ipads, really going to focus on cognitive coaching with (so far) six teachers (I’m hoping to build on that) and bringing a new fishbowl type model of PD to school.

All of this goes towards a more personalized style of development. At times I wonder about how beneficial or damaging personalized learning can be. I guess it’s important not to totally enable enable a learner to dictate everything, but rather create situations where as individuals they can succeed. Specifically I’m thinking about teachers, and how we need to engage them where they need it most, without offering overly involved amounts of people.

Hopefully our fishbowl model will address these issues, smaller groups focused on things they need to know (school directed) but build up relationships so we can work on what the teachers want to know and hopefully add in some cognitive coaching as well.

I start seeing new teachers next week, looking forward to seeing the new teachers and reuniting with the old.