So I’ve still been really focused on what it means to work on a team or group. I’m more or less planning for next year and how I can help my team be a little more group oriented.
I’ve been thinking about the idea of developing team identity and what that means. Senge was big in organizational development earlier in my educational career, and now I’m wondering about how best to work with a small team in a big organization. What does that mean, how do we develop identity and how can we work with our team to make a difference in our team.
I think first for us is identity development. Not just grade level, but actually understanding who we are as individuals and what that means for us as a group. What do we really know about each other, how can we bring about bigger change as a group, seeing ourselves as part of a bigger whole? I’m not really sure of everything just yet but that’s my plan.
Adam Grant’s give and take is also going to be a part of my summer reading, trying to get things moving for a more successful team. We’ll see how it goes.
I used to be a coxswain, the small (I can’t believe I used to weigh that much) person steering the boat and getting the team working together. I’d never been a captain before, or someone who led something, and this was a strange position because I was doing something other than what everyone else was doing, but I was essential for keeping people moving together. It was an amazing opportunity and a ton of fun, mostly I learned a lot.
We just finished the exhibition, one of the major reflections we have from this is how to pick teams? How can you pick an effective group (can you)? I guess what the boils down to is, what do we really want from the groups? PE teachers want teams to be fair as in equally matched, previously we picked our exhibition teams surrounding what passions do we share, we are looking to picking groups that will have people contributing equally (if that’s even possible).
When we were rowing, your team had be aligned. We had to move together. So if your stroke was outpacing the rest, they had to slow down. Is that what we really want out of our students? Of our grade level teaching teams? Of our schools? I wonder really what a team is in this regards, or if the term team is really what we’re looking for.
This is my first year teaching a class that is going through the PYP exhibition. For the past seven years I’ve been a part of it, either as a mentor or as someone who helps prepare the presentations. I’ve always loved it, and always wanted to play a bigger role in it.
This year, especially with my class, I feel like it’s been pretty great. The students were pretty good at finding a problem and being able to look at something they felt was important to them. They’ve come up with questions and lines of inquiry. It’s been exciting to watch.
I guess most exciting of all, especially from my point of view, is when the students encounter problems with their group mates. It’s interesting to see how they go about approaching the person they think is the problem, and how they come up with solutions to figure out how to make something work. Sometimes it’s been really successful, other times, not so much.
Some of the groups have really changed their focus and ideas, while others have stayed pretty consistent. It’s just interesting to see the amount of effort that goes into it from a student point of view, and makes me wonder how well I manage my time.
One of the most rewarding aspects for me so far has been seeing how their idea of action has evolved. It started with just wanting to raise money and now it’s going for more personal transformation. Instead of students working to raise money for a cultural group, they are looking at how we can recognise racist thoughts in ourselves. One group is taking students into a green screen room to talk about how some people don’t get access to education using visual displays, it’s great to see action taking on personal aspects.
This week as our exhibition unfolds we’ve been looking at what to do when people disagree. Since we are in groups discovering our own process, there are bound to be disagreements, and we were wondering what are some of the more interesting ways to interact with each other when these types of situations arise.
When I was doing my master’s we looked at the idea of using aikido as a conflict management style. The hope in aikido is that the relationship matters. There should be a win-win resolution. When we are working with others, physical conflict might not happen but if we can apply the same principal of win-win to our verbal conflict we can hopefully work towards a better resolution.
Aikido also hopes for resistance and letting force flow through the situation. When we think of disagreements from this point of view, we can hopefully focus more on what the problem really is (not what is superficially being presented) and we can let the negative feelings or connotations flow past us.
If you’re interested in learning more, there’s lots online, or you can check out this article
Doing my reading this week, and being interested in environmental education I often wonder about how to start developing a new curriculum or a new approach to teaching and learning.
This week we focused on Schwab’s The Practical: A language for curriculum (1970) and how we (still) may have a problem with a crucial part of school, the curriculum. When we use one theory or approach to solve a problem we can miss out on other opportunities to see a problem from different perspectives. By thinking that one theory or curriculum can solve a very complex problem like education we may be missing out on subtle ideas that can be taken from many theories.
I guess what I’m wondering is what are the variety of ideas that we can draw from to integrate environmental education into our “everyday” curriculum? How do we (re)start the process of creating an environmental curriculum without a singular focus, while trying to teach multiple disciplines.
AttributionNoncommercial Some rights reserved by photoptimist
This week I’ve been wondering how the local and global work together. I know it’s messy but in the PYP how can we balance the importance of a local focused curriculum in a world of global issues.
In the PYP the main focus is on the learner and developing learner agency. The goal is to develop agency through explicit teaching of the learner profile. Through a concept based, inquiry driven program focused on learners, the International Baccalaureate aims to create compassionate, life-long learners who know when and how to take action with their learning (Barnard, 2016). The International Baccalaureate and the PYP in particular is a value-laden curriculum focusing on the Learner Profile as a way to teach the core values of the PYP (International Baccalaureate Organization, 2009). By teaching an internationally value laden curriculum I think the PYP is trying to address Schwab’s commonplace of milieus. The PYP strives to be a school that regardless of size or location develops an “internationally minded person” (International Baccalaureate Organization, 2009, p 3). The International Baccalaureate Organization (IBO) does not seem to see milieus as separate or distinct. However, they see the need to develop an international student who can move between places.
One of the IBO’s standard C 2.7 says that “The written curriculum promotes students’ awareness of individual, local, national and global issues” (International Baccalaureate Organization, 2014, p. 5). The IBO wants students to see global connections as well as local issues. Schwab (1973) discusses the idea of milieus resting in milieus but in this regard he was highlighting the different cultures and identities within the classroom not local, national, global issues. In the local, contextualised milieu teachers are supposed to be looking at the interactions between the students, the students and their home life and the students and their community. While it is important that we think about global context, Schwab was highlighting the importance of learning within the community, knowing who the students were as people and community members, and the cultural climate of the learners. By expanding this to offer global issues or perspectives the PYP is trying to create a more connected world. However, they fail to address the importance of understanding the world the students live in and how they live. By looking at the student’s communities and families and what might pop up first we can start to link their knowledge to the larger world.
So how should we, or is it important to focus on the local classroom issues first, or do we start off by looking at what makes us all human and making connections with the world. Any ideas?
Reading Schwab (1973) for my curriculum class has made me think a little differently about how I approach the idea of content (and personal content mastery) in my teaching.
Being a part of the IB, and firmly believing in concepts, I’ve always kind of thought that having a mastery of content might not be that important. I thought that good teachers can ask good questions to get people to deeper understandings, even if they don’t fully understand.
Since reading this article though, I think I may have missed some key points (hopefully because I have a solid knowledge of all the required understandings). If we as educators don’t really know the content how can we ask good questions or lead to a desired enduring understanding. Backwards design is a powerful planning tool, but if we don’t know what the end goal is (or we’re unable to do the end goal ourselves) how can we get students there?
Working in the outdoors has always been easy for me, and other people have told me they’ve felt uncomfortable outside, they always wanted to know what they could teach. I was always slightly confused by this (I guess because I felt like I knew enough of the outdoor content) but they need to become masters in their understanding.
I guess I’m wondering if we need to be more focused on content for PD at times. Like make sure our teachers really and fully understand the content of our place so they feel more comfortable sharing what they know. If we can really download some local knowledge about our place, we may be better able to teach about it.
Our unit right now looks into the “ethical implications of science”. Recently for my doctorate we’ve been talking about the hidden curriculum or the null curriculum and how that effects how and what we teach. I wanted the class to explore either the ethical implications of school, or the ethical implications of science.
It was a loud hour. I remember one of my PD opportunities when I was in Australia. The leader had some balls, we were in a circle and he was trying to explain something to us while we had to move the balls around the class. It turned into a very loud exercise. The leader reminded us this is sometimes what it’s like to learn. By bringing in new thoughts and new concepts we often had to communicate loudly, or talk it out in order for it to make sense to us. So I didn’t try to disrupt the loudness too much, instead I just reminded them we had to talk about it before the end of the period.
Despite the noise there were many thoughtful responses to what is being done in science and school, the conversation (happily) didn’t end when the class ended either. Students were really digging deep to wonder why the believed something, and if what they were doing was “good”.
We’re moving from this unit into our exhibition where we are trying to sort out our values and beliefs and how we express them in our everyday actions, so I think this is a pretty good stepping stone, plus I learned a lot about how and what my co-learners are thinking.
During my course we looked into “what is a curriculum” so we could learn about how we talk about things. We were looking from a perspective of could there be one definition or should there be one definition?
We wanted to know if post-modernist thought was somewhat useful in a real world educational setting, and I guess as any good post-modernist, why is that good. Our small class all had different viewpoints on what they thought curriculum was, and all of us could see success (especially if criteria of success was well defined when explaining curriculum).
This made me think a lot about how team meetings are structured (more at an IB school, or a school where teachers are more in charge of creating the day to day curriculum). If we lay out our values at the beginning of the year, and we talk about the similarities we have, I wonder if our meetings throughout the year will be more effective. It seems to me that most of our conversations that block us from effective co-planning are due to a difference in opinion about the why behind what we are teaching, not the actual things we are teaching.
Any thoughts?
Jackson, P. W. (1992). Conceptions of curriculum and curriculum specialists. In P. W. Jackson (Ed.), Handbook of research on curriculum (pp. 3-12). New York: Macmillan.
So I’ve still been really focused on what it means to work on a team or group. I’m more or less planning for next year and how I can help my team be a little more group oriented.
Joe Teft 