Technology and Children

Blog about new technologies and their impact on education, incorporating a focus on innovation and STEAM.

Wednesday, March 21, 2018

Teachers in the center of the Professional Learning Process #IMMOOC #LCInnovation Season 4

As I read Katie's book, it's almost as if she had been with me when we were designing our new STEAM High School curriculum back in my last school! I can totally identify with her points of view. I lived the experiences she describes and believe in teacher's voices being heard in the whole process of innovation. I could also see some places I, as their leader, could have done better. I identified myself with the open-ended professional development. Because the vision of what the curriculum should look like was so new, since we were the first ones to be doing it in Brazil so we had no model to follow, we were in a zone where even I was unsure of what the course would look like in the end. It was an amazing opportunity for growth, and it couldn't have been accomplished if we hadn't all worked together. 
When Katie asks:
  • How do you create more opportunities to connect and provide effective feedback to support those you serve?
One of the things I think was fundamental in our process was that we guaranteed weekly meetings for the teachers working in the project. One thing I learned was that having all 21 teachers together was counter-productive. The best model for these meetings was when we divided the group in teams of 4 or 5 teachers and had specific goals to meet. We planned out the lessons, tested them out, reflected on the outcome, improved, and then we would go to the rest of the team and try it out on them and get their feedback, so in the end all of us were prepared to teach that lesson. It optimized the use of our time and shared the responsibilities of the work. The balance Katie talks about between being too compliant training type and too open-ended is indeed very important. I lived those models. Another important aspect of the feedback was the documentation of the process. When we shared our ideas, one teacher of the team of authors would be the notetaker to make sure none of the ideas shared by the other teachers were lost. That allowed us to grow as a group and learn to trust and admire each other as we discovered each one's unique talents in this process. 
  • How might you create systems that minimize training and foster a culture of learning? What would you add or modify in the chart shared in chapter 9?
The chart in chapter 9 includes everything we did that turned out to be very effective. The one thing that I didn't see there that also was amazingly helpful to us when bringing STEAM to the School was offering opportunities for teachers to visit other spaces and see how the learning could be modeled in different environments (makerspaces). We looked at benchmark schools who were already doing what we wanted to do as inspiration for us. We took the teachers to conferences where they had the opportunity to participate in hands-on workshops that modeled the type of work we wanted them to bring back to their students. This field work really helped pass on the vision of the type of learning we wanted to bring to our school. 

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