What Conditions are Critical to support learning and Innovation? #IMMOOC #LCInnovation Season 4 Episode 2

This week we had two questions to prompt our reflection. So here goes...

How might you create or improve your innovation ecosystem that is described in Chapter 2?

To improve the innovation ecosystem, you should start by building a shared vision, starting from the administrators and including all the people involved (teachers, students, support staff, parents). You have to decide what you think education is about and what the role of the school is. You have to know where you want to go so you can think about the roads you will need to build to get there. And you have to know why you are doing this, who it is for! As Katie says: “We can have the latest technology or the best curriculum, but if we are not obsessed with who learners are, how to best serve them, and how to partner with them to move forward, we can fail to make the impact that we desire and are working so hard to achieve. Part of being learner obsessed is ensuing that the teachers have time, support, and trust to do what is best for learners and their classrooms and throughout the school.” (page 51) I love how she is calling attention to the important role of the administrators in making this possible. Many times, we are putting so much weight on teachers to change and forgetting that we are inserted in a whole ecosystem that needs to be involved. Teachers are only a piece of that puzzle. As Katie cited in page 60 Gene Wilhoit’s The Vision: “Teachers teach more effectively when they work in professional cultures where their opinions and input are valued. In such environments, administrators support teachers as they exchange ideas and strategies, problem-solve collaboratively, and consult with expert colleagues.” I love this sentence (page 64): “Empowered teachers empower their students.” Administrators empower teachers so they can empower their students!

Another aspect I have found is challenging when bringing in this change is thinking about assessment. In page 60 Katie states that “What you measure and value influences the type of learners and citizens your systems are designed to create.” She also points out that “To truly integrate new learning, it is critical to carve out time to allow for trial and error, collaboration, and especially coaching and feedback.” That is not what was happening in the school until recently. It is one of the hardest aspects for educators to think about (teachers, parents, and, why not, the students themselves!) in light of this new approach. Until now we associated assessment to grades that measured concrete chunks of knowledge that students spat out after “memorizing” the content they should learn. It was an end product, not a process. If we are to change the ecosystem, we have to rethink how we assess the process and what we measure in learning. We must redefine what we consider “success”. Katie sums it up pretty nicely in page 85: “If we are honest, anything that is worth doing and learning takes time, feedback, critique, and multiple revisions to improve. To maximize learning opportunities, not only do we need to allow room for mistakes, but we need to create a culture that relies on learning from others and build in opportunities to reflect, revise, and improve.” That is what I see as significant education!

What does your ideal classroom look like? What examples do you have that you can connect to the learner-centered experiences described in chapter 4?

Katie talks about building a desired graduate profile. When we first started planning our STEAM curriculum, we had a Saturday workshop for all the teachers involved. There we did some hands-on activities to build our “ideal” student. Basically, we built the person we wanted him/her to become as an outcome of the experiences he/she would have with us. It was a great experience because it not only gave us clarity of who we wanted our students to become, but it also helped us communicate this to the other stakeholders who were not participating as intimately in the process. It was also an opportunity for the teachers experience as students the type of hands-on activity we wanted them to later do with their own students.

This was the result:

We did something very close to what Katie described in the Significant Learning strategy for building a shared vision of what we want our classroom to look like and what type of student we want to graduate. (pages 104-105) And our conclusion was also very similar to hers, where she describes: “Most often, the learning and growth required productive struggle, risk, guidance, and mentorship.”

 So, we designed lessons using Project Based Learning as our methodology, looking at our curriculum and bringing the lessons into a context that would be close to student interests. Our goal was to reach what Katie describes in page 106: “When we focus on learners and connect to their interests, needs, and goals, we can create experiences that spark curiosity, ignite passion, and unleash genius.” That’s what we aimed for.

As we designed the challenges and then the lessons that would help the students reach their goals, we were studying books such as The Innovators Mindset, From STEM to STEAM, Invent to Learn, Social Emotional Learning Handbook amongst others to help build our own list of characteristics that would define the learning experience we were designing. I loved Katie’s summary of the “10 characteristics of learner-centered experiences: personal, agency, inquiry, collaboration, authentic, critique+revision, productive struggle, goals+accountability, models, reflection.” (page 107) Ours was pretty close to that as well. We called this list the essence of what we believed STEAM should be (it was the “soul” of the curriculum). Our list included: autonomy and protagonism, critical thinking, design thinking, hands-on solidary learning, contextualized peer learning, entrepreneurial attitude and creative attitude.  But we incorporated many of the characteristics in Katie’s list into our lesson plans. We found that having models, allowing time for critique and revision and making sure to include time and activities for reflection made a huge difference in students’ perception of their own learning process and helped them understand this new culture of learning. We had to make their learning process explicit to them so they could bridge the gap between what they thought they knew about education and the transformations we were bringing them.

To finish off this post, I’d like to comment on what Katie wrote in page 114 – “Build the Foundation, not the Ceiling (loved this!!!) – The best teachers do not use a single approach or follow one curriculum; they create the context and experiences for diverse students to learn and grow.” That’s what is so amazing about designing these experiences – you just add the starting point. It’s beautiful to watch the students taking off from there and reaching for the sky! That’s what teaching is all about!!!