Change that eminates from teachers lasts until they find a better way.
– Roland Barthes
Continuing to tie up the year during SLA’s weekly professional development meetings, it was my Professional Learning Community’s turn to present what we learned during our independent study in the first semester.
My very small learning community consisted of Mark, a math teacher, and me. That’s it. Just two of us.
I’d be lying if I told you I didn’t love learning with Mark in the first semester.
What began as a plan to find new tools and writings to bring to each meeting shifted into something more directly applicable – conversation.
Each time we met, Mark and I shared what we were doing in our classes and brainstormed ways in which technology could transform students’ learning into something more engaging, authentic and differentiated.
As Mark admitted, I’ve a bit more proficiency with tech and learning. Often, our conversations consisted of me learning about the math concepts he was teaching his students and then throwing out whatever ideas came to mind.
Because I realized math is Mark’s domain of understanding and had no qualms admitting my deficiencies in its instruction, I didn’t hold back my ideas, nor did I take offense when Mark dismissed an idea as impractical.
Had I paired up with another humanities teacher, my ideas might not have flowed so freely, and any negation might not have been so freely accepted.
When it came time to plan our presentation to the entire faculty, we experienced a moment of pseudo-panic. Had we been collecting and cataloging tools and articles throughout the semester as we planned, we would have been set. Read this, now try this, now plan a sample lesson, now share, now critique in small groups. It’s the unsweetened cereal of professional development.
When it came time for today’s presentation, we decided to share not only what we learned about the tools, but what we learned about process as well.
For us, learning had been social, collegial and immediate.
In the first five minutes, we gave an overview of our process.
Next, I asked each faculty member to think about where they would rate their comfort with technology in learning on a scale of 1-10.
“Now, use your fingers to show your number. Without talking, line up from highest to lowest.”
They did.
From their, we broke the line in half. The highest end of each half was paired with the highest end of the other half and they were broken into couples.
Then, down to business.
Laptops in tow, the lower numbers in each pair explained what they’re doing in their classrooms through the end of the year. The higher numbers listened, asked questions and then started brainstorming ideas on how tech could be better leveraged to help with learning.
Mark and I milled about the room.
At each table I stopped, a conversation similar to the conversations Mark and I had throughout the first semester was taking place.
After a few minutes, we paused, asked people to share what was going well and then gave a few more minute either to continue on their topics of discussion or to let those who had been brainstorming share what was going on in their classrooms.
For the finish, I asked the group what they noticed about the past 25 minutes that stood out to them:
- People were working cross-disciplinarily. With one or two exceptions, each couple was made up of teachers from different disciplines.
- People were talking one-on-one about their practice.
- People were talking about things that could immediately affect classroom practice rather than living in the hypothetical.
We also talked about what could be done to continue this kind of conversation and collaboration. The thing that stuck the most was the idea of moving outside people’s normal routine to seek out the feedback of our peers.
That’s the key of it. In a structured, focused way, we asked people to move outside the routine of talking to those in their disciplines or the routine of curriculum design and have a one-on-one conversation about improving how they teach.
That should be the routine.
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