The power of connection in the digital world is limitless.
I don’t know Alyssa. She attends school in another school district, but here is Alyssa’s recent email to me:
My name is Alyssa and I am a grade 12 student and attend Templeton Secondary. Recently, I have been reading your WordPress blog and I am blown away by how much truth they hold. I started realizing that there needed to be a shift in thinking about the North American school system (structure & curriculum) about a year ago when I came upon Sir Ken Robinson’s Ted talk. Since then, I have been researching, and talking about this topic with as many people as I possibly could.
The one difficulty I have had with spreading the idea of change, is that – well, people think that everything is fine. What I want to do, is put together a presentation for my school, for the teachers, for the students, and for the parents, about bringing OUR education back to us.
Using technology, having more personalized learning, and a more relevant curriculum are all things that I want to address. Education is my passion, and I hope to help expand this education movement.
Our students are hungry to be included and engaged in these conversations — we just need to find the way. There are students like Alyssa, in all of our schools, who want to help guide our work and their learning.
I come back to a comment from Brian Kuhn regarding this movement: “How are we going to make the change? One student, one teacher, one parent, one school at a time.”
Thanks, Alyssa, for joining the conversation. Let’s all work toward engaging more students like Alyssa, in the education evolution.
The conference features many internationally known experts, who have been widely quoted over the year, as the province has been investigating 21st century skills and personalized learning. Also included in the program are Premier Gordon Campbell; Minister of Education, George Abbott, and Deputy Minister of Education, James Gorman.
The topic is directly in line with so many of the conversations we are having in West Vancouver. We will have a team of close to 25 at the event, including trustees, administrators and teachers. The event has sold out at over 700 participants – clearly, similar conversations are happening in many places across the province.
In advance of the event, conference organizers have shared a number of resources for participant consideration, and they are available here on the BCELC website (this site is full of links to resources connected to personalized learning).
One article conference organizers have suggested is What’s Next? 21 Ideas for 21st Century Learning by Charles Leadbeater. It is a very interesting read with lots of ideas to mark for further discussion.
One quote that stood out for me, when describing centres of innovation, was:
The school leadership provided an igniting sense of purpose to propel innovation and encourage managed risk taking to develop new approaches . . . That kind of ‘igniting purpose’ is vital when innovation is such a highly collaborative, cumulative endeavour, which relies on mobilising and motivating staff, pupils, parents, partner agencies, other schools. Collaborative innovation relies on the participants having a strong shared sense of purpose.
This is absolutely in line with what we have seen in our district around a series of initiatives, including the Primary Years Program and Middle Years Program IB implentations. I am so impressed by the “shared sense of purpose” from students, parents, staff and community.
In addition, the 76-page report is a series of resources including presentation slides from Charles Leadbeater that support his findings.
My own suggestions for background material leading into the conference include:
A short video from Tony McKay that gives insight to his work
Another short (3 minute) video worth watching is linked here, from Dr. Stuart Shanker, discussing brain development; additional backgrounder material, The Innovation Unit site, gives a good sense of Valerie Hannon’s work.
For those attending, or following the conference from a distance, there are a couple of ways to participate. Engage on Twitter by posting comments tagged #bcssa10, and use this same hashtag to follow the conversation. If you don’t have a Twitter account, you can engage at TodaysMeet (no account sign-up required) at: http://todaysmeet.com/bcssa10.
I will try to update this blog with daily summaries as well.
UPDATED – Videos from Conference Organizers
The following videos have been shared by conference organizers to help prepare participants:
Model the change. Demonstrate the way you want things to change through your own language and behaviour. Often, seeing a leader do something first gives people the courage to try it themselves.
Turn negatives into positives. Find ways to reframe people’s resistance as opportunities for change. This requires that you listen carefully, understand the underlying reasons for the opposition, and address them directly.
Find allies. Chances are someone else in the organization wants the change as badly as you do. Find that person and pool your resources and ideas.
This fall, I have been amazed and impressed with the energy in our district around personalized learning and how teachers are using technology to support it in their classrooms. While it has taken many forms, and actually very few use the term “personalized learning” and opt instead for differentiated instruction, grouping for learning, inquiry-based learning, among a host of other terms, we have profound examples of teachers feeling they have “permission” to experiment and be creative, and students owning their learning in new ways.
Of course, this is not a race.
Earlier this week, we spent some time with all our principals and vice-principals looking at our successes and challenges during the first month, as well as what we want to do during the next 90 days, with personalized learning and using technology.
One theme constantly emerged: the need to continue to focus on learning goals and then, if appropriate, see how technology can support them. We also discussed the opportunities and challenges of students publishing for a public audience, and how we work with students and parents as we do this in an authentic and secure way.
The discussions we are having may be about schedules, content or technology, but almost all of them come back to being about change – schooling looking different for students than it did for their parents; schooling looking different for staff than it did when they were students.
Our commitment for the next 90 days is around providing more support to teachers around pedagogy and technology, to build greater capacity at each school, and to continue to invite participation from students, staff and parents on this journey. We all agree that education is changing, and there are some amazing examples in our district of what is possible, right now.
There is not one right answer, and to finish this where I started, it is not a race.
