Captivate & Challenge: My Goals for 2018-2019

Before I start about me, I am proud of what we’ve accomplished with Design and STEAM at ISB in the past few years. And I’m excited to see what the future holds – as the team grows, as we move into a purpose built space, and as we continue to refine and develop our curricular program.  Our ultimate goal is that all students at ISB get a range of design thinking opportunities and develop technical skills that will help prepare them for future careers, projects and life to make a positive impact on their communities and the environment.

But, this post is about MY annual goals this year…

I’m keen to be a part of this pilot for teacher reflection and growth.  While goals are personal, I think it’s great to see what other colleagues are doing and how we can connect what we are doing and work together towards common goals.  For this pilot, teachers will be using Tripod’s 7Cs Framework for Effective Teachers.  Since this didn’t fit perfectly with our roles, the EdTech team has revised this framework to better suit our needs:  7Cs for Coaches

My two main goals this year are connected to CAPTIVATE & CULTURE.

CAPTIVATE: Coaches who captivate spark and maintain learner interest in learning. They stimulate and engage learners by cultivating curiosity and inquiry and by making lessons interesting, relevant, and enjoyable.

My goal: I want to improve my presentation skills both in workshop and presentation format.

The WHY: I present a lot with my role.  I like sharing.  I get just as much from presenting as I do from being a participant (sometimes even more!). BUT, I get very nervous when I present.  I talk too fast.  I lose my place.  My message and passion gets lost in the delivery. I love being inspired by a presenter, a keynote speaker, a teacher and I want to get better at this.  Specifically, I need to work on presenting where there is “no feedback from the audience” – a big presentation on a stage and the first 10-20 minutes of a workshop.

How I will measure this goal: I will get feedback from trusted colleagues and participants after presentations.  I will use video to analyze different presentations this year.

How I will achieve this goal:

1. Participate in Kendall Zoller’s Presentation Professional Development (Sept 2018 at International School Beijing)
2. Work on one skill per month to increase “muscle memory” for these competencies of Choreography of Presenting
3. I will use the Choreography of Presenting book as supporting materials
4. I will use video from some of my presentations to analyze my presentations and receive feedback from others

CHALLENGE: Coaches who challenge learners insist that they persevere and do their best work. They hold learners to high academic standards, encourage persistence, and monitor learner effort.

My goal: I want to improve the feedback protocols we use in our classes and activities – through Integration, Enrichment classes, and Ignite Weeks.

The WHY: Sometimes I feel like the feedback protocols I use are repetitive and don’t always get good quality responses from students. Carving out enough time to adequately reflect and give/receive feedback has been an area I feel like that I can continue to improve on.  Also, I want to impact the culture of our students, especially as they enter more “high stakes” high school courses they want to know how do I get highest marks rather than critically looking at their own work and also collaborating with their classmates to help everyone improve.

How I will measure this goal: I will have a resource to share with all teachers with different feedback strategies we can use as a whole school for design thinking and quality reflection practices.

How I will achieve this goal:

1. Collect feedback protocols and strategies from my colleagues & extended PLN about their existing feedback practices
2. Meet with the EdTech/STEAM Team to evaluate feedback protocols and strategies create a common language for feedback practices
3. Curate feedback protocols and strategies for self/peer reflection, conferencing, formative feedback and assessment
4. Design appropriate graphics for high impact visuals for teaching and learning
5. Share feedback protocols with ISB community, Design network and beyond

All images in this post are from The Noun Project

ECIS Library Conference Reflections

Now, one would think that the ECIS Triennial Library Conference was a strange choice of PD for me, but there were a few different factors that got me there:

1. My husband is a librarian and he wanted to go to this conference (he has good taste and he’s always a fun guy to hang out with)
2. We have good friends who live in Chennai who would watch our kids while we attended this conference (our first conference together… ever!)
3. My office is in a library and our Office of Learning includes the EdTech/Design Facilitators and Librarians, so I should be working more with them!
4. There were some MakerSpace/Tech presentations that I felt there were definitely enough sessions I could attend.
5. It was during Chinese New Year holiday, so I wouldn’t have to miss any school and we could all go to India as a family.

As soon as I walked in, I realized that I was not in my comfort zone – my connected, happy, social, familiar “Design and Tech PLN bubble” I had developed over the last ten years.  And after a delicious Indian breakfast and more caffeine, I relaxed a bit, even though I was surrounded by hundreds of unfamiliar names and faces. I realized it was good to be a little uncomfortable and to embrace the situation.  Very few people knew me (and I didn’t know a lot of people there) and the focus wasn’t necessarily on my needs, but I definitely could still get a lot out of the experience.

While I could write a lot about what I learned and all my highlights, from the hospitality of AISC (which scored an A++ in my book) to Mr. Schu‘s engaging keynote (even to a non-librarian), I will put down my top four:

1. I met the Boyers from Shanghai American School and they are doing a lot with First Lego League.  In short, we need to be doing this at ISB. I’m excited we have a new Computer Science/Robotics/Design/Science super-teacher joining us next year.  I think he’s already offering this at his current school. I’m excited to start some conversations with him about our developing programs. If he isn’t going to offer this for MS, I think I need to step up and do something about it. Robotics and Programming are not my strengths, but I could definitely help facilitate a program like this and I really like the facets of the program from their core values to the research component to the designing and creating.

2. It was great to see the ES and MS/HS MakerSpaces.  Roger was a gracious host and toured me around the secondary Design Space after our session was done in the ES Lab.  It is always interesting to see what other people are doing and how they have organized their spaces. ACTION: Stay in touch with the Design and Maker teachers from AISC and MamaTechnology who is running an Open MakerSpace for Secondary Students at JICS.

3. Library MakerSpace – I went to a session led by Melinda Piehler.  Her focus was mainly ES, but I got a lot of great ideas and starting points from being in her session.  A Library MakerSpace is something I’ve considered for years.  I’ve never gone through with it because I felt like I was coming up with an idea and dumping it on someone else to manage.  Luckily, at ISB, my office is in the library and it’s an amazing space that kids really like to come to.  I know it’s not going to work perfectly, but I want to give it a go and see if it can work, so students can create outside of integrated projects and Design classes and maybe even prefer to create rather than mindlessly consume YouTube videos on their downtime.  I’ve just written a DRAFT proposal that I’m going to share with our secondary librarians this week (here are some pieces):

4. Living Library – Catherine Buchanan presented how she organizes and runs her Living Library at Chadwick International School in Korea. While this is probably a bit out of my job description, it’s something that John and I would like to work together to develop for our middle school for the Fall.  I love the idea of inviting people in as primary resources to engage students and for our students to learn more about all the amazing people in and around our community.  We think we’ll try to schedule this event for Fall 2018.  There are many schools that organize an event like this. Here are some examples: The Human Library and check out this article. More to come on this. 

The ECIS Library Conference  was almost just the right amount of new ideas to come back with after a conference.  Sometimes I come back with too many ideas and I am overwhelmed with what I want to do versus the amount of time I have to take action on some of my new ideas. I would say I didn’t have a ton of options that applied to me for a lot of the sessions, nor did I know enough people to pick out the “engaging presenters” that you could learn anything from.  I feel like I can easily manage the four actions (above) and maybe I should look around for different types of PD rather than attending the same conferences in Asia that I go to all the time.  They are excellent, don’t get me wrong, but it’s always a good thing to be out of my comfort zone every once in a while.

This was a slide from Mr. Schu’s presentation, but I like that can apply to our MakerSpaces and has a deeper meaning – I think I’ll make one for the MS/HS Design Lab.

Design Thinking and EAL (English as an Additional Language)

Throughout my teaching experiences over the course of my career, I have frequently seen that EAL, Student Support or students taking multiple languages (all for good reason), often miss out on hands-on personalized learning experiences.  These types of hands-on electives courses are exactly what these students need.  They need authentic language experiences and safe but dynamic environments to flourish and develop both language and technical skills.

Sparked from a conversation between our HS EAL teacher and our Educational Technology Coordinator, Clint, a new project was born to fill this need.

Students were to find a client (another one of their teachers) and using the design process, they would creatively solve a problem of their client.

Students first had to approach a client, and record their interactions as a language assessment to find out the problems or needs of their teachers.  This is an important part of the design process as a designer needs to empathize with their client.  For the students, this was definitely out of their comfort zone and they had to understand the requests and respond on the spot in a natural way.

Here’s a sample clip of a language task:

 

The students worked through the design process to create their final products.  We offered sewing and vector drawing (to ultimately laser cut) workshops for small groups depending on the needs of their projects.

Students were very engaged in this project and it has been a great way for students to extend their oral communication as well as problem solve and develop more technical skills.

The variety of student projects range from:

Design Process Journal Entry – A daily written task sharing progress

a compass used for a white board Math classroom

a step stool for a teacher’s classroom

a leather bag designed for a teacher who moves around a lot throughout the day

two different school supplies’ holders for different uses in the classroom

a system to help foster more classroom participation (for a teacher who’s a Patriot’s fan)

It has been great to get into more high school courses this semester. After my first year of working almost primarily in the middle school, I’ve been wanting to branch out more in the high school.

As a long term goal, I would like to work more with the EAL and Student Support teachers, along with my EdTech Facilitator colleague to help develop authentic design projects to use as a frame work for language instruction, practice and learning.

This is connected to one of my professional goals this year: 

2. I will model and support a culture of openness and sharing through collaborative practices, public reflection and celebration.

c. I will facilitate personalised learning.

 

Year 2 @ISB: Onward and Upward

This year, as an EdTech Team, we have created the following goals:

1. Articulate, communicate, and facilitate the implementation – with ongoing reflection? –  of a PK-12 Digital Citizenship program/curriculum to all ISB stakeholders (students, teachers & counselors, admin, parents). 
2. Model and support a culture of openness and sharing through collaborative practices, public reflection, and celebration. 
   1. #learnISB more than just celebratory e.g. feedback, advice, process, reflective goals, professional learning etc.
   2. Commitment to reflective professional learning through blogging. Showcase professional reflective practice. Develop an active blogging culture.
   3. Facilitate personalised learning through the development of authentic tasks. Engage co-teaching and planning, tech integration etc.
3. Work with teachers and admin to develop criteria and frameworks that foster continual and sustainable optimization and refinement of our student learning systems, resources, and tools. 

And from these team goals, I have identified my own professional goals for the year.  I have focused on Goal #2.  Here are my three goals that will help support our team.

2. I will model and support a culture of openness and sharing through collaborative practices, public reflection and celebration.

a. I have been using #learnISB on Twitter to share out projects as I work on them with teachers primarily the past year.  This year, I’d like to try to share out more “works in progress” and try to make my twitter communication more interactive rather than just celebratory.  I don’t seek feedback and interaction as much as I used to and often just “like” or retweet rather than extend, so this is an area that I will work on this year.  My plan:

• I will try to tweet something once a week that is more than just celebrating student work.
• I will also seek other twitter accounts and educators’ social media as inspiration/models to help me think about how I want to share my passion about design thinking and STEAM in Education.

b. I will blog more to continue to make connections with other educators, be a model for other educators and to deepen my own reflection, as I feel it is definitely enhanced by the act of writing it down, editing, revising and getting feedback.

I love to blog.  In my blogging hayday, I was managing, writing, sharing through three blogs at the same time and I loved it.  However, that has dropped off the past few years. Being new at ISB last year, I found it hard to find the time to blog. This year, I am going to make more of an effort.  I think having other bloggers on the EdTeach team and giving myself a specific blog goal (to post at least one reflective blog a month) will help me stay on track.  The great part about all this, is the vulnerability of it and I know my own thoughts and practice will grow from sharing my own teaching and learning.

c. I will facilitate personalised learning.

This is HUGE, but something I feel really passionate about and am very excited about in my role as a Design Technology Facilitator.  I want our students at ISB to go beyond scoring well on their IB Exams and walking away with an exceptional GPA as many of them do.  I want to better prepare them for being a creator and creative problem-solver no matter what area they plan to study or be a professional in.

Here are my measurable indicators of success:

• Integrate & Co-Teach Design Process in authentic ways
  • I started this last year, but I want to work in more areas and break out of the Science/Engineering classes more this year
  • I also want to make more of an impact in high school
• Build the Passion Project course to be more visible and increase enrollment/excitement around this course
• Increase student opportunities to personalize their learning with high quality enrichments and ASAs that develop skills and use design thinking as a process.
  • ES – MS – HS After School Opportunities
  • MS Enrichments
  • HS ELO (Experiential Learning Opportunities)
  • More in-school studio-like experiences like OneDay or something like NuVu

Year 1: Design Technology Facilitator

I have to say, I landed a dream job this year.  I don’t think this position exists in many places around the world.  It is the perfect balance of teaching, curriculum building, leading, presenting, program development and designing collaborative spaces.

That being said, I have learned so much this year.  It is exhausting and amazing to move to a new country and school.  I love seeing how different schools and systems work differently.  Everything from the schedule to homeroom structures to communications to curriculum to human dynamics is different.  It is always sometimes better and sometimes more challenging than other work places.  When you put yourself into this newbie position, you are vulnerable, you have to depend on others and you learn, learn, learn and do your best.

I didn’t have goals this year besides surviving and develop a Design program at ISB.  I had an action plan to work with which definitely helped out.  More importantly, I was very lucky this year to have a large amount of amazing people around me – both professionally and personally – new colleagues, old colleagues; new and old friends.  And that is what made this year amazing.  Not perfect.  But a great first year, for sure.

Arduino Teacher Training – Thanks to Jonathan @ Creatica

First, I’ll start with things that I am proud of accomplishing this year:

1. Creating a Design and Engineering Team to develop a K-12 Design Process for our school that connects design thinking with NGSS Engineering and can be used throughout our school – in classrooms, enrichments, After School Activities and even in our own practices of creative problem solving.  We still have some work to do as our program grows, but I feel like we collaboratively created a process that we can all work with.  I have developed standards and rubrics based on this process and will continue to make more support materials for teachers to use.

2. Being very active in classrooms  – this was not so much my doing than the openness of the teachers I work with.  I was frequently invited to co-teach, facilitate and work with many teachers this year.  It was great to get to know our students, community and teachers so well in the first year.

3. Designing collaborative spaces for design thinking and engineering to take place.  It was amazing to have an idea and over Winter Break a new design lab was born for MS and HS students.  It is a great space (although basic) for students to tinker, learn, prototype, create and learn.  To add on to this experience, there will be another space for ES students and teachers to use next year as we develop the Design & Engineering Program through the whole curriculum.

4. Collaborating on Personalized Learning Experiences

Before I arrived, ISB had a lot of great opportunities for students to follow their passions, interests and curiosities to choose their learning.  Middle School students sign up for enrichments – anything from band to yoga to robotics to textiles to game design to Genius Hour and everything in between.  I was able to jump in and help coach and co-teach Genius Hour which was a fabulous experience.  I worked with amazing teachers and we worked together to create a similar design in which students followed the design process to identify problem or opportunity and create a solution.  I help facilitate other enrichments, and I learned a lot working with other teachers.  I was able to “take over” One Day, which is a day that all MS students to design their learning.  It was difficult to take it over when I had only experienced it through Twitter the year before.  Due to a teacher leaving, I’m excited to be facilitating for the Passionate Project Class in HS, which will allow many middle school students opportunities to design their own learning experiences as they move through high school.

One Day Construction

One Day Student Collaboration

Genius Hour Feedback Session

And now on to things I feel like I missed the mark on and need to work on more next year:

1. Working with high school – Middle school is definitely “my space”.  This MS being full of exceptional teachers who welcomed me in all the time, I didn’t always leave a lot of time for HS.  I need to work harder to get into the HS.  Students are enjoying the experiences they have in middle school and I don’t want their design thinking skills and creativity to take a back seat as they enter high school.
2. Evaluating what I do and how it connects to what my role at this school is.  This year, I rarely said no.  I wanted to learn more about the curriculum and my colleagues because in my role, relationships are everything.  Some work I took on, was beyond my job description, as it is with most teachers.  However, next year, as I work with a new colleague coming in and have a better sense of the school, I need to articulate my role better and stay focused on what I can do well and impact student learning the most.  I know this is something I will always struggle with and I feel like I want to do more and really be a part of a community, so I need to maybe even simplify this goal and think that if I take something on, I need to take something else off the plate.  This is a big school with a lot going on, so there is always something to do.

Goals Reflection 2015-2016

This year my Tankyuu (personal teacher inquiry) goal research question was:

How can I foster creativity at Canadian Academy?

It’s a big question.

And maybe a little too unfocused.

I definitely feel like I have made some forward strides with fostering creativity at Canadian Academy, but because my question was so broad, I think I was a little all over the place, rather than focusing on one area of our community.

My Action Plan was to:

• Increase creativity in my classroom
• Improve Creativity for the ICT PD
• Offer Creativity Workshops for the Community
• Facilitate a Hack-a-thon
• Host a Collaborative Art 7 Design Profesionnal evelopment Forum
• MakerSpace in the Library

I will reflect on all of these areas below:

1 . Increase creativity in my classroom

Did I increase creativity in my classroom?  This is hard to measure.  If I compare my projects this year compared to last year, I would say overall they are more creative, but I didn’t create a rubric to quantify this. The kids are different then the classes last year, even though most of my units are the same. I will say that the number one thing that helped improve creativity in student projects was really simple.  When I met with kids and conferenced with them and gave them formative feedback, especially in criterion B when they are deciding and justifying their designs, I asked them,

“How is this creative?”

That sparked interesting discussions and often led students to revise their ideas or go a little deeper with their thinking and create more interesting, creative, original designs.

2. Improve Creativity for the ICT PD

I proposed this to the tech department and our director of learning.  In February, we started to run Tech PD sessions on Mondays after school in the library alongside of the Tech Talks – Tech Help for our Community.

There were some great sessions:

Graphic Designing for Teacher led by our HS Art teacher, Laura Dortmans

Digital Attribution was co-led by Team Lemley, as we discussed the difference in digital attribution and expectations we have as teachers which also sparked more questions to bring to the whole secondary faculty

Google Classroom was led by Kieran Burgess our Theater teacher.

There were more sessions.  I think it was great to see teachers teaching teachers.

However, I feel like these sessions were not well attended.  Many of the same teachers/staff attended while a lot of these sessions would have been appropriate for the whole faculty.

3. Offer Creativity Workshops for the Community

Choreograph Your Own Dance Creativity Session

Liz Durkin and I organized creativity workshops for students on December 11th and February 10th. Both sessions were really successful. Each day, there were over ten sessions that middle school and high school students could sign up for a session they were interested in.

Teachers created time and space and offered interesting creative topics through a wide range of disciplines. In my readings this year, one of the most important factors in fostering creativity is time and space to create.  I also feel after my own experiences in the Design classroom and also supported by The Secret to Creativity Ted Talk by Mike Dillon, that by offering specific tasks that someone can be creative with the outcome or solution is much better than a completely open-ended project.

Build a Free Standing Tower

Pop Up Cards

4. Facilitate a Hack-a-thon

After attending John Burns’ Hack Your School session at Learning 2.0 in the Fall and hearing about all the great things they do at SIS (#sisrocks).  Laura and I were inspired to bring this to our school.  We made a little proposal for Leadership.  I created a video asking people what they would “hack” if given the opportunity, but it fell flat.  It was a busy year for me with my two jobs, recruiting and after speaking to the Headmaster about making time for it… it didn’t happen.  If I hadn’t had so many things going on, I would have pushed back more.  So this action was a fail.  But, one I would like to facilitate some place, some time, because I think it’s a great concept for grassroots change at a school that supports learning and gives anyone at school a voice and platform to be heard.

5. Host a Collaborative Art 7 Design Professional Development Forum

Creative Connections was my pride and joy this year. Laura (Head of Arts) and I really wanted to merge our departments this year.  Unfortunately, we weren’t able to do that well.  But in one of our (many) discussions about art and design being together we started to talk about PD.  We had both been to a TON of pedagogy based PD and IB training, but very little hands-on workshops in art and design.  At Learning 2.0 this year, I went to an Build-Your-Own Arduino Bot session and I got to sit and create with other teachers and it was fantastic.  Laura and I successfully planned and pulled off Creative Connections.  It was exactly what we wanted it to be.  I plan to reflect on Creative Connections in another blog post, hopefully coming soon.

6. MakerSpace in the Library

 

The MakerSpace at CA Library didn’t come to fruition.  I had two really good conversations with the librarians about this.  MakerSpaces in libraries are all over the place.  There are many resources on what people do and why they are so awesome.  The first conversation I was super gung-ho about getting things in the library.  I’m all for piloting and starting off small.  We discussed changing the themes each month for materials.

Then I read more and thought about it more and considered the logistics.  I can barely keep up with the materials in my own two classroom/labs and I don’t want to be making a mess in someone else’s space.

Without direction, will the kids create good quality things?

Our library doesn’t have spaces that one can get really messy and create or have a sound proof recording studio, which I think would be great, so I decided to abandon this idea for this year.

Again, something I’d like to look into again somewhere, someday, but this just wasn’t the year.

So, I now go back to my original inquiry question for my goal for the year: How can I foster creativity at Canadian Academy?

I think I thought of some pretty good ideas to bring more creativity to the classroom, professional development and to activities at CA this year.  Again, I was a little all over the place with many things going at once.  I’d like to do a few things well rather than do a lot of things just okay.  In the future, I would like to work with a team of teachers/staff (and/or the Arts & Design Department) to develop a better plan to work on this at a school. There is a lot of good creativity at CA in pockets, but it is something that can continue to improve.

I know for my own personal creativity, I just need more time.  I hope in all the actions I worked on this year that I provided a time and place for people to learn, play, solve problems and collaborate.  As a design teacher, I need to find more time in my own life to be more creative, to be a better example for my own students and children.

So next year, I’ll be off to a new school with new goals.  I’m not sure how annual goals will be developed at my new school, but I do hope that I can help develop my own goals out of my own interests and passions and I continue to foster my own creativity.

Today I Was My Own Resource Teacher

I am currently teaching a unit on Basic Coding to my grade 7 Design students.  The first few weeks of the unit are skills-based classes.  Each day, I introduce a few skills to the class and then the students play and create a basic animation or game on Scratch demonstrating their newly acquired skills.  I give them formative feedback on what they have created.

Over the years, I have gotten much better at differentiation and always pre-test in one form or another at the beginning of each unit.  I have identified skills that the whole class needs and I definitely wanted to make sure we had a common language for the concepts and skills of this unit.

I found a video tutorial from Clint’s MYP Design blog which was a good tutorial teaching the viewer how to double jump with the Sprite in Scratch.  It had some general background information about Scratch and I really liked the part when he shows how to make the Sprite move naturally.

But, how did I want to share this with my students?

Should I just mimic the skills and do it myself on the screen?  This would work.

Have the students watch it on their own time?  This would work, too.

However, I ended up having them watch it all in the class via the projector.

I felt a bit weird about this.  It is a twenty minute tutorial.  It’s not just a quick video I’m showing at the beginning of class, this is a substantial part of my class.  They are paying tuition for me to teach.  Was this a lazy way out?  Did this discredit my expertise?  These were all things going on in my mind.

It ended up being one of the best things I have done in a while.

I became my own resource teacher.

I was able to watch the students as they worked through the tutorial.  I saw students who struggled with coding.  I saw students who struggled with following the instructions and going from the big screen to their screen.  I also saw students flourishing.  I saw students helping each other.  I wasn’t caught up in delivering the content and I was able to really see the kids and where they were.

When students left the class, I gave them an exit card asking them how they felt learning this way, what they learned in the class and what they struggled with, needed more practice on, or wanted to now learn.  Many of them liked this approach.  Some of them wanted to watch the tutorial at their own pace and pause it on their computer.

I haven’t had a resource teacher since I was a Language Arts teacher many years ago. I forgot the power in actually helping while the students were receiving instruction.  I was able to really “see” my students – from the back of the room, watching how they synthesized the tutorial they were watching.

I was lucky to find a great tutorial, so I didn’t have to spend the time creating one.  Luckily there are hundreds of Scratch tutorials.  I did spend time in watching quite a few the past few weeks to make sure they are good quality, have a low “cheese” factor and explained what I wanted it to.

Why don’t you try it.  Go ahead, be your own resource teacher.  Share how it goes!

#beyondblogging Take Aways

Two weekends ago, I attended #beyondblogging with a group of teachers from CA.  The great thing about this group of CA teachers and staff, is that I don’t always collaborate with them regularly on instructional technology and it was great to chat with them about what’s going on at our school seen through different perspectives.

Jabiz and Rebekah were confident leaders, guiding us through activities and discussions for which they did not have the answers, but allowed us to make our own conclusions and actions for our own next steps.  I feel that that is something very important as a teacher to remember.  I felt more of a learner because I felt like my thoughts not only contributed to other “students” but to everyone in the room.  These leads me to the first of my two big take-aways…

1. The Leaders. The Presentation. The Workshop.

I feel like I am a good teacher… to middle school students.  Where I know I can improve on, is my presentations and sharing with adults.  It’s a much harder gig to stand in front of the faculty or adults you’ve never met than standing in front of my middle school Design Teachers.  I think that being a good presenter to adults, especially teachers, is a really important skill to hone.  Jabiz and Rebekah did this very well.  They were down to earth, well-read, experienced and confident. They prepared a great two days of learning and collaborating.  I find it a fine balance of keeping the workshops active: talking, sharing and thinking but not forcing adults to do kind-of ridiculous hands-on jigsaw activities that waste a lot of paper, that I really wouldn’t use in my whole class anyways.  I also feel that the workshop was differentiated for beginning bloggers to those of us that have been doing it for years for ourselves and our students.  It’s hard to differentiate a workshop or just plan it so everyone can get a lot out of it when you don’t know your participants because they are teachers coming from all over Asia for a weekend workshop.

2. Students Sharing in their Own Way… Even Unedited (gasp!)

Throughout the workshop, we were asked to share our thinking.  With the exception of a few times, we could share how we wanted to. I shared my learning through a Vine, Instagram photos, blogging, Tweeting, and sketching on chart paper.  Other teachers shared in different ways, but we all contributed in our own way and showed our learning.  In my MYP Design classes, students can turn in products using a variety of media, because that is the nature of the course.  However, I don’t differentiate the reflection piece (design folder) too much.  There are some parts that don’t really lend themselves to other formats – like their sketches, but I could encourage them to post however they want, as long as they meet the criteria and I can find their work fairly easily. I could also encourage students to use the social media they use regularly to share their learning and passions.

Taking Action

So, I jumped right into it.  The Monday after the workshop was the second week of my MYP Food Design 9 course, and it was the perfect time to present how I want students to share their “learning journey with food” throughout the course of the semester.  I want students to share what they have created in and out of class and any other food products that inspire them to create.  I offered some suggestions to the class. As I’m typing this, I’m thinking I should have had more of a discussion with the students as to what they want to use…  (maybe we can talk next week, it’s still early in the semester to change).

But, already, I’ve gotten some great results.

I have students sharing photos on Instagram.

They’ve created Picasa albums.

They’ve created new categories on their blogs.

Now, the organization for me to find them all is not the best workflow in the world – it’s a Google Doc with the link to where they are posting work.  For some kids they are just hashtagging their Instagram pictures with #cadesign9. This makes it a bit more than a one-click solution.  BUT, it’s easy for them, and I think I’d rather it be easy on them than on me.  Also some of their pictures have been retweeted and shared, which is great.  I want them proud of their work.  I don’t want them creating for me, for a grade.  I want to see what they are passionate about.  I want to see what they want to create and that they are thinking about food.

Now, this is much easier with my ninth graders, because they all have iPhones and are of the age where they can open up social media accounts.  I need to figure out how to bring this down to my sixth grade.  I can easily have them record their reflections with Photobooth and post their work.  But is there more?  What else can I do?

I also want to use specific language in my class for “un-edited work” and “finished, polish work”.  A finished video takes a lot of time and can sometimes distract from the purpose of the task, but I think video is a great tool for documenting a variety of work and reflections.  Video, with both the audio and visual piece can really show who the student is at that snapshot in their life, better than a bunch of text on a screen can.

So, I’ve gone off on a tangent a bit here, but as you can see, I’ve taken a lot away from the #beyondblogging workshop.  I still need to think about our school blogs and their purpose and what students may be using in 5, 10, 15 years to share their growth, learning, service and passions.  As always, I have 99 more ideas running through my head and got a few other great take-aways from the weekend, but I’ll save them for another day.

Teacher Goal: Holiday Sushi Class

My teacher learning goal this year is to improve my technical skill levels – both with food technology and digital technology.  Over the past five years, I feel like I’ve had a lot of PD and growth with my teaching strategies and I have developed a good curriculum for our design department.  However, teaching a very skill-based course,  I need to acquire new skills, especially since I haven’t worked professionally as a designer.

One strategy was to attend cooking classes to:

1. Learn new skills and cooking techniques

2. See how other people teach cooking

3. Evaluate the kitchen space and how materials/ingredients are managed

I not only gained confidence in creating sushi, I learned about Japanese ingredients I had never purchased or worked with before. I saw how much the teacher prepped for the class. (It was a lot.) But, I came to the conclusion that when creating a highly technical product, there may be more prep time needed, especially for a limited time frame (like my 60 minute class).  Our chef-teacher and her team had measured out the quantity of all the ingredients, while still leaving a lot of the prep to the participants, like mixing, cutting and manipulating the food.

One other huge benefit to the class, was to take the class in Japanese.  After that experience, it made me think that EVERY teacher, definitely every International School teacher should take a class in a language that they have limited proficiency in.  It was good to be a student in that environment and experience what many of our new students experience.  I was able to easily follow along, because the teacher did such a great job of demonstrating (with the assistance of the remote control camera-screen) and she was friendly and worked one-on-one with students who needed help. I think it is really interesting that you can identify good teaching without understanding language.  I’d love to try this again in a school setting to see if I can learn or see learning in a classroom without mastery of the language of the classroom.

In the end, this was a really rich (and FUN!) professional development experience.  I now give myself at least an hour to prep the kitchen for classes (which is time consuming) but worth it.  I get to spend more time giving formative feedback to my students and I can really have my students focus on the skills I want them to, rather than try to rush around and in the end make a big mess in the kitchen, because there wasn’t enough time to do everything.  I hope to do more cooking demonstration classes in the future to get more ideas to use in my classroom and continue to improve my own skills, in a variety of cuisines.

Moving and Shaking

A few weeks ago, an article was circulating the edu- blogosphere about a Learning Coach shadowing a student in preparation for her new job.  After reading this and doing a little self reflection, I started to think more about sitting as a student in my class. And decided to take a little action:

1. I bought 2 yoga balls as a trial for student seating.

2. I decided to make sure that EVERY class incorporates movement.

3. I decided not to gripe when I had to clarify the instructions to individual students, but just repeat it to the students, no matter how frustrated I may have felt.

4. As a tech coordinator, I want to do this same activity with the lens of looking at tech use of our students throughout a day or two.  (THIS ACTION WILL NOT OCCUR AT THIS TIME – Hopefully in January.)

Here is what happened:

THE MIGHTY YOGA BALLS (aka Bob and Bob)

After the “Bob Introduction and Expectations”, it has gone swimmingly with the yoga balls.  Most of the kids want to use them and I’ve really seen great improvements with some students who struggle with staying focused and/or sitting still too long.

MOVEMENT

This point resonated with me.  I think my class is engaging and there is a lot of movement when we are creating, but on other days, while I think the kids are stimulated and there is a lot of student let inquiry and activity, they are sometimes very sedentary.  So, I have decided half way through the class that the kids would get up and do something physical/fun and hopefully tied to our learning.   Last week,  I made up an activity called “Left or Right” where students had to move to the side of the room of the graphic design there were more drawn to (that was shown on the projection on the board).  They then had to justify their selections with turn and talk and full class discussions.  This week, the movement wasn’t connected so much to our learning, but did a great job of getting them off their computers, moving, interacting and having fun.  I did the 5-4-3-2-1 activity from Three Minute Brain Breaks and plan to use more of their activities.

Here’s a clip from the activity:

From my observations, they seemed like they were better able to focus and got a lot accomplished as they were inquiring and analyzing graphic designs for their current design cycle project.

REPEATING INSTRUCTIONS

Not listening is a huge pet peeve of mine (ask my own children)… And I too, like the teacher in the article, would get frustrated when I would have to repeat something I just said in the class.  While I make a conscientious effort not to use sarcasm, I’m sure my facial expression and/or my asking someone else in the class to repeat “What I just said” was equally as not nice.  So, I’ve just taken a breath and repeated the instructions to the few students that need to hear it again for whatever reason.  That’s why I’m in class – to help.  If I see kids not listen to the instructions well, then I take a more proactive approach and use more proximity control when I see them doing something else or whispering to a friend.

All in all, these three very little things have made a huge difference in my classroom the past few weeks.  I think one of the most important things about being a teacher is connecting with your students and making the content fun and engaging.  I need to make the knowledge and skills connect with them however I can.  That is knowing my kids and also making the content interactive and engaging for every kid, for every unit.  And, honestly, I think I get better at this every year, but I can always improve.