Lessons Learned

I recently posted How Progressive is Your School? to highlight our school’s effort to measure just how progressive we are. The discussion centered upon the article by Alfie Cohen and the 8 values (Intrinsic Motivation, Social Justice, Collaboration, Whole Child, Community, Deep Understanding, Active Learning & Taking Kids Seriously) that encompass being more progressive in how we “do” school. I am now doing a series of posts about our learning community’s ideas about each value. We are now discussing one value per month and looking at ways to follow through in making the value even more a part of our culture at HIS.

• “How well do I understand my students desires/beliefs in terms of social justice and how much am I imposing my own values onto them?”
• Can we set up a student organization that deals with discipline issues?
• Peer Leaders as proactive way to prevent issues
• Current events across the curriculum showing complexities and diversity
• Digital citizenship
• Global citizenship
• Self-Family-Community-World
• Expand definition of community
• How to put students in situations that involve social justice? How to engage their passions?
• Start with broad theme, go local and connect to lived experience

What a mouthful for a post title.

I have spent my years as an instructional technologist working through the curriculum development and review process to help shift my schools towards becoming what we call School 2.0. We were able to construct a workable system at my last school that really made a difference in how and what we taught in our classrooms.

We are now developing a curriculum development system at my current school that will involve working with our school culture and unique needs. Hsinchu International School is very different than the very large school I worked at before. We will be using a series of questions around specific categories to help us through this creation process. The questions come from a workshop I developed to help guide school communities to either refine their current curriculum review system or to start a new one. I will be sharing these categories and questions in a series of posts.

This is the first one and it covers the big picture when school wide leaders come together to start the conversation.

1) What would be an effective way to manage school-wide subject area meetings to review the standards/benchmarks for scope/sequencing (i.e., facilitation, time of year, one or several meetings by division, etc.)?

2) How do discussions take place about the big picture and developing ownership of the curriculum?

3) Who overseas this process of creating this process?

4) Who will be the leaders in each division to support this effort and gain support for it?

5) Who would be involved in curriculum development in each division? What would be their roles? Is there a place for students and/or parents at some point in the curriculum review process?

6) How would you ensure follow through on action items (to do’s) as you create your curriculum development system?

7) What big picture topics (i.e., each school year’s goals, student learning results, differentiation, etc.) would you want to integrate into your curriculum other than alignment of standards and benchmarks?

What are your priorities in either refining your current curriculum review system (or in starting one from scratch)? In other words, how much can you take on and still be effective in this process?

9) What ultimately do you want your curriculum to do?

10) How will you provide your participants the time and coaching to learn the skills needed to develop curriculum?

11) How will you get “buy in” from your participants to be curriculum designers?

12) How will you get buy in from all of your educators to actively use the curriculum?

13) How do you share the curriculum? To whom?

14) What other questions (and answers) come to mind?

Our principal, Brent Loken, began a series of community discussions in our morning gathering today. As our Five Learning Outcomes drive what we do at HIS, it is important that we continually find ways to imbed them into our school culture.

Brent used the phrase “What does being a community contributor look like in the cafeteria, the basketball court, the hallways…?” He then went on to lead a brainstorm of students painting the picture of being a community contributor.

Brent will be leading out these discussions in the coming weeks as we look at all our learning outcomes. I am wondering what are other techniques school leaders are using to make their missions and student learning outcomes a regular, every day part of their students’ lives.

I recently posted How Progressive is Your School? to highlight our school’s effort to measure just how progressive we are. The discussion centered upon the article by Alfie Cohen and the 8 values (Intrinsic Motivation, Social Justice, Collaboration, Whole Child, Community, Deep Understanding, Active Learning & Taking Kids Seriously) that encompass being more progressive in how we “do” school. I am now doing a series of posts about our learning community’s ideas about each value. We are now discussing one value per month and looking at ways to follow through in making the value even more a part of our culture at HIS.

• How do you build IM when students are not passionate about the subject?
• What does it really feel like to KNOW something?
• How do we build connections to expand lateral thinking?
• How do we enrich students’ lives to give them more interests to get excited about? (Field trips real & virtual, telecollaboration, reading content in classes, current events, blogging)
• Where are most of our students on the “dependent” to “independent” learning continuum?
• How to move them along the continuum?
• How many students are motivated by learning knowledge as opposed to ideas/skills?
• How to develop risk taking?
• Is project-based instruction the only (main) way to develop IM?
• How to develop the skills to be learners today and in future?
• How do 1:1 computers help or hinder IM?

Image Source: Adopted from Johneric Advento’s revised version of Margaret Carpenter’s original diagram

Our Shifting Our Schools podcast as well as Jeff’s and my blogs along with countless other podcasts and blogs share ways to help educators make the shift from traditional style, teacher-directed classrooms to what we call the Learning or School 2.0 model. This “shift” with all its edublogger advocates is all about the change process which we know is quite difficult to manage and is not happening very quickly.

While I enjoy discussing the big picture and the big ideas, my practice as an instructional technologist is on the practical, in the classroom instruction and assessment strategies that help transform classrooms into 21st century learning communities.

My belief for bringing about this transformation is that schools must develop a curriculum and collaborative systematic model that becomes the mechanism for shifting our classrooms and our schools to the School 2.0 model. Sadly curriculum development carries an uncomfortable connotation for many educators. The reality is that the curriculum should be the driving force that guides so much of what we do to affect the learning for our students. If handled well, curriculum development as a part of an engaged and thriving learning community, can be an exciting process that shifts and transforms our schools. Obvious information but sadly we often put little thought into how we develop or follow through with our curriculum.

We often spoke about this on our SOS podcast with one show centered on the work of the International School Bangkok’s team of technology resource coordinators and literacy specialist. The ISB team constructed a curriculum development model and recently Kim Cofino created a collaboration flow chart that together nicely presents a model for other schools to review and possibly adopt and individualize to meet their needs.

Back to the practical… Kim will be presenting at the Learning 2.008 conference next week about the importance of curriculum and collaboration in bringing about the shift in our schools. After watching Kim’s slide show for her presentation, I remembered a workshop that I started to put together for another conference. It dealt with how a school learning community begins the process of designing their own curriculum and collaboration system. As I am not able to attend the Learning 2.008 conference, it makes sense to get the components for my workshop out there as a practical way to help support Kim’s and others’ efforts. Each school is different and whether one looks at the ISB model or the one we created at HKIS, the process for developing the model needs to start by engaging all the stakeholders in the discussion.

My next several posts will share the questions that teachers and administrators can use to start their discussion as they work to develop their own systematic way to review curriculum that integrates the instructional strategies, content, assessments and 21st century learning skills that will shift their schools to the Learning 2.0 model.

I recently posted How Progressive is Your School? to highlight our school’s effort to measure just how progressive we are. The discussion centered upon the article by Alfie Cohen and the 8 values (Intrinsic Motivation, Social Justice, Collaboration, Whole Child, Community, Deep Understanding, Active Learning & Taking Kids Seriously) that encompass being more progressive in how we “do” school. We took time to list our questions and action ideas for each of these values. Our next step is to spend time each month to focus on one value at a time.

My plan is to post our staff’s PD work on each of the values in a series of posts. As we drill down on each value, I will further post our community’s discussion and plans to measure our efforts.

To start the posts off, I will list our responses to the value of Collaboration and what comes to mind for our HIS educators.

• One room school house
• Where are we in our interdisciplinary efforts?
• Learning how to collaborate, learning to work and play together
• How do we build a truly democratic school?
• What role does the SRC play in our community decision-making?
• How effective is group work in our classrooms? Which kinds of group projects more effective?
• Which Web 2.0 tools meet the specific and different collaboration needs?
• While we have the structure and culture for collaboration, how well are we doing?, how can we measure our efforts?
• How to expand the collaboration to our immediate and world community?
• Role of administration in all aspects of collaboration?
• Our culture supports mixing of seniors with younger students
• What structures do we have and need to support collaboration in our community?

After two weeks of community and professional development, we opened the doors to have our students join us. With our first senior class sharing their wisdom at morning gathering, we as educators could not have been happier to have our full learning community once again together at Hsinchu International School (HIS).

The faculty met at the end of the day to share their impressions and feelings about the day. Panda Smith, a new science educator to HIS, brought a smile to all our faces as she told the story of a new ESL student interacting with the technology rich culture of our school.

The student asked Panda “Where is the banana? What do I need to do to get the banana?” Panda looked at the very earnest student who was obviously troubled about something she was missing in her first day at HIS. Panda made the connection and was able to communicate to the student that while we have no banana, we do have “the Moodle”.

You have to love that language barriers cannot stop students from accessing the technology.