Lessons Learned

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Tag: risk taking

How Are We Preparing Pre-Service Teachers to be Shifted Educators?

Mark Hofer, Steve Whitaker, and Michael Kelly will join us on tonight’s SOS Podcast, where we will discuss this teacher preparation question. It should be an excellent discussion as all three taught pre-service teachers at the University of Virginia. Mark now teaches at the College of William and Mary.

To answer this question, what do we do with our colleagues in our schools to help them shift their teaching practices to more Classroom 2.0 practices? We have covered many topics in the podcast that support shifting individuals and schools, but two, in particular, jump out at me when working with new teachers.

Risk Taking– I wrote about this in my previous post. We ended up needing to postpone that podcast discussion with John Mikton. It is now scheduled for April 30th. When working with university students, one can start with their communication and learning practices. In most cases, this will involve tapping into their everyday life experience of using cell phones, social networking tools, information literacy, etc., while guiding them to see that they already have learning networks.

Professional Learning Networks– Much to being a shifted teacher is about being a lifelong learner connected to one’s physical and digital learning networks. We again draw on the pre-service teachers’ natural propensity to use technology to help them set up their RSS reader and connect to blogs, wikis, etc., that support shifted practices and new learning while offering examples of risk-taking activities by educators from around the world.

How Can We Help Teachers Take More Risks in their Teaching?

John Mikton will join Jeff and me to talk about this question on the Shifting Our Schools podcast taking place tonight. To answer this question, the starting point is to work with teachers individually to ask them what needs to happen to help them try new ideas in their teaching and learning. Large workshops or sending folks to conferences are not the starting point to help build a culture of risk-taking. Large-scale PD efforts can provide models of shifted practices and get folks excited to try new things, but it still comes back to each teacher in their classroom trying new ideas in their teaching. It is helpful to talk to teachers a few weeks after returning from a conference to see how things are going in trying some of the practices they saw at the conference. They often need to act on their excitement of learning new approaches due to barriers in their schools.

We know the list of barriers often affecting teachers in many ways, not just in not taking risks (i.e., not enough time, too much to cover in the curriculum, assigned tasks that don’t support student learning, parent expectations, etc.). Experience tells me that by talking with individual teachers, finding practices they are confident in using in their classrooms, and then asking what they see as engaging in other classrooms or their professional reading, we, as learning specialists/coaches (instructional technologists, librarians, learning support, GATE facilitators, curriculum coordinators, etc.) can then help them take small first steps to try new things starting within their area of comfort.

One theme that runs through many of our podcasts about shifting practices and schools is leadership. While learning specialists can make a huge difference in supporting teachers and learning in the classroom, our administrators can help push the shift by modeling risk-taking by setting a tone for the school that trying new ideas is expected. By communicating to the larger community through various communication avenues (e.g., blogs, email, Twitter, various presentation tools in parent meetings, etc.), the administrator takes risks with new technology while inviting parents to understand and expect risk-taking as part of the school culture. Celebration of teachers and students taking risks should be central to the shift in culture. While much of the focus will be on successful risk-taking, we must highlight when the results didn’t quite work out and learning took place. 🙂

Let’s work with individuals while having the community assess the nature of our current school culture. In that case, we can gather the information needed to create an action plan to build a climate that supports risk-taking. While this process might take some time, if we start immediately by having our learning specialists/coaches work with teachers to share their opinions about barriers and needed actions for support while having our administrators lead by example, we can start helping educators take more risks in their teaching.

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