#OneWordOnt

This school year has certainly been the most exciting and most challenging of my educational career thus far. I was given the honour of becoming a new principal in a large elementary school in our board. The transition to the new role has been a challenging one. We started the school year short two classroom teachers, and my husband and I, along with some very caring helpers including my nephew, some caring staff members, and some student volunteers, rushed to prepare the rooms to receive children. 

We were also short a secretary, a librarian, and two custodians. Not having a secretary was especially challenging given that I was new in the school, didn't know the staff or families, or where anything was filed, stored, or kept. Let's just say I learned quickly and painfully through trial and error, guess and check!

When I saw the tweets for #OneWordOnt, I thought, this year it is a no-brainer, my OneWord is "Listen". As I get to know new staff, students and parents, listening has become the single most valuable skill I've needed to draw upon. 

It is easy to jump to conclusions, to judge behaviour, to make snap decisions, to form quick impressions when we don't take the time to listen. But listening doesn't just happen. It is not always easy to do. It is a skill, and like any other skill, it needs to be learned, developed and honed. When there is a long list of things waiting to be done, and a crisis occurs - whether it be a parent who is upset, a fight on the playground, a child who has been bullied, or a staff member with an ill family member - it is tempting to quickly "solve" the problem, to say, "do A, B and C" without first taking the time to listen. But being new to the school community, it is so critical to take the time to listen, to get to know the people involved in the issue, to hear every side of the situation, and to learn the context. 

Listening means recognizing that behaviour is a form of communication. There are so many great quotes about listening, this is one of my favourites: 

 Listening is an art that requires attention over talent, spirit over ego, others over self. ~ Dean Jackson

Listening often means letting my ego go, and realizing that I might not have all of the answers, or know the best way of doing things. Listening means learning; I am not learning if I do all of the talking. Listening requires humility. Listening requires an open mind and heart, a readiness to hear the other person's perspective, it requires caring about what the other person is experiencing. Listening means hearing what the other person is saying, and not saying, without planning a response. Listening means caring more about understanding than about being understood.

This year is a year of building relationships. In order to do that, I plan to LISTEN.

Teacher Agency - Who Owns the Professional Learning?

This morning it feels as though my brain is going to explode. Actually, it feels like that most days lately.

In September I took a secondment with the Student Achievement Division on the Capacity Building Team at the Ministry of Education. In the past six months I've had the opportunity to learn from so many deep thinkers in education. I've been participating in wonderful reflections, discussions, and heated debates on teaching and learning and most of the time, my head is spinning and moving in so many directions that is difficult to tease all of that learning apart into specific threads.

But one of the threads that I keep coming back to is the notion of "agency". In January, they posed a question on the OSSEMOOC blog that I follow: "What is your #oneword for 2015?" Without hesitation, my immediate thought was "agency".

I first came across that word about a year ago, and I brought it up at one of our recent planning meetings at work. This word alone has inspired great on-going discussion and led to shifts in our current thinking on learning.

Agency ... is an individual’s sense of what they can do and what they think they can do. Duggins, Shaun D., "The Development of Sense of Agency." Thesis, Georgia State University, 2011. http://scholarworks.gsu.edu/psych_theses/88

Agency is the power of the individual to choose what happens next. (Lindgren, R., & McDaniel, R. (2012). Transforming Online Learning through Narrative and Student Agency. Educational, Technology & Society, 15 (4), 344–355.)

I first became intrigued by the notion of student agency when I saw these images on Twitter.

Images courtesy of flickr user Bill Ferriter

These images can be found on Bill Ferriter's blog The Tempered Radical where he distinguishes between the notions of engagement vs empowerment. I believe that "agency" is more than just being engaged in the learning; having a sense of agency is about being empowered to doggedly choose to pursue learning.

I've also been inspired by the work of Alan November and his book "Who Owns the Learning". Alan November explains that with the advent of educational technology we are living in the

"Age of the Empowered Learner". I have written a fair bit on how using blended learning in a grade six classroom really empowered my students and helped them to take ownership for their learning.

But in my current role I am not working directly with students. I support the learning of adults. To be specific, I support PROFESSIONAL LEARNING. I've been interested in professional learning for a long time. It is actually a rather elusive term for me. We tend to call any event where we pull educators away from their regular work to tell them something new "professional learning", but I often have my doubts that much "learning" is actually taking place. In fact, I wrote a blog post about the difference between professional learning communities and professional learning networks because I have sometimes been frustrated by the PLC's that I've been involved in (which you can find here). 

I believe we need to start considering the term "agency" more deeply when it comes to teacher learning. This question was posted recently on the OSSEMOOC blog:

"How does shift occur from a mindset where learning is provided to a culture where learning is sought?"

As I ponder the idea of teacher agency and reflect on our current professional learning practices I end up with so many more questions:

• Millions of dollars are spent each year on professional learning in the province of Ontario, how do we know what impact it has on changes in teacher practice and student learning? 
• How do we differentiate the learning of our teachers since we know that they all have different experiences, skills, strengths, interests, and most importantly - students with different needs?
• How do we provide system level and school level professional learning and yet still provide teachers with voice and choice in their learning? 
• How can we leverage the use of technology to empower our teachers to be innovative learners?

My friend Regan and I have had frequent conversations about professional learning. We often question our own beliefs about learning and teachers' motivation to learn. There is an expression in education that is "Go with the Goers". Some teachers are seen as "Goers" - they exhibit a learning stance, believe they can and should be constantly improving their practice, and seek out new learning on their own. I often wonder why it is we should go with the Goers if they are going to get there anyway? Isn't it the slow starters we should be focusing our attention on? 

This in turn leads to more questions:

• Can we help teachers develop an inquiry stance about their teaching practice if they currently don't have one? If so, how do we do that? 
• Can we impact teachers' motivation to learn? 
• Can we develop in teachers a sense of agency? If so, how do we do that? 
• How does our current professional learning practice either foster or inhibit a sense of agency in our teachers?

These questions are really important because research indicates that teacher efficacy directly impacts student learning, and teacher efficacy is tied closely to teacher agency. 

"Teachers who set high goals, who persist, who try another strategy when one approach is found wanting—in other words, teachers who have a high sense of efficacy and act on it—are more likely to have students who learn (Shaughnessy, 2004)" ~ as quoted in "Teacher Efficacy and Why Does It Matter".

I realized as I reflected on these questions that I had a fixed mindset about this topic. I believed that some people are more motivated to learn than others, some educators have a learning stance, and others don't. In fact, teacher agency is often defined as an innate quality.

Teacher agency is typically viewed as a quality within educators, a matter of personal capacity to act (Priestly et al., 2012) usually in response to stimuli within their pedagogical environment. It describes an educator who has both the ability and opportunity to act upon a set of circumstances that presents itself within that individual’s leadership, curricular or instructional roles. The educator described would then draw from acquired knowledge and experience to intercede appropriately and effectively. Agency is increasingly rare in the educational world of prescriptive improvement, and the term is too “often utilized as a slogan to support school-based reform” (Priestley, Biesta & Robinson, 2012, p. 3). Teacher Agency in America and Finland By Roger Wilson, GVSU Faculty

As I've been exposed more and more to the work of Carol Dweck, however, I realize that the definition above is very much a fixed mindset. Do we believe that all educators are capable, competent and curious? If so, then the old adage "Education is not the filling of a bucket, but the lighting of a fire" by Yeats is as true for educators as it is for students. So the question for educational leaders becomes not "What should professional learning look like?" so much as "How do we light a fire in our teachers?"

How, then, do we (in the words of Lucy West) create a multi-generational learning culture in which educators - including ourselves - and students become learners in the company of one another?

Kristen Swanson poses the following question on her blogpost #HackPD:

What if the only PD ever offered by a school was "How to Learn Something When You Want to Know Something?"

It is time to re-think professional learning, to look closely at its impact on students and teachers, and perhaps to redefine it. We need to be thinking about why teachers need to own their professional learning and what that will look like at both the school and system level. We need to start thinking about how we are going to develop agency in our teachers and think less about what content, skills and strategies we need to be teaching them.

Why Are You Blending?

Today I attended the On the Rise K-12: Enhancing Digital Learning Conference.  It was a great experience, and I met some really passionate people that I was truly inspired by.  One such person was Anthony Perrotta.  He led a session on Student Voices.

This year, some of our Secondary teachers were provided a new digital resource to support learning for an Applied-level course. The resource is really a digital text, with animations, applets, videos, bookmarking features, note-taking features, a calendar, quiz tools, etc.  Basically, it is essentially a Learning Management System, not just the e-text teachers were expecting to get.

The feedback on this resource has been pretty mixed.  While the teachers are seeing some merits to having this e-resource, they are also finding that perhaps we targeted the wrong students.  It has been suggested that students in an Academic course, who are perhaps more self-motivated might benefit more from this resource.  Overall, some of the teachers felt that the students in the Applied stream work better with a traditional text and traditional handouts.

I was surprised by this feedback. I believed that students who often struggle with dense text and who lack organizational skills would benefit from a blended learning environment.  But after today, I realized that not all blended learning environments are created equally.  Just because we provide teachers with digital tools does not mean that they will change their teaching practice.  The tools are only helpful if we choose to use them to teach differently.

A blended learning environment is not beneficial to all students all of the time.  Anthony Parrotta reminded me that it's not the Learning Management System or the technology or even the "blending" that makes school engaging and motivates students.  It's about using the technology and digital tools to permit our students to be the drivers of their own education.  When we provide teachers with new technology, we have an obligation to provide them with support that will help them consider how they can use those tools to teach differently.  There is no point in using a 21st century tool in a 20th century way.

For blended learning to positively impact our students, both teachers and students need to take on new roles in education.  The teacher needs to become a co-learner in the classroom.  Teachers and students need to be jointly responsible for the knowledge building that happens in the classroom.  This is a huge shift in paradigm for many of our teachers and our students; they need time and opportunities to discuss what this means and what it would look like in their classrooms.

Anthony said "Student voice is grounded in ownership".  I firmly believe, I in fact KNOW from experience, that ALL students can take ownership for their learning when explicitly taught how to do so and given the tools they need to be successful.  Digital technology can not only engage our students, it can empower them to be active participants in their learning rather than passive recipients of information.

Teachers need support to know how to teach this to their students.  It is not enough to teach our students content knowledge.  We have to teach them how to be learners.  The power of a Learning Management System is not in its ability to provide students with online content and its not in its ability to grade students or even for them to easily submit their assignments to a dropbox.  The power of a blended learning environment is in its ability to put students in the driver's seat, to empower them to become collaborators in their own learning, and to choose who they would like to connect with to share that learning and how they would like to share it.

How are you using a blended learning format to ignite a passion for learning in your students?

Empowering Students Through Blended Learning

Last year, I used the Ministry's Learning Management System to teach my Grade 6 class through a Blended Learning format. It was the most exciting and inspirational year of my teaching career to date. 

Next week, my friend and colleague, Penny, will be joining me to present our experiences in using the D2L Learning Management System with our Elementary students at the On The Rise K-12 Conference. Preparing for this presentation has fired me up once again with the excitement that I experienced last year.  

I think Education is one of the most exciting professions that exists.  My motto is: If I'm not having fun, then my kids are not having fun.  And if my kids are not having fun, they are not learning to their potential.  If they are not thoroughly engaged and inspired, if they are not "lost" in the learning, they are not learning deeply enough.  

When I began to use the D2L with my students, incredible things started to happen.  My students began to take ownership for their own learning!  Having a Science background, I approach every new experience as an experiment.  I have often commented on the fact that I see the classroom as a laboratory.  Using the D2L then, was just one great big experiment, and as is always the case in Science, in order to learn, we need to make observations and collect data to definitively determine the impact of the changes we make to the environment.  

I had hypothesized that using a Blended Learning format would positively impact student achievement as measured by report card marks and EQAO scores.  For the vast majority of my students (but not all), this was the outcome I achieved.  But what I hadn't anticipated, was the impact the tools in the D2L would have on my students' Learning Skills.  With the exception of one student, the kids in my class became more self-directed and took greater ownership for their learning using the tools found in the D2L.  

When I began to notice this shift in their Learning Skills, especially their collaboration, communication and self-regulation, I had to pause and think why is this change happening? 

What hit home for me was the the impact of the Assessment For and As Learning practices, (or what I prefer to generally refer to as Formative Assessment practices), that we implemented in the classroom and how the tools in the D2L supported those practices. 

Last year, I really tried to change the format of discussion in my classroom from Teacher - Student - Teacher to Teacher - Student - Student - Student.  But we found old habits are hard to break.  It was easier to develop this flow of discussion using the Discussion tools in the D2L.  Not only that, but we could go back to the Discussion threads and USE THEM as formative assessment.  We could look at our conversations, and talk about how could we have said that differently to extend our peer's thinking or to gain a deeper understanding into their thinking, or how we could have expressed our thoughts more clearly.  As a teacher, I could look at the conversations my students were having and know so much more about what they understood and what they didn't understand so as to tailor my instruction more expertly to meet their needs.  I was able to find patterns in their misconceptions that I wouldn't have noticed otherwise. 

I think the other thing that led to the change was the fact that I could provide my students with more immediate feedback.  They used the paging tools regularly to let me know when they were struggling with concepts.  Students told me that they were more comfortable asking me questions through the D2L than aloud in class because no one but me knew that they were struggling.  However, as the year progressed, and they saw the positive impact their questioning was having on their learning, they began to ask the questions in class as well, and more excitingly, they began to answer one another's questions while I sat back and took on the role of observer rather than expert.

They started to pay greater attention to what helped them learn and what didn't help them learn.  Their communication to me changed from "I don't get it" to explaining to me exactly what they were having difficulty with "I don't get how you know whether you have to multiply or divide the decimal when converting to different units" to eventually saying "I watched the video to see how you solved it, but I solved it a completely different way, and my way is easier and works too because I got the same answer as you did". 

My students began to take ownership for one another's learning as well and truly became a community of learners to the point that they were letting me know which videos I had posted were helpful to their learning, and which ones weren't. They would search for alternative videos and additional links and urge me to share them with the class because they felt their peers needed to see them.  

Using the tools in the D2L, my students were making their thinking visible.  They became more metacognitive and paid attention to their learning.  The Blended Learning format gave my students a voice, and they learned to use that voice.  They were empowered, and teaching doesn't get any more exciting than that!