Professional Learning and Growth: Teach Well

This morning I heard that NCTM is accepting proposals to speak at next year's fall conference in Boston. As I completed a number of proposals to speak, I found myself thinking about my professional career as an educator. While I've always had a loose-tight vision for where I am heading in education, I have not always taken my professional learning, voice, and direction as seriously as possible. I wish, from the start, I had thought of my professional efforts as building blocks towards greater skill and professional impact at school and beyond rather than seeing it more as one experience after another to strengthen and share classroom teaching.

If I were to advise professionals early in their career, this is what I would advise:

Create an Online ePortfolio
Create a vehicle where you will post your goals and professional efforts. After each event, add your professional effort title, the date, and a short description. Though you think you'll never forget all that you do, the truth is that educators are very busy and the multiple events we are engaged in do meld together so it's important to keep an accurate log and make updating that eportfolio a regular part of your professional work.

Reflect
It's essential to create a reflection vehicle too. The better you organize your reflection vehicle from the start, the better those reflections will serve you down the line. I suggest that the reflection vehicle utilize a blog or website format that can be private or not. The one advantage to publicizing your reflections is that you invite commentary and feedback. Also to publish elevates the seriousness you take when completing a task like that.

When setting up your reflection vehicle, good categories include the following:

• Classroom Teaching
• Professional Presentations
• Systems Think
• Reading and Research

You may want to break these categories down even more.

Professional Learning Network (PLN)

Take creating and nurturing a PLN seriously and treat members of that community whether it be online or off with respect and care. It's essential to create and nurture a strong PLN with regular connections, mutual support, and collective learning in an ongoing fashion. This PLN will turn out to be your greatest source of learning and learning opportunities. Vehicles such as Twitter, Voxer, Instagram, and association threads and memberships help to support a dynamic PLN.

Choose a Few Professional Organizations to Join

Try not to spread yourself too thin, but instead commit to two or three professional organizations with depth. Take time to try out many organizations and then pick a few that really support your work. Then, in turn, find ways to support and get involved in these organizations in ways that matter.

Grow Your Contribution and Value

Rather than doing more of the same, try to find a few paths of professional learning to deepen and grow. Challenge yourself by offering to present at conferences beginning with local events and building up to state, regional, and national events. In doing this, hone your skills along the way. Seek out support to develop your speaking voice, presentation skills, and the practice you are presenting. As a lifelong learner, make the work that you are presenting and your presentation skills stronger and stronger so that you are gaining a voice in the professional sphere, a voice that is honest, valued, and valuable to those who sign up to attend your workshops and presentations. 

Educators need to continually prune their paths of professional learning and development. They need to reach out, challenge themselves, read and research, and develop their practice in ways that matter. To stay at status quo in your learning community is to stagnate, but to reach out and challenge yourself is to grow in ways that matter. What would you add to this discussion?

Ideas in Fallow Fields and Developing Your Teaching/Learning Practice

I am leaving a lot of ideas in fallow fields right now. While I desire change in multiple areas of school life, I cannot forward all of those ideas for lots of reasons. Therefore I'll focus the final years of my career on the following ideas--ideas that I can certainly support with my time, energy, and team.

Teaching Life-Long Learners
I use the popular adage, "If you give a man a fish, he eats for a day, but if you teach a man to fish, he eats for his whole life." Then I say that the same is true with learning, "If we teach learning points alone, children learn discrete knowledge, but if we teach children how to learn, then they are able to learn for their whole lives." Hence, I'll continue to build my knowledge about how the brain works and the best ways to learn, and then impart that knowledge to children as they work to master discrete knowledge, concepts, and skills.

This effort will include developing the following efforts we include in our weekly program:

• showcase portfolios including student reflection and assessment
• student-led conferences
• learning menus
• using the class website as a virtual classroom
• embedding lessons about how the brain works, and how students' knowledge of the brain can support their optimal learning habits, attitudes, and actions.

Promoting a Robust Teaching/Learning Program and Routine

I will continue to work with my grade-level team to develop a robust teaching/learning program and routine. That program and routine will include the following:

• lots of active hands-on learning
• development of our knowledge as educators
• working with organizations in and around the school
• teaming with families, students, and colleagues to teach well
• assessing our program efforts with the learning/teaching team in an effort to continually improve and develop that program
• developing our field studies, STEAM projects, special events, and other engaging components of the teaching/learning program

Apt Assessment and Development of My Own Teaching/Learning Efforts

I want to continue to develop what I can do with and for students with the following actions:

• Using an optimal weekly routine of reflection, assessment, and development on my own and with colleagues.
• Reading, researching, and learning via conferences and other special events to continually develop my practice.
• Taking critique seriously and responding with efforts that better the teaching/learning program.

Teaching, Holidays, and More

The holidays are around the corner and there's much to do at school. I've spent some time looking at the long view to figure out how I'm going to fit it all in and what the focus will be.

In general the big theme is kind attention to family, colleagues, students, and friends. That means carving out the time to be able to be present for them at school, at home, and elsewhere.

In school, I plan to promote steady, caring attention to each child I teach via a number of varied learning experiences meant to engage children in mastering the many standards we're charged to teach. We'll move along step by step and adjust in ways that respond well to students' needs and interests. The key is to be prepared with materials, room set-up, and response.

At home, preparing for the holidays means readying the house, preparing foods, and making time for those closest to me. The biggest challenge is making sure that I reserve good energy for the events and people that matter.

With some travel and wait time on the horizon, I'll have to plan ahead for the teaching to come in the new year as well. We have a good program in place, the materials and support we need to teach well, and a schedule that affords us the time to do that work. What's most important at this time is following a positive routine of teaching and learning well. Onward.

Science Study Update

Fortunately the school system gave me a number of hours to work on the science study update. What will that entail?

First, I'll use the resources available to create 6-10 learning experiences that meet the state and systemwide science standards and expectations.

Each learning experience will build on the other.

The first learning experience will focus on teamwork and lab reports.

The second learning experiences will be a math lesson that introduces students to using a balance,  completing a lab sheet, and review of the science notebook. During this lesson I'll emphasize routines and habits that help us to work safely and respectfully with one another and the many materials involved.

The next will be a lesson that reviews the concept of properties with a number of objects and materials we'll use throughout the unit. This will include practice with the lab sheet and science notebook.

The following learning experiences will engage students with hands-on experiments and explorations that reveal the standards' meaning and give students practice with those concepts, knowledge points, and skills.

In the end, students will take a test that summarizes all the learning. They will be able to take the test as many times as they'd like until they get their best possible score.

In addition, there will be a number of enrichment activities and resources available to the students, and we'll follow up with our three engaging systemwide STEAM activities and the end-of-the-year Global Cardboard Challenge.

This is the framework I'll follow, and now it's time to fill in the details and then arrange the materials in ways that are easily accessible to students and educators completing this study. Onward.

Looking Ahead: Friday Musings November 2018

Plans are set for the weeks ahead. The focus will be class culture, math and science learning, and supporting a community of readers. This focus will require continued efforts to re-organize the classroom, attend to individual student's needs/interests, and tweak the personal/professional schedule. Onward.