Learning is Change

It is about knowing and trusting where your students are in their learning. It is about trusting your technology to be there for you when you need it. It is about trusting what it means to be a teacher is not tied up within a particular lecture or a format that you established just out of college.

But, the trust goes deeper than this. The trust that we place in Blended Learning as an innovator and a way of getting us to the future of education is immense. We are placing our trust in something new, in something that has only been really tested within the last 10 years. We have a long history of reform in education, but it hasn’t looked quite like this.

So, we must look to our traditions and look to the spaces where we know what works. We must construct mentorship models where we can learn from one another and apprentice ourselves with one another.

Our trust is not a blind date. It is building on what our innovations have led to, as Blended Learning is standing on the shoulders of giants. While we are creating something new here, it isn’t newness for its own sake. It is the way that we will build the future of education, but it isn’t a bridge too far. It isn’t the single revolutionary step, but rather it is the missing link.

We’ve been doing differentiation in our classrooms for at least 100 years. We have been asking “essential questions” and allowing students to “own” their learning through big ideas for just as long. We just haven’t had the same capacity to do so for each and every learner and to connect all of those learners (and their teachers) together in an open network. That, is truly new.

Teacher Leadership is kind of an awesome thing to see. When teachers feel empowered enough to create the future of their school, the limits just seem to vanish.

In teams that trust one another, learning happens and ideas are disseminated rapidly. When the doors are open for a reason, teachers really do have an expectation that you will be walking through to meet them. There is no illusion of movement or momentum where the teachers take on a leadership role. No one is trying to sound smarter than they are or trying to hide their students scores inside of some buffer. Transparency is not a buzzword, but rather a matter of discourse.

In a school where the teachers are empowered, this openness is pervasive. When a few teachers talk about doing their long-term planning using Google Docs, I hear the subtle whisper of an invitation to everyone to do the same. When that invitation becomes an expectation for all teachers in the school to take part, the classroom has shifted beyond the four walls.

Where I saw this happening most clearly last week was at the Sabin World School. This clarity came from a single protocol they use to establish consensus. They have set an expectation among teachers and leadership that if you do not agree with something said or a decision made, you must propose an alternative in order to voice your discontent. I love this. I love the intense level of trust this requires of teachers. I believe there is nothing so powerful as being compelled to create something rather than fearing what comes next. It changes your orientation.

The fact that you cannot just say no or stand in the way of change without proposing your own reasoning is groundbreaking.

It will impact students as well. If we trust teachers enough to create the change that they want to see, then we have to allow students to create that change as well. When I look at Sabin, and the teachers found within, I see the future of inquiry: asking the right questions, and making the right decisions based upon the needs of the teachers and students within the school.

Yeah, Teacher Leadership is kind of awesome.

There’s a part of me that wants to map everything. I want to be able to map ideas and I want to be able to map out direction. I want to be able to map out what the future looks like, displaying it for others to interact with. This part of me, the mapping part, is small but growing. I see so much of our work being tied to the geographies that are either real or that we create in order to better understand the connections between things. Our ability to put things on a single plane and show the area within which we will learn is no small feat. And that is why I am even more glad there is someone whose job is actually mapping the things going on in DPS.

Oh, and he is going to fix global warming too. Robb Menzies, our GIS specialist, is working both on the large scale mapping needs of the district and he is busy building mapped simulations that help students to understand their carbon footprint. When I spoke with Robb the other day, he told me about the project that lets students actually see the number of kilowatts In their bedroom, then in their house, then in their neighborhood and city, and then as a part of the utility itself, solving the problem of energy usage. When I heard about this, I thought he was literally “mapping out the future.”

Then we started brainstorming together the ways in which we could simulate a visualization for where global temperature is heading. We were simulating rolls the dice using a Google Fusion Table and determining which city would have above above and below average temperature. It was both fascinating, yet somehow it seemed like I had stepped into someone else’s universe. It sounded like an amazing project that could only see the light of day if someone championed it and made it happen. I was struck that this type of mapping doesn’t happen by accident. It has to be intentional.

I believe the mapping of our district has to be just as intentional. I’m really interested in what our map looks like. Where are the spots that we marked with an X, and where are the treasures that we are questing after? And the bigger question I keep thinking about is: “What should we be mapping?” If we have designated champions of our GIS information and empowered them to create things beyond just number-crunched heat maps, where should we be placing our capacity to lay everything out on the table and see what there is to see?

We should probably be mapping where we want students to go.