November+2014

November
It is a good thing that I started this habit of trying to write a bit every month. A month at Dakota sometimes feels like a year, and the little bit I write here rarely reflects anything of the academics, sports, or the arts initiatives that are all tied to student learning. More than anything else, I tend to write about the ongoing Bring Your Own Device initiative at Dakota, and I tend to focus on staff Professional Development as well, mostly because I actually like PD.

I know that not all teachers enjoy PD. In fact, some loathe it, but I do wonder how they'd feel if somehow we never had any PD. How would teaching change if we were not given time to reflect on important topics, new theory, current practice, and given a chance to meet with other teachers to talk about what we do?

We had two Professional Development days at Dakota in November. On the 14th we spent the morning learning about [|New Pedagogies for Deep Learning (NPDL)], which was introduced to our leadership last Spring, and is now rolling out into the schools. Michael Fullan and a number of international partners want to develop a network of schools that are using new technologies. A few schools in the Louis Riel School Division are involved in this research project, Dakota included. The quickest way to get a fix on NPDL is to compare it to all of the "21st Century" learning models that have cropped up over the past 20 years. All of them value citizenship, numeracy, literacy, communication and technology skills. They all encourage creativity, and thy all tend to put pressure on traditional systems of bell scheduling of class time, credit allocation, and rigid curricula. [|Ian Jukes "Fluencies"] and the [|Manitoba Literacy With ICT Continuum] are the two models we have followed the most closely here at Dakota, but it will be fun to see how NPDL works into what we're doing at Dakota.

On November 28th the teachers from five or six schools got together here at Dakota, in a "family of schools" PD Day, aimed at helping us to get to know each other a bit better. The teachers who joined us all teach K-8 students who then come to Dakota for 9-12. I heard a few teachers mention that they had never been to Dakota, never walked the halls, and so they did not really have a picture of the place that they could share with students. Our day was scheduled around a few events, and everyone had to select from a menu: one event in the morning, one in the afternoon. In the morning I took in the [|"Blanket Exercise"] which is a 2 hour object lesson regarding the experiences of First Nations, Metis and Inuit people from the time of first contact with Europeans until the present. The exercise points out many of the injustices that are still unresolved, and helps to provide an understanding of why things are as they are in the present. In the afternon I took in a presentation on reading and literacy by [|Dr. Karen Boyd], of Manitoba Education and Advanced Learning. It was good to talk about the common challenges of reading that teachers see as they teach students from the ages of 5 to 18. With close to 100 teachers in the room our table groups were frequently engaged in the reading and text-selection tasks that Dr. Boyd offered as examples to highlight the very broad set of considerations needed when thinking about reading.

Teacher PD is a good thing. I've always liked learning, and there is always something to learn at a PD session. Thanks to the people who organize PD days, the teachers, the Admin, and the Speakers.