May+2015

May 2015
One of the good things about having done a bit of speaking at professional development events for teachers is that I'm often forced to learn new things myself. The month of May provided a good example of this. A few months ago I was invited to address the staff of Windsor Park Collegiate on the topic of Fullan's research project called [|"New Pedagogies for Deep Learning" (NPDL)]. Our school division has agreed to partner with a few other divisions in the Manitoba to become a Western Canadian research node for the incredibly broad international study that Fullan and company are setting up. In the wake of "Alive in the Swamp" and "Stratosphere" there is more of an appetite to figure out the many ways the information technology can improve student engagement and student learning. So, I went to Windsor Park Collegiate and presented. Which meant I had to consolidate my own learning about NPDL. Which turned into a slicker slide show than I'd had in the past, which included some material from Hargreaves about the differences between improvement and innovation, particularly in educational contexts. The presentation came and went. Feedback from the participants told me that it was good- they learned new things- but that the most powerful portion had been the stuff on innovation and improvement, how they are different from one another, and the advantages of each.

Fast forward a bit, and I received an invitation of speak to the combined staff of six high-schools in our division on the topic of "The power of Collaboration, Innovation, and Improvement". This time I had to dig deeper into work by Hargreaves to sort it out into a way that would make sense for the high school teachers of the Louis Riel School Division. I really like the quadrant framework that Hargreaves uses to explain educational improvement and innovation. Now for a bit of a bunny trail: quadrant frames like this are layering up in my consciousness in a curious way lately. If you overlap the Hargreaves quadrants with the Johari Window and Wilber's AQAL quadrant framework all three of them link the lower right quadrant with complexity, systems, dynamism, and the unknown. In other words, things bigger than me, bigger than you, and even bigger than all of us together. A full comparison of these three quadrant frames would take more time and thought than I'm able to give right now, but could make for an interesting theoretical paper at some point. Click on the pictures to take you to relevant links.

Presenting on collaboration, innovation and improvement pushed me to think deeper and to research a bit more so that I had something credible and relevant to share with others. I suppose all of this is just an example of the old saw that the best way to learn something is to have to teach it. I like that old saw. Good saw, that one. Anyways, I'm thankful for the opportunities that I've had to learn, to grow, and to share this year. And that is about as good a conclusion as this post needs. Always good to end with thankfulness.