Professional Development End Game

As I mentioned in The Other Side of the Coin post, I have heard repeated calls to assess CBL-- particularly our school's Dallas Team pilot.  On the one hand this is ironic, because no educational venture at our school has been more studied and transparent.  And on the other hand,  the call is premature since the majority of our teams have not even implemented their plans.  Don't get me wrong, I think CBL needs to be assessed-- but so should the rest of the curriculum.

Consequently, I am asking the teams of staff which are planning new CBL projects to participate in “CBL Pilot 2”at Mercy High.  Since we have plunged into CBL in order to address Tony Wagner's Seven Survival Skills for a New Economy, I have asked the teams to consider how those skills will be assessed by their new CBL projects.

I proposed that we help position our Curriculum Council with a framework for planning and assessing instruction for the Wagner Survival Skills.  The framework would invite assessment of CBL and other forms of instruction.  In other words, CBL would not be scrutinized in isolation.  If CBL does not accomplish what we hope to achieve then we need to change in more effective ways.  But change itself cannot be rejected merely by throwing stones at CBL.  If we are teaching the Survival Skills across our curriculum than any academic department should be able to demonstrate how they are attaining them.

You can see the "End Game" proposal to the CBL teams, below.  Next time, I will describe how we move from this to a (hopefully) serious contemplation of assessment.

End Game Proposal

Two of my students check out iPod touches.

CBL End Game

Leading professional development for Challenge Based Learning has been quite of experience*.  Like the CBL process itself,  I have done some zigging and zagging along the way.  Heading into the final quarter of the school year, I want to provide an opportunity for closure.  Consequently, I have prepared a "work sheet" for the staff teams who are developing challenges for the students.

CBL Work Sheet

I hope none of my colleagues take this as an assignment.  It is meant to provoke discussion within the teams so that they can trouble-shoot as many issues as possible before implementation.  I'm sure I left important considerations out of the list, but I found myself deciding which areas of Challenge Based Learning really meant most to me.

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*I'll be presenting on my experiences Challenging the Challengers at ISTE on June 29.

Snow Day + Facebook + Health Challenge= Eureka!

I received the call regarding our snow day the night before.  Pretty sweet-- I could sleep in a bit and plan out a leisurely day.  I'm not sure why, but I found myself musing about the stir of inter-disciplinary activities I was entertaining for my American Government class.  One of them, I have been contemplating for launch as early as April, 2011.  It's the notion of having student create political ads as a way of showing their understanding of media and politics.

The idea actually came to me from Health Class.  In one of our professional cluster group's we have been working on a CBL related to teaching the influence of media on health issues.  Mike Gruber made (at least in my opinion), a terrific suggestion for a challenge:  Use media to "counterattack"  negative media influence.

To tell you the truth, I'm not sure that this challenge is going to come off this way.  But it sent me in a different direction. I intend to assign the students to make campaign ads.  The instructional goal will be the same-- By using media, the students will understand its influence.  We will study some ads and then give the students' their mission.

All of this was in my head, the morning of snow day.  I even had the notion that I would have them develop two ads-- one attacking an actual office holder and the other promoting the fictional campaign of the challenge.  Yet, I also wanted this fictional campaign rooted in reality.  I was thinking of having the students "run" an actual person against the officeholder.  However, when I started to write down potential "candidates" the list was pretty short.

Enter Facebook.  I posted the following status on my wall:

Help me out? I am trying to think of famous living Michiganders for whom my students can design political campaigns. The catch? They can't be politicians. Folks like Dan Gilbert, Jeff Daniels, Mary Sue Coleman. Toss in a name and I bet my minions have designed a campaign ad for her/him by May.

Lots and lots of names.  Enough to assure me that I can let teams of maybe  2-3 students draw and then run their candidate for governor or senator.  Perhaps in the future I could try this at a higher technical level by teaming with another department.  In the mean time, I am quite pleased with my Snow Day/Facebook/Health Challenge collaboration.

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Flickr CC Photo by EtanSivad

Customizing Professional Development on the Fly

If you have been visiting the Drive-thru this semester,  you know that I have been journaling my experiences and materials as a professional development leader.  Our staff met with me twelve times during the first semester in professional cluster groups (PCGS). There were five groups and they constituted one "prep" of my assignment.


The focus of the PCGS has been the implementation of Challenge Based Learning.  This semester our registrar magician, Colleen Rozman, managed to schedule CBL design teams into the PCGs.  Consequently these teams have a regularly scheduled period for workshopping their projects.  My goal is to customize the professional development experience to each team's needs.  I began by asking them to respond to a survey, allowing me to get a sense of what each team needs right now and to get them thinking about vital issues for their CBLs like technology and assessment.  Here's the survey:

 PCG Survey

The survey activity has allowed me to develop distinct agendas for our next cycle of meetings.  Topics like the following have surfaced:

 * How will we assess the degree to which our students' consciousness of global citizenship has been raised?


* How do we word a challenge so that it is "actionable."


* How much should the challenge "count" in the total course grade?


* How do we weight the relative importance of process v. product in assessment.

As you can see, these are "real world" issues about Challenge Based Learning.  They also lead to important discussions about education. (In this instance process is as important as product.
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Flckr CC photo by hugochisolm

Baker's Dozen

We (the Mercy staff) finished the first semester with a twelfth round of professional cluster group  meetings. These PCGs are designed to train teachers in Challenge Based Learning Design and allow for the discussion of topics related to Tony Wagner's 21st "survival skills. In this one I pounded away at a topic near and dear to my heart-- assessment. 

My tech tip pointed to the word cloud application, Wordle.  Ironically, my heart was not particularly in this one because I'd never seen that much use for word clouds.  Fortunately, my peers pointed to a number of uses ranging from ice-breakers to t-shirt creation.  Another site was also noted that I will keep undisclosed so I can use it for a future tech tip, myself!

But the main focus was on this point:  As a school we are trying to cultivate Wagner's "survival skills:

✦ critical thinking/problem solving
✦ collaboration/leading by influence
✦ agility and adaptability
✦ initiative and entrepreneurialism
✦ effective oral and written communication
✦ accessing and analyzing information
✦ curiosity and imagination

How do we measure these?  Do we simply ignore the acquisition of these skills because we are only use to using other instruments like multiple choice tests for measuring knowledge gained?

My intention was to provoke reflection on these questions and tee us up for some practical engagement with this issue next semester as we make more progress with our new cross school learning plans.  I also shared some of my own experiences with assessment through presentation, narrative, rubric, and podcast reflections.  Most groups ended with a consideration of issues related to these different assessment tools.

Assessment Slides

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The photo in the screen capture of my slide is licensed through Creative Commons by tubachuck.

Interdisciplinary Baggage

At a recent professional cluster group meeting (PCG), we were wrestling with the difficulties posed by attempting to develop interdisciplinary Challenge Based Learning projects.


As Gerry, a top science teacher, noted: the term  "interdisciplinary" (or multi-disciplinary) is too freighted with baggage.  It immediately invited one to see obstacles to collaboration, since our curriculum is organized by department courses and we are scheduled into department meetings  


We realized that we preferred idea of joining "cross-school" teams to which we bring our entire skill sets as educated adults.  This point of view allowed us to imagine shedding department labels (e.g., "science teacher") and committing to a commonly held passions with other adults and students.  Then, after crafting a challenge with our cross-school teams, we could weave the project into our course curriculum.  


As another astute educator recently remarked to me, "Language is powerful; change is sneaky."   I think Gerry's observation makes it more likely that we accomplish some dynamic changes to our school curriculum.


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"collaborative drawing (detail)" Flickr CC photo courtesy of scalefreenetwork

The Change Dilemma

I had a recent opportunity to talk with an expert about reform and change in education.  I bent Dr. Ruben Puentedura's ear about M-Hub, Challenge Based Learning, and our ongoing professional development through PCGs.  His reflections on all these matters were quite insightful and interesting, but one remark in passing, came back to me just the other day.  During a dinner conversation,  he referenced Everett Rogers' model for the adoption and diffusion of innovations.  Rogers theory breaks innovation adopters into five groups:

Innovators-- the first individuals to adopt an innovation.

Early Adopters-- These individuals have the highest degree of opinion leadership among the other adopter categories.  More discrete in adoption choices than innovators. 

Early Majority-- Adopt an innovation after a varying degree of time. This time of adoption is significantly longer than the innovators and early adopters. 

Late Majority-- Individuals in this category will adopt an innovation after the average member of the society. These individuals approach an innovation with a high degree of skepticism and after the majority of society has adopted the innovation. 

Laggards-- These individuals typically have an aversion to change-agents and tend to be advanced in age. Laggards typically tend to be focused on “traditions”.

 

I decided to read up on Rogers because last week I began to get back channel feedback that implied I was churning up too much information in our professional development groups.  Folks needed more time to process information, settle in, discuss, etc.  This makes perfect sense at several levels: I have been rather furiously introducing new themes and we are discussing a radical new learning design with CBL.  Besides, change is simply tough on most of it.  It brings discomfort an ambiguity.  I deeply sympathize.

 

And that's the dilemma.  One's sympathy calls on a veteran teacher like myself to focus on the "slow" students, the laggards if you will.   But I think that culture shift of the kind that I trying to facilitate to focus attention on those early adopters and make sure that they are cultivated and intellectually nourished.  Initial success of my project cannot be measured on whether or not the majority immediately buys in.  We need to start bringing over the "early majority" to CBL and teaching Wagner's Seven Survival Skills.  Then some of the rest may come over.  And perhaps, some never will.  

So here is where I am with the dilemma.  I am going to cheer lead  every fresh idea and innovative inclination that comes along.  I want to be positive and fight any urge to become a scold.  But wait for ideas to "settle in"?  That's a fine line.  Because it is entirely legitimate to analyze, reflect and choose caution.  On the other hand, others need to press forward so that they don't lose the momentum to innovate and try new things.

P.S. Please don't lay any half-baked ideas expressed here at Ruben's doorstep.  This has been a riff on one reference he made.

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Flickr Creative Commons Photo by kagey b

 

 

 

 

Reflections on the "See-through Cycle"

Professional Cluster Group #5 focused on reflections. I took the opportunity to focus on my experience at the "Challenge Based Learning Group Think", sharing what I had gleaned about the "future of the book" and the student as "free agent."

Participants filled out the "Big Idea" Survey that I blogged about which I recently blogged.  This shall serve as grist for our next session on "Deep Learning."

Finally, in small groups we discussed our experience with the "See-through Cycle  which surpassed my greatest expectations in terms of participation.  The reports on the experience were universally positive, but the big question concerned how to take transparency to the next level.

I'm really looking forward to ratcheting up the discussions with some exercises I have planned for "deep learning."  Stay tuned!

Reflections Slides PCG#5

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"See-through Cycle" title slide photo insert thanks to the kindness of Jud Turner.