The Art of Play

My family and I had a great summer. I was fortunate enough to get to go to New York and see the "bright lights, big city". New York did not disappoint, it was exactly as I had pictured it; amazing architecture, great shows, fantastic food...the city that does not sleep is a great description. We of course went and did all of the tourist attractions, but one that I absolutely wanted to do was dance on the piano from "Big". Sounds a little ridiculous but is a childhood memory, we watched the movie with our children before we went and I promised to bring back pictures and a video.
The piano is located at FAO Schwartz right off of Central Park. It is an unbelievable toy store with many items larger than life - picture a nerds box the size of a cereal box. What struck me here was not the amazing toys, or even the size of the store, it was the people who worked at the store. They seemed happy and were constantly playing and inviting people to play. While most adults stood back and watched, the kids joined in without a second thought; throwing airplanes around the store, jumping on the life size piano. As I was walking by to go to the piano, one of the workers said to another guy - I love coming to work everyday, there are not many jobs and companies that encourage you to play for work.
Dr. Stuart Brown recently wrote the book Play. I have not read the book yet, but I am looking forward to it. He sees play as essential in the development of intelligence and happiness. Often as educators, we get wrapped up in the tasks of the day, the curriculum to finish and need to value the play that our students engage in to facilitate learning to a deeper level. This also creates a culture of curiosity and wonderment in our students and engagement in the learning process.
As I jumped on the life size piano and giggled with all of the kids that were on with me, I thought, as adults we all need to jump on the big piano sometimes and remember how important it is for all learners adults and kids to play.

How do we Develop Core Competency Skills to Prepare Students for the Future?

Tony Wagner speaks of the "Global Achievement Gap" which is the gap between what students are learning in school and the seven skills he feels students need for the future:Critical thinking and problem-solving, Collaboration across networks and leading by influence, Agility and adaptability, Initiative and entrepreneurialism, Effective oral and written communication, Accessing and analyzing information, and Curiosity and imagination. As we look as teachers on how we are engaging students in their learning, these core competencies are skills that need to be infused in our lessons. Through inquiry based teaching and strategies used with SmartLearning, students are constantly working toward developing these skills while learning the outcomes. High inference tasks, creating criteria, and feedback loops give students the authenticity and ownership in the task they are working on and the freedom to explore and represent their knowledge in a variety of ways. Teachers take on the role of "guide by the side" as they support each learners needs in order for them to be successful. Below is Tony Wagner's video on the "Global Achievement Gap".

As a teacher, I have worked hard to develop these skills in my students, giving them ownership in their learning. Check out the examples below from our science class:
Simple Machines

As an instructional coach, I find we are also constantly developing these competencies within ourselves. Through reflective conversations, we can keep these skills in the forefront of our planning, along with curricular outcomes to be effective designers of learning and tasks that enhance and build competency skills that our students will need in the future. How do your teachers build core competencies in students?

How do schools foster a structure of belonging and community?

Often when you walk into a building, whether it is a home, office, school or store, you can get a feeling of the atmosphere and community in the building. How do schools foster a structure of belonging and community? In Community - The Structure of Belonging, Peter Block speaks of creating a stronger social fabric, having groups of people together to explore possibilities rather than problems and create more ownership in the decision making process.

One area he speaks of is physical space. Most spaces are created for control and efficiency. In an earlier post, I wrote about creating learning spaces to maximize student learning based on their needs. Spaces that are designed to be collaborative and welcoming create a culture of belonging and community, assisting people in taking ownership for their community and possibilities they can create. This creates a social structure for these possibilities to be explored and created with everyone in the community being accountable for their success.

Block also speaks of the need for good questions to activate conversations. In the small group gatherings we facilitate in our learning teams we always start with a question to explore. This helps us focus on the purpose and allows people to engage in the possibilities of the topic and take ownership for their learning. The small groups allow for discussion with various staff and give different perspectives that perhaps would not have been explored without a vertical grouping.

So what ways can we strengthen community and belonging through schools? Historically, schools have been the heart of our communities. Neighborhoods were built around them, most people have experience with schools in some aspect of their life. How do we increase belonging in the building? Increasing voice for all - students, staff, parents, and community- creates and strengthens the social fabric of our environment. When people discover and share the gifts they offer and are acknowledged and valued for these, cohesiveness and trust is built. Student voice can be heard through choice in the classroom, leadership teams and vertical grade buddies. These all create ownership for what they are accomplishing and accountability for responsible citizenship- contributing and giving back. Staff voice can be developed through building distributed leadership, having discussions around the possibilities rather than problems and the shift of ownership. Reaching out to community in various ways to have them involved in schools - parent councils, reading programs in our schools (involving community members and business people who may not have children in the school) and classroom presentations are a few methods we have explored in our school.

Block states that the overall premise is to "build the social fabric and transform isolation within our communities into connectedness and caring for the whole."(2009) Currently communities are functioning more in isolation than ever before. How do schools return to being the heart of the community and help to foster the structure of belonging and community as a whole?

Collaboration and Instructional Coaching

Over the past two years I have been fortunate to have the opportunity to collaborate with many fabulous educators and expand my PLN. As a teacher and coach, this has stretched my skills and influenced the way I teach in my classroom. My PLN now stretches from my school to the far ends of the globe. I have been able to do this through many different avenues such as conferences, collaborative meetings, social media like diigo, blogs and twitter, and face to face reflective conversations. I truly feel blessed with the people I have been able to work with and collaborate with, not only in the past couple of years, but throughout my whole teaching career.
A couple of weeks ago, I had the privilege to collaborate with colleagues and present at the AISI Symposium. Our Division spans a good geographical distance so the coaching experience has allowed me to get to know other coaches around our division and share our experiences, hopefully to better our skills as coaches. As we discussed our roles in our schools, we realized that there were common key concepts that were in all of our schools:
- Alignment of goals - division, school, learning team, and individual
- Coach as a staff member
- Support of administration and division office
- Supporting learning for teachers
- Differentiated approach for supporting teachers
As we have developed our relationships and trust within our schools, these five concepts were vital to the success of coaching. Check out our presentation below about different ways we reached our staff.

Help! How Do I Reach My Staff? on Prezi

At the Heart of the Matter - Engagement

Recently we have been working through a sequence on engagement in our learning teams. It is a very interesting conversation as there are many interpretations of what engagement looks like in the classroom. In learning teams we did research using "What Did You Do in School Today" to give us common language of three types of engagement - social, academic, and intellectual engagement. We then did instructional rounds thinking about engagement in our own classrooms and what we could do to improve our own practice in an area of engagement. Finally we came back together and reflected on our practice and examples of each type of engagement we see in our school each day. Conclusions seemed to be that all three types of engagement were needed for students to be deeply and truly engaged in their work. If one of the pieces was missing, full engagement would be difficult. To add to this, if students had intellectual engagement, both social and academic engagement pieces were intact.
Click on the link to see a summary webpage of our learning teams on engagement:
www.wix.com/kwedman/Engagement

Learning is at the Heart of What We Do

I recently had the privilege of seeing Jim Knight present around his new book "Unmistakable Impact". I always learn so much from him regarding the role of coaching but also in his teaching and delivery style. I really reflected on his comment about learning being at the heart of what we do. As teachers we are constantly planning, assessing, and changing to support the needs of our students. I often think we forget how much of the day we spend learning from our students and each other. Whether it is a conversation first thing in the morning with a student that has something to tell you, and informal conversation in the hallway with a colleague, or a formal conversation you might have on your learning team, we are constantly learning and trying to improve our craft of teaching to improve our instruction for today's learners.

In learning teams, you develop partnership principles with the other parties which Jim Knight discusses in his book that create an atmosphere that you can truly engage and learn from (Jim Knight, 2011). The first is equality where you see yourselves as equal contributing partners. The next principle is choice. Through learning teams, the facilitator gives choice within a structure giving the group more ownership of their learning. The third principle is voice. All members must feel that they have input and their contributions are being heard. Reflection is the next principle that is a very important part of our practice. In the hectic pace of the day it is extremely difficult to take the time to slow down and reflect on our practices. The culture needs to make a shift from the culture of doing to a culture of learning and doing (p.180 Unmistakable Impact). Embedded professional learning teams set this structure up for professionals to be able to take a step back and reflect and talk about what is best for today's learners. Principle five talks about dialogue being shared inquiry (William Isaacs, 1999) and should not take the form of threatening or one sided conversations. Everyone should feel they are working toward a common goal. Praxis is having relevance to the work you are doing in the team, this will lead to engagement of the learner. Finally, reciprocity is needed for professionals to gain the full experience of the team. Through learning, give and take, and sharing people feel energized, valued, and alive (Wheatley, 2002). When professionals engage in meaningful, deep conversation they are able to reflect on their own practice and how they can improve. I am very fortunate to be able to engage in a variety of reflective conversations throughout my day which has a positive impact on my instruction. How do you engage in reflective conversations in your day to improve your practice?

Are Learning Spaces in Schools Conducive Environments for the Learning of Today's Learners?

Happy New Year! As we enter into a New Year, it is important to take a step back and examine the perspectives we have in our daily lives. Dewitt Jones, who I have mentioned earlier has a great video on Creativity. As a photographer he talks about looking at daily life through different lens and that most things have more than one right answer.
So what about the learning spaces in our schools? As we look at school reform for today's learners, are there things that we should look at changing to enhance the opportunities we create for the best learning situation for students? We want our spaces to be active, collaborative, places to create and challenge our students to maximize their learning potential.
We were discussing this as a group this week and reflected on learning spaces of 20-25 years ago with open space classrooms. Some people in the conversation had taught in these classrooms, some had been students in these classrooms, but the general consensus was the same - traditional classroom teaching styles had still been in place without walls. This was the only difference.
As we worked through an activity this week, creating the ideal learning spaces for our students, there were many common themes - more space, many spaces for multiple intelligences to be developed, natural light, places to collaborate, and technology. Realistically, we know we cannot do all that we would like to create these learning spaces, but how about one or two things? The key to this is to also reflect on our pedagogy through a different lens and reach today's learners.
What innovative ideas have you implemented or thought about to create learning spaces for today's learners?