Not being STUCK and having momentum is a really good thing! In Part 1 of my reflection of our professional learning, I chronicled our journey as a faculty from feeling stuck to moving forward as adult learners. Full disclaimer here....year 2 of our journey Hurricane Harvey hit Houston. We lost three weeks of our school year and in all honesty we dealt with so many obstacles that just "doing school" as we knew it was a challenge. BUT, we did move forward!

Year 2 of our journey took our staff from looking at the process of learning to examining how we approached content in our classrooms.  Our faculty was once again challenged at the beginning of the school year by our principal, Michael McDonough, to continue their journey as learners and to look at what students were creating with the content in each of our classrooms.  That led to our 2017 Learn shirts. 

As a faculty we had shifted our mindset a bit moving into year 2 because of the Learn Project. Conversations began centered around what was happening  in our classrooms with the content that students were learning?  A simple jump to focus on Blooms Taxonomy would be the assumption....but it was more than that.  We looked at once our students had processed content at high levels how were they then taking that content and constructing something new. And how could those "new" ideas be authored and shared outside our walls.  This focus brought up learning that focused on collaboration and communication. Yep....21st century skills just naturally bubbling up in our path. 

We continued learning walks and instructional conversations. Sharing out the pockets of innovation that we were seeing. We celebrated our teachers as we saw a shift in mindset creeping into our culture.  Teachers began to share their learning with each other and a few more teachers also found the magic of a PLN. 
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In the  Spring, we  have all of our faculty members complete a professional learning survey to gather feedback and information from teachers.  One of my favorite questions we ask is "When comparing May 2018 to May 2017, how does student learning look differently in your classroom?" The responses we got reflected growth in many areas. And looking forward, the survey also showed us that there were questions around how  were we supporting the social and emotional needs of our students. What learning did we need to embark on to lift stigmas associated with mental health and learn as educators more about our students?

We learned to continue to encourage  teachers:

• to get curious
• to dig into learning that had the potential to answer their questions
• to think about what impact a change might have in their instruction
• to then give it a go
• and then reflect 

Stuck….we were STUCK and here is how that happened.  Six years ago, in the fall of 2013, the district I work in moved our high school to a 1:1 environment. Devices arrived on campus for teachers in the fall, and then in the spring, the students received their devices. The shiny object was in the building in mass and at the same time, access to traditional resources, such as physical textbooks, was taken away. In many ways, it was a situation where the band-aid was ripped off in hopes it would be the solution to instructional transformation. The professional learning that rolled out along with deployment was one size fits all training, which was not well received. That first year our work truly centered around just communicating effectively about how students would receive their devices, care for them, and have them repaired if there was a problem.​  

From the beginning, our principal, Michael McDonough, communicated to faculty that a laptop was a tool. Teachers were given a lot of space and time in how they began to utilize devices as well. We were never a compliance-driven campus when it came to computer usage. However, we were focused on 21st-century skills and how our classroom instruction could pivot to embrace those skills.  Fast forward two years, and you can see from an excerpt from a blog post “Meeting Teachers Where They Are” just how far we had moved in our quest to create a 21st-century learning environment.

One of the great things about blogging is that it helps you recreate your story and see how you have grown.  In January of 2016, two years into our 1:1 initiative, I can see that my learning was impacted by Elena Aguilar’s book “The Art of Coaching: Effective Strategies for School Transformation“ This book pushed my thinking about ways to increase the effectiveness of professional learning for teachers.  I began to focus more of my time on individual teachers and just spending time asking  questions and curating resources that might be impactful to them in their practice.  Aguilar’s work helped challenge my thoughts on how adult learning could change instructional practices for teachers. In my blog post,  “Looking at Adult Learning,” I share and reflect on some of Aguilar’s insight.

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As a campus, we had tried one shot learning events such as “Tech Tuesdays” and learning lunches that exposed teachers to new tools and instructional strategies. Quality professional development opportunities were also being offered off site by the district. Some teachers were eager and attended, but we were not seeing a significant return on the investment from these learning opportunities.  We engaged in 21st learning walks to seek out and document changes in pedagogy that reflected shifts in learning for our teachers. What we continued to see was traditional teaching methods that were well planned and executed, and by today’s measures were producing successful results. As we continued to participate in learning walks, we observed few environments that were embracing 21st-century skills. *An important point to emphasize here is that the teachers we were observing were excellent and students were scoring well on state tests and AP/IB exams. These were excellent teachers, and it was intimidating to ask them to take on risks and new strategies.   So, this is where we got….STUCK.

In the spring of 2016, Mr. McDonough had the idea to introduce and challenge his administrative team to engage in “Genius Hour.”  You can read his blog post “My Attempt at Genius Hour” here.  Introducing the concept of Genius Hour and encouraging his team to identify something that they wanted to learn about created a buzz, and it was exciting.  

As the 2016 school year was winding down and we began to look towards the next school year, our focus had been defined by a single word….LEARN.  And Learn was a verb which meant there would be action.

That word pushed me professionally that summer, and I attended two national conferences.  Ipadpalooza in Austin and ISTE 2016 in Denver. At these conferences, I had the opportunity to physically meet in person many educators that had become essential members of my PLN.  These two conferences inspired and motivated me to dig deeper into the work of learning as well as leadership.  Attending different types of sessions like poster sessions, playgrounds, and large and small group presentations lead by people from across the country pushed my learning and was impactful. Those conferences inspired a blog post that had ideas for ways to engage your faculty when they returned refreshed after the summer. “​Get Creative with Your Faculty When You Head Back to Campus.” If you are looking for a few ideas, you might check out that post.

In August, we jumped into planning a learning experience that provided a focus on being an adult learner. As our faculty returned, they were met with an inspiring opening session led by our principal, Mr. McDonough. In this opening session, we were each challenged to engage as learners ourselves. In that welcome back message, he asked our faculty to re-engage as learners themselves and to pick something that they wanted to learn about. At the end of that opening session, our faculty and staff received their Learn t-shirts. A simple t-shirt turned out to be a catalyst to continue the conversation that had been started in the 2016 welcome back message. 

As we began the fall semester, teachers engaged in their own Genius Hour project documenting their topic with their appraiser. An important point to make here is that what they could choose to learn about anything, it did not have to be directly tied to their classroom. And so the “Learn Project” was created as a collaborative slide deck.  All of a sudden, teachers were asking questions and actively logging into their Google accounts. Common questions at the time were, how do I log in, how do I find the project, and how do I save? We worked our way through the questions and saw teachers engage in the collaborative project.  They also took notice that everyone could see what they were sharing.  They experienced collaboration and that creating something that others can see gives learning meaning.   Choice, voice, creation and communication were intertwined in one project and the project began to create ripples. 

And that is how we got UNSTUCK.  There were many lessons learned throughout those first few years.  The most important lesson may have been the importance of mindset around the concept of learning. In my next post I will share the next steps of our journey.

If you have a story to share about professional learning and how it helped move adult learning forward, please link to it in the comments below.

*This blog series was prompted by the session “Learn is a Verb” that Michael McDonough
​ and I led at #TASSPSW19. It is a reflection of my learning journey around the work I have been apart of over the past few years.  
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**Learning for me while creating this post was how to format “block quotes” in Google Docs.  If you are wondering how that is done, here is a quick tutorial.