​In my first two posts about our professional learning journey, I shared our  shift in mindset and practices surrounding professional learning as a school community.  In our annual 2018 Spring survey to staff, an interest in social-emotional learning and how, as educators, we could learn more to help our students.  Our journey was super charged with the opportunity to work with Dr. Brene´ Brown and her Daring Classroom's team. If you are not familiar with Dr. Brown's work, please watch the video below taken from a keynote address she gave at SXSW in 2017.  

Our three days of learning with Dr. Brown's team was hard and deep at many points.  We quickly learned that we were not just going to be learning about ways to support students in our school, we were going to be learning about ourselves. We have a very large faculty, close to 200 people, and as with any learning, there were teachers that were not in a place where they could connect with and engage with the topics we were learning about. And that was OK.  If you have read my previous two posts about our learning journey, you might be asking how this fits into our shift in mindset to encourage autonomy, choice, and risk in professional learning. Our work with Dr. Brown opened our minds to what some of the barriers can be in adult learning and in fostering learning mindsets in our students. We began our work with Dr. Brown and her team by identifying our own core values and then spent time reflecting on how our values shape and guide us personally and professionally.  

​What we quickly learned was that everyone comes with a story...EVERYONE. And learning more about vulnerability and empathy were the first steps in helping us to enter classrooms and look below the surface at our students.  

`Vulnerability is defined as the quality or state of being exposed to the possibility of being attacked or harmed, either physically or emotionally. Each of us is unique, and the feelings that we experience with vulnerability are also unique. For me, vulnerability begins in a conversation between my head and heart, a queasy feeling in my stomach that comes from the fear of being emotionally exposed. Brené Brown talks about vulnerability being “…based on mutuality and requires boundaries and trust. It’s not oversharing, it’s not purging, it’s not indiscriminate disclosure and it’s not celebrity-style social media information dumps. Vulnerability is about sharing our feelings and our experiences with people who have earned the right to hear them. Being vulnerable and open is mutual and an integral part of the trust-building process” (Daring Greatly, p.45).

Creating a safe space within our classrooms for students to feel safe is something that we need to actively seek to create. When we are vulnerable with students we are showing that not only do we respect them, but we trust them. The thing about learning is that it's hard, and if we want students to show up and give us their best we have to work to create a that space where they can share openly. Mr. Houle, a new member of our staff, shared how he would approach a sleeping child in one of his classrooms. He spoke about first getting down on the students level, rousing them from their sleep and then he "would do his thing". He went on to share, "because if you don't have your thing, you won't be able to connect with the student.

We learned from Dr. Brown that “Empathy is… communicating the message of, "You are not alone.” And in that moment of realizing you are not alone, you feel a connection to someone else. Dr. Brown goes on to explain what connection is; "Connection is the energy that is created between people when they feel seen, heard, and valued: when they can give and receive without judgement."  Brené Brown's short film below is the best source that I have found to explain empathy.

In our work with students extending empathy can mean:

• To simply listen
• Acknowledge that what is being shared must be difficult
• Thank them for sharing 
• You do not need to try and fix anything

A key take away for us was that rarely can a response make a difference when interacting with a student, it is forming a connection that ignites a relationship. 

In addition to the three days, we spent with Dr. Brown and her team, as a faculty, we read Daring Greatly,  Rising Strong and Dare to Lead by Brené Brown. Our learning throughout the year encompassed a more in-depth understanding about empathy and vulnerability.  We saw, heard and felt the impact our knowledge was having in some of our classrooms.
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I captured an assignment that Ms. Oertli, an English 1 teacher created for her students below.  It's just one example of our time with Dr. Brown's team being integrated into a classroom. 

And so our learning journey continues...  As a faculty and staff, we have embraced a culture of growth and learning, and that is exciting.  I am grateful for having had the opportunity to learn from Brené Brown and her team.  She is funny and smart and just REAL. As a school, our greatest asset is the people that walk through our doors every day. If as adults, we commit to continue to learn and serve our students in better ways, we can't help but get better.  This blog post gets us to date as to where we are in our professional learning journey. I am excited to see where new learning takes us in the future! #BHSLearn

Our 2018-2019 Learn Shirt!

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.