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. 
​
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.

​

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.  
​ 
**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.  

​Beginnings are important. What happens in the first few minutes of class affects the entire class period.  Working with new teachers this year I have found that helping them find templates and ideas to create structure in their classroom is helpful.

When students enter a classroom if an agenda is posted and expectations clearly set for what will be happening that day, the teacher has taken a step that influences the classroom culture.  When classroom procedures are streamlined, things are clearer for everyone and there is more time for learning. An efficiently run classroom enables students to focus on their work, which, in turn, helps reduce discipline problems. 

For teachers, this means that work and organization happens before the students are anywhere near their classroom. Creating a slide deck each week with an agenda for the day and information the student needs to successfully participate in class is one way a teacher can begin a class period. Taking an idea from a GIF I saw on Instagram. I decided to create a slide deck to use with new teachers. The slide deck has 13 different templates that a teacher can customize and use to get started.  

I specifically included an icon of a cell phone. Establishing procedures and expectations for phones in today's learning environments needs to start on day one and be reinforced every day.  A teacher can delete the phone icon that applies for the class period. If phones can be used during the class period, leave the yes icon.  If they are not going to be used, leave the no icon.  

Make a copy of the slide deck and then you can import a single slide and use it in your own  deck for a week. The video below shows you how to import slides from one slide deck to another. 

Additional Resources for Teachers

• The Do Now: A Primer from Teach Like a Champion site  
• Starting with a Do Now from the Teaching Channel
• ​ "Six Opening and Closing Routines for New Teachers" by Rebecca Alber 

If you have additional resources that can help new teachers establish a beginning routine, please share them below. 

Working on a large campus with upwards of 200 teachers I get excited every time a teacher discovers Twitter, connects with a Facebook group or more recently connects through Instagram.  As much as I would like to say the majority are collaborating in these spaces and building PLN's outside our building we aren't there YET.  

Last May I had an idea to try and reach the teachers that were not connecting in the spaces above through good old email. I looked at the different platforms that I could use to create an email that was not just created in Outlook but in a space where it could be a  resource.  Smore was my first choice, however with the email filters in place in my district the communication didn't come through consistently or if it did all the resources did not show up correctly.  I use Constant Contact for our school eNews, but it wasn't going to work for what I wanted to push out to faculty. So for the teachers, I chose to use Mail Chimp.  I am grateful that there are so many tools to choose from! 

I follow the same formula in each email. I share a strategy, a resource (usually a blog post or podcast), a tech tool, and finally some of the social media posts from our faculty.  I love to share these highlights! For teachers not using social media, the embedded posts give them an idea of what other teachers are doing. It also reinforces that social media posts are interesting. I make all of the posts clickable in hopes that people might discover more than the single post they clicked on. Each year our story grows on social media painting a  stronger picture of who we are as a school! While i am pushing this content out to them, I am hopeful eventually it will start to pull them into spaces where they can pursue their own interests and connections. 

If you want to subscribe to the mailing list and receive a copy of the emails that are sent out in the future click here!  Please feel free to use the format and any content that has been curated! 

Below is what the latest Learning Connections email out looked like.  

Connecting ideas, people, tools and opportunities to learn.

​Learning Connections is a communication that has been created to help connect educators at Bellaire HS to ideas, people, tools, and strategies. Our goal is to create a space that you can browse when you have time. We will be sharing interesting educational posts, podcasts, and online courses with you periodically. We will also be spotlighting different uses of Social Media on campus. Each of these moments helps to tell Bellaire's story.This communication is intended to be collaborative moving forward and a product that is crowd-sourced by the Bellaire faculty. You'll be able to send in ideas through a form at the bottom of this message or tag items #BHSLearn on Twitter.

15 Visible Learning Strategies

You’ll probably agree with me when I say, “200% more growth than peers” is quite a stretch.

Or is it?

In our recent nine-week action research, students who focused on visible learning strategies outperformed their peers on district standardized tests. But that’s not all. They achieved over 200% more growth than their peers.
We’ll get into our results more, but first how? What are visible learning strategies?
We used a handful of visible learning strategies and helped our students take control of learning. Their teacher gave them a few strategies that allowed them to take ownership in their learning. They only used three of the 15 strategies below, and achieved amazing results! Read more here...

​https://teamtomeducation.com

Class Randomizer
Shout out to Glenn Fruitiz, a BHS Science teacher, for this share!  His students know at any moment that he may be calling on them. It's a great tool to make sure you are reaching the room.  Create a spreadsheet that has each of your periods in it and quickly copy and past your roster into the tool. ​

Below are links to other editions of Learning Connections .

• Learning Connections #1
• Learning Connections #2
• Learning Connections #3
• Learning Connections #4
• Learning Connections #5

I would love to hear other ideas and see examples of how you connect with your teachers. Please share below or tag me on Twitter. 

I can remember the first twitter chat I tried to be a part of, I was on Twitter where I thought I should be participating, it was for goodness sakes a "Twitter Chat".  I understood the question/answer structure in general and between trying to find the question in my stream and shorten my thought process to 140 characters (now its 280) I was always three steps behind. I wasn't able to respond or really interact with anyone else. I had moved from being a lurker to a participant, so there was progress.  It was a frustrating experience though!

Then I discovered TweetDeck and everything began to make sense. I could organize my content, responses and see the questions all in individual feeds.  TweetDeck is a web interface that allows you to view tweets in real time. TweetDeck has many features you won’t find within the standard Twitter interface, but we will focus on what it specifically does for Twitter chats. In short, you can create a specialized column that will auto update with tweets containing a specific hashtag or user. When you open TweetDeck, you will see your version of the following screen. 3 or 4 columns with a menu bar on the left. This page is completely customizable. Click on the sliders at the top right corner of any column and a  options appear. You can sort a column, clear its contents, change the size of previews, filter by keyword, even remove the column completely. 

How to get started with Tweetdeck:

• Go to Tweetdeck.com
• Log in with your twitter credentials
• You will be able to customize the columns. 

Below is what Tweetdeck looks like when you are in the app. The screencast that follows the images shows you how to set your screen up and then how to use Tweetdeck in a chat.

Once you are logged in and set up, you are ready to participate in a twitter chat the easy way.  If you have questions send me a DM and I'll be happy to help you.

Good luck learning and sharing your thoughts in your next Twitter Chat! 

I had a teacher ask me for ideas for how her students could show their knowledge at the end fo a unit in a way that wasn't a traditional, paper, presentation or test. I pulled together some resources about infographics and thought I would share them. 

We see infographics all the time. They are visual images used to share information or data. Infographics work in the classroom because they grab students and allow an entry point to learning — and because they sum up pages and pages, even chapters, of information that would take a student hours to process. In addition to organizing information for students, infographics can be one more option when students are asked to research, share their findings, or analyze information. It is an alternative way for them to creatively communicate knowledge or an idea using a combination of visuals and small snippets of text.  

If you haven't created an infographic yourself, here is a good blog post that walks you through the process.  (Like just about everything these days, we have to teach ourselves before we can help our students learn!) 
​

In looking for resources about infographics I came across the image above. It made me want to dive in and learn more about everything it was saying!  This is just an example of how inquiry and learning can start with an infographic. I found it here. ​

​Looking for ways to introduce infographics to your students? Check out these resources: 
​

• This will save you tons of time - Here is a link to a lesson plan with resources all ready to go so that teachers can introduce what an infographic is and how it organizes and presents information.
• Fantastic Resource - Kathy Schrock has a Guide to Using Infographics as a Creative Assessment. She includes links to help develop formative or summative assessments that have students creating infographics to showcase their mastery of knowledge. Check it out, because there is A LOT there! ​

• One free tool that will help students create an infographic is Easel.ly. This site requires no sign in at all so you can either plan to have students create in one sitting OR you can use the "groups" feature to create users under your e-mail that require no shared personal information. This is a nice option that will then allow the students to collaborate. The groups feature also enables students to save and come back to their designs later. 
  
  Easel.ly also has a ton of templates already available as starters. For example, if a student or group plans to compare/contrast two things, there is a template available to either edit or to inspire them to create their own from scratch. While there is a pro version, the free version offers everything our students need to create their own infographics.
• ​Use Google Slides or Microsoft Powerpoint to create infographics. There are templates that have been created to guide students. Read all about how you can use the tools you already have on your device to create infographics on this TCEA Blog Post Infographics Made Simple. 
  ​

If you have additional resources or examples of using infographics in our learning environments please leave them below! 

As our Christmas decorations come down and boxes that have been stored for over a year in our garage are unpacked while we remodeled after Hurricane Harvey, I am sitting back and looking at my "big picture".  I am grateful to be a part of the #CompelledTribe and to have developed a practice of sharing my thoughts and learning through blogging. (More about the #CompelledTribe and why I blog here.)

Here goes where I am as we close out 2018.....

I’ve found this year to be filled with reflections on gratitude, appreciation, inspiration to keep learning, stretching, growing, exploring, creating, and contemplating who I am meant to be.  Seven take aways from 2018 that I will carry forward in my journey are:

• Failure is an opportunity for growth. It is evidence that I had the courage to try. It is the best way to learn how to do (or not do) whatever I am striving to achieve.
• Try not to ever pass up an opportunity to travel. Being a traveler expands world views, perspectives, and empathy in powerful ways.. It makes us more insightful and accepting.
• Loss comes in many forms. It isn’t something we get over but something we learn to live with and shapes who we are and how we see other people. (Empathy) 

• Use my opportunities and privileges to extend more opportunities and privileges to others.
• Things gather dust and most things will eventually end up in a donation box.  Keep it simple.

• My time is the most valuable and precious commodity I have. Gifting it to others is the most meaningful gift I can give. Filling my time with people who make me feel motivated, challenged, inspired, valued, or loved is the most valuable and memorable gift I can give myself.
• Never settle for what is, continually ask what if... including looking within. (It's ok to change your mind and your goals.) 

I learned the Latin phrase alis volat propriis or "She flies with her own wings."  It makes me smile. 

Wishing everyone a Happy New Year!  Now on to the fun of thinking of my three words for 2019! What will yours be?  #ChallengeOn

Finals are coming! We assume students have the skills and tools they need to make connections and deepen their learning independently, but many times freshmen have never been exposed to skills and strategies to use.  Creating a study plan is a first step students can take to help them experience greater success. 

Creating a study schedule is a time management method that can reduce a student's level of stress by teaching them how to set aside the necessary amount of time for studying, and also how to use that time wisely.

When reading about ways to help our students begin to get organized I came across a blog written by a student at the time in Portugal. She shares from a student's perspective 10 Essential Steps to Creating a Study Schedule.   Students love to hear and learn from other students! 

A study plan can be created on paper or electronically. Need a template or a place to start? Below are templates you can make a copy of. Feel free to use as is or edit.

• Starting with your hardest course, work backwards from the exam date and assign study chunks to individual blocks in the schedule (If using a paper schedule use a pencil because you may need to revise!)
• Schedule your peak learning times for your hardest studying. 
• There is no perfect plan: try to spread your studying over a period of 5 days or more, and reach your targeted number of study blocks.
• Be sure and schedule breaks and things to look forward to doing. 

Encourage students to create a study plan that is reasonable  Keeping in mind the amount of time they need to study and review each day, students also need to realize that, blocking off four hours, for example, with no break will set them up for failure. 

Develop a plan to communicate and share information with parents also. As we began to post our Finals schedule we also began to push out information to our parents through our weekly eNews.  We also have a Study Skills and Resources section available on the Cardinal's Nest our Freshman website. 
​
Once a student has their study plan in place, some helpful reminders are:

• Place the calendar or printed schedule in a visible location so that it is easy to see or if the schedule is electronic have it bookmarked and easily accessible. 
• It is important to review, study, and self-test. First, spend a few minutes reviewing the material you studied during the previous study block; then spend most of your time reviewing the current chunk of material; then spend some time testing yourself on that material.
• Take the breaks that they have scheduled into their study time. 
• Find a place or environment that is right and comfortable to study and concentrate. 
• Include exercise and healthy snacks in your break schedule. 

Creating a plan is the first step. If you have additional suggestions or resources for students to use, please share them below so that we can all learn and help students draft a study plan that will help them be successful.  Next post I'll focus on Retrieval Practice and how it plays such an important part in making learning stick.