Today, Westminster is hosting INMAX – a Benchmark Research membership group of large, independent schools in the U.S. The topic of focus is leadership and innovation, and the agenda appears quite intriguing as a whole.
At 11:30 a.m., Jill Gough (@jgough) and I (@boadams1) will be sharing a story about tearing down walls and connecting dots. We will be sharing the story of our school’s multi-year journey to become a PLC – a professional learning community. The official title of our session is “Learnopolis: Tearing Down Walls with PLC.” We plan to use the Twitter hashtag #learnopolis for tweeters, and a PDF of our slide deck is embedded below (the iMovie in slide #9 is inserted below, too, as a YouTube video).
In short, we are trying to communicate the following:
- “School” hasn’t changed very much in the last century – maybe longer. [We need to adapt and evolve!]
- Schools exist in a bit of an “egg-crate culture” (Kathy Boles), as we have generally organized with individual teachers and rows and columns of students. For the most part, teachers are relatively isolated as professionals.
- In the 21st c., we can capitalize on the notion of social networks by rethinking and rebuilding the critical infrastructure of schools – the human infrastructure. [New basic building block should be learning teams.]
- While we cannot rebuild the physical plant, we can rebuild the way we work within the physical plant. We can build a learnopolis!
- By shifting our central paradigm from “teaching” to “learning,” and by providing regular, job-embedded, structured time for teachers to collaborate, we can build the schools that 21st c. learners desire and deserve.
We are looking forward to learning together with our colleague schools at INMAX today! And we are looking forward to building a learnopolis! After all…it’s about learning!
it's about learning 