Synergy: Complexity~Simplicity, Collaboration & Brainstorming

Posted on October 27, 2011 by boadams1

Our Synergy team is at the halfway mark, time wise, of the semester. For the past 9 weeks we have been recording images, questions, and thoughts in our observation journals. We use a common space, a Posterous group, to communicate, collaborate, and connect ideas.

The challenge now upon us…What data mining strategies should we employ to uncover community issues that, as a team, we want to study, investigate, problem-find and problem-solve? We have over 300 posts. It seems daunting, almost overwhelming to sift through our data.

Via his talk at TEDGlobal 2010, “How complexity leads to simplicity,” Eric Berlow was our “guest expert” to help us think about and learn that “complex doesn’t always equal complicated.”

A couple of key insights that stuck with us include:

[Use] the simple power of good visualization tools to help untangle complexity to just encourage you to ask questions you didn’t think of before.

and

The more you step back, embrace complexity, the better chance you have of finding simple answers and it is often different than the answer that you started with.

Here is a quick trailer and then approximately 4 minutes of video from Monday’s Synergy learning experience to show one of our attempts to find simplicity on the other side of our complex task of data mining for new projects.

If you facilitate project-based learning, how do you empower students to determine the team projects?
What other methods would you recommend to us for putting students in “that driver’s seat?”
How does assessment for learning change when immersed in PBL?
How would you assess the various learning demonstrated in the video?

We would love your feedback.

[Cross-posted at Experiments in Learning by Doing]

Sometimes, we just need to be asked!

Posted on July 26, 2011 by boadams1

Moments ago, I sent the following e-mail to the faculty with whom I have the privilege to work and learn everyday – the Junior High faculty at Westminster. I am genuinely excited to learn what they might suggest for faculty meetings and other professional-learning opportunities. Certainly, with their help, our opportunities will be better and more well-suited for us all!

Dear JH:

I need your input and contributions! Our entire JH needs your input and contributions! You are amazing professionals who are devoted to the career of teaching and learning. More than anyone, you have superb ideas about what you want to be learning professionally. You know what you need regarding “corporate professional learning” time – our faculty meetings and in-services. You are surely thinking about your goals…and you think, “If Bo would just do x at a faculty meeting, it would really help me accomplish my goal and better serve student learning!”

WE ARE SMARTER THAN ME! Rather than me individually thinking and planning for our learning time together in faculty meetings and in-services, I would like for many people to contribute to that thinking and planning. I have set up a Google Doc for us to use together to suggest meeting topics, particular content, specific pedagogies, what’s-worked-in-the-past, interesting professional questions you have, etc. [I am asking now in case I need to secure a speaker/facilitator, begin a set of action steps, etc.]

[I inserted Google Doc link here!]

If for some reason, you have any trouble on Google Docs, just email me your suggestions (I will paste them into the Google Doc). But PLEASE try the Google Doc first!

Together, our JH professional learning community can brainstorm, idea-exchange, and contribute to the form and function of JH faculty meetings and other corporate learning opportunities. You have a voice about how our meetings should be, and I hope you will exercise that voice.

THANKS!

Bo

Flying in a Flock

Posted on March 16, 2011 by boadams1

A particular line from an email I received recently keeps coming back to my mind and making me reflect (the full email can be found in my post from March 15 – “Dumber or Just Different?“):

We have even seen some of our faculty peers engaging in technological multi-tasking by tweeting each other during presentations (so-called “back-channeling”).

If you are a teacher, educator, or school person, do you believe in note taking? Do you encourage, or expect, or even require that your students take notes? Do you assume that note takers are dutifully engaged and processing the information? Do you think that the notes can be used later to remind and refresh the thinking of the note taker? Do you sometimes ask a student who is not taking notes, “Hey, don’t you think you should be taking notes on this stuff?” Perhaps you even use a stronger prompt to elicit a note-taking response. Have you ever considered that note taking is “multitasking?”

Well, tweeting is just a form of note taking! Dare I write it…”21st Century Note Taking!” However, tweeters leverage technology to enrich their notes and interaction with whatever is the source of discussion on the “so-called ‘back-channel.'” Do you ever wish, or have you ever wished, that you could see someone else’s notes? Just a peek, so that you can calibrate your note taking and discover what the other person thinks is interesting, important, or needs-to-be-remembered. Now you can! Just join the hashtag of the back-channel and explore what other engaged note takers are thinking, asking, responding to, contemplating, etc. Perhaps there are too many people in the room for everyone to have a fair shake at audible-voice air time. No worries. Now more people in the room have a voice. One does not have to concentrate on injecting one’s thoughts into the audible conversation, but of course one can do both – tweet and discuss out loud. In fact, in my experience the two forms of participation complement and expand and encourage each other.

Note takers have always been multi-taskers. Now, many are simply “smarter” about it. The connected note takers realize the value of shared, collective, collaborative notes. WE are smarter than me.

Maybe the tweeters understand the advantages to flying in a flock, rather than flying solo.

Riffing, Swirling, and Boarding

Posted on March 13, 2011 by boadams1

Had I taken my sabbatical more than four years ago, I believe that my time at Unboundary would have seemed like a journey to a foreign land. As it is now, Unboundary is very recognizable and familiar to me because of the work in which I have immersed myself regarding PLCs – professional learning communities.

In The Fifth Discipline, Peter Senge writes:

The tools and ideas presented in this book are for destroying the illusion that the world is created of separate, unrelated forces. When we give up this illusion – we can then build ‘learning organizations,’ organizations where people continually expand their capacity to create the results they truly desire, where new and expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured, where collective aspiration is set free, and where people are continually learning how to learn together.

During my first week as a sabbatical intern at Unboundary, I witnessed the power of three collaborative tools: riffing, swirling, and boarding.

Riffing is improvisational brainstorming. Often team members will declare that they are riffing. This seems to bring into play a set of unspoken, agreed-upon norms – these next ideas are for building more ideas, so don’t shoot them down and don’t add them to the more-concrete draft yet. Just hear me and think with me. Try to pick up a note that you can riff on, too.
Swirling is perspective and feedback seeking. It is asking for input and assessment. It provides evaluation from the standpoint of mixing things up so that new lenses can be applied to the thinking and creation.
Boarding is communal mind-mapping. Making boards literally means putting index cards up on a tack-board wall (often movable panels) in order to outline and storyboard an idea. By utilizing a board, big-picture visualization and idea connectivity is facilitated.

Watching an Unboundary team riff, swirl, and board is akin to watching a PLC. In a PLC, team members work through the four questions: 1) what should be learned, 2) how will we know if learning is happening, 3) what will we do if it has already been learned, and 4) what will we do if it is not being learned. In a PLC, this work is accomplished collaboratively through such practices as analyzing student work, establishing SMART goals and essential learnings, engaging in lesson study, and participating in instructional rounds. By working together and breaking out of the traditionally isolated way of working in schools, PLC members are able to riff, swirl, and board their ideas…all for the benefit of learning. WE are smarter than ME. Therefore, schools need to ensure time and space for teachers to work together as lead learners, rather than continuing on the path of the egg-crate culture typical of most schools.

In the 21st century, schools and other businesses – all learning organizations – must partner together to share productive and innovative techniques. We need to expand our capacities to create the results we truly desire, we need to nurture new and expansive patterns of thinking, we need to set free our collective aspirations, and we need to learn how to learn together. We need to riff, swirl, and board…together. We need to unboundary ourselves and strive for more significance…together. Imagine the thinking that school and business could do as a team. Imagine the thinkers we would facilitate in schools – thinkers who would grow into the business leaders of tomorrow. Imagine the learning that could happen!

– Senge, Peter. The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization. New York: Currency Doubleday. Accessed via e-copy on Amazon Kindle App for iPad.