Sessions That Lead to Growth Spurts

In my recent blogs, I have discussed conferences and the benefits of attending conferences.  I have touched on the importance of your PLN and making connections during conferences that will help you grow as an educator.  I am a huge proponent of the human connections that are made during conferences.  In my opinion, educators and administrators can grow from the conversations alone at conferences.  Don’t sell the sessions and speakers short though.  There are many powerful messages and transformative ideas that can be taken away from each quality session.

A good conference session provides attendees the opportunity to learn, visualize and implement.  Let’s look at some important takeaways from sessions to get the most that you can from conference sessions:

Visualize the implementation at your school/class

Listen and learn at each session.  Obviously, if you attend a session and its not what you thought it would be, you should use your feet to help you.  Go attend another session that you were contemplating attending.  Don’t waste your time by attending a session and checking your email.

Go into a session and visualize the implementation.  Watch and listen how it happened and then go make it happen in your school.  Some may say, “Well, some things just aren’t realistic for me to implement in my school.”  I disagree.  See it happen and then make it happen.  Does it have to be the exact same thing another school implemented?  No it doesn’t.   Just use the fuel the session gave you to build your fire.

Mentally manipulate another idea

I was in a recent conference session and heard a school discuss their Freshman transition program and the different activities their students and mentors participated in.  I immediately began thinking of ways I could change our transition program at NLHS.  The ideas I had were not the same as the school I was listening to.  The session allowed me to think in a more broad sense about what would work for our students and staff.  It is important to remember that different things work for different schools.  The goal is to personalize the ideas gathered from the sessions and fit them to your building growth. 

Talk the talk

Communicate with your PLN during the session and after the session.  Tweet out ideas and important points from the session.  Your PLN will offer comments and other ideas that will help you grow.  Don’t transition to the next session mentally until you have maximized the potential growth from the session you were in.  Communication is vital in this regard.  Use personal relationships and social media to get everything you can from a session.

See your reflection

Take some time after the conference to reflect on your experiences.  Think about the sessions you attended and make a plan on how you will communicate this message to others.  Involve other people in your district.  My advice is to blog and tweet about what you have learned and what you are excited about.  Your passion will be contagious and others will help you grow by expanding your reflection.

Your professional development is exactly that, your own.  You are the person who determines how your PLN will grow. You also determine what you will take away from conferences.  For the sake of our great profession, I hope you take advantage of the great growth opportunities professional development can offer.  If you are not going to do it for yourself, at least do it for your students and your building.  They will help your visions become reality.

Lordes, Dolly Parton, & Personalized Learning

I don’t know how many blogs or articles you have read in your time, but I am pretty sure this one will be significant for you.  Why you ask?  This blog has quotes from two female singers named Lordes and Dolly Parton. Yes, you read that correctly.  What blog could possibly contain quotes from Lordes and Dolly?  What else, a blog about personalized learning.

Personalized learning is all the rage right now.  All schools are scrambling to offer a personalized environment to their students.  For those of you who don’t know what personalized learning is, it is “instruction paced to learning needs, tailored to learning preferences, and tailored to specific interests of individual learners.” (National Education Technology Plan).  Giving our students options and different ways to learn should be the new driving force in education.  The traditional educational structure that we as adults know is being turned upside down. 

-       Give our students the opportunity to learn what they want, when they want it.

We need to be more flexible with our students and their schedules.  Schools need to release the strangle hold on traditional educational structure.  Give students the responsibility to schedule courses and create their schedules based on their interests & everyday lives.  If a high school student gets a job that starts at 1:30 pm each day, wouldn’t it be nice to offer them a list of dual enrollment college courses that they can take and still get to their job by 1:30 pm each day?  You have a student earning college credit, learning how to manage their time effectively, and working at a job preparing them with life skills outside of school.

-       Take advantage of technological resources

Technology, if used correctly, will transform personalized learning.  What are some ways technology can stretch personalized learning?  The gold standards are devices for students, distance learning equipment, high-speed bandwidth, and having teachers equipped with the proper resources.  We as educators need to create more blended learning opportunities for our students.  Let’s not focus so much on the distance learning aspect as much as giving our students the responsibility to complete their coursework and have an educator facilitate their learning.   Aren’t we preparing these students for college and life?  If so, we need to expect our students to use technology to their benefit so they can grow for their next phase in life.

-       Equality of student learning

Personalized learning gives all of our students the same opportunity.  If you truly open up the traditional educational framework and allow our students the opportunity to take classes from other schools and at different times, all students will have more opportunities.  Students will have more opportunities to take college classes, to take AP courses, to meet new people & build personal learning networks, and opportunities to grow as students and life learners.  These additional opportunities mean our students, as Lordes says, have ”no postcode envy.”  Students in Appalachia will have the same opportunities as students in other districts around the country.

-       Troubleshoot, document, and learn

When you embark on something new, there are always going to be bumps in the road.  We can’t let set backs limit the opportunities we offer our students.  I have to give credit to Dolly Parton, I think she states it best, “The way I see it, if you want the rainbow, you gotta put up with the rain.”  When you use more technology and increase rigor in the classroom, you will inevitably encounter issues.  We need to move past these and create opportunities for our students.

-       Transform learning and teaching and reach out

We all need to develop PLNs and utilize our PLNs.  You colleagues will help you grow as an educator.  And I don’t mean the people in your building, I mean your colleagues from around the world.  Ask questions, try new things in the classroom, go out on a limb: Take Risks!  Use a learning management software tool such as Edmodo to give your students more responsibility.  Transform your teaching and start using more blended methods.  Allow your students to work through problems and collaborate to get the result. 

We need to change our educational philosophy as a whole.  To really make personalized learning work, we as educators need to increase rigor and increase the responsibility placed on students.  Let’s get more dual enrollment courses offered for students using innovative instructional practices.  Let’s increase our collaborating efforts as educators modeling this approach for our students.  Will we have difficult stretches in the process?  Yes, but always remember what Lordes & Dolly said.  Your students deserve the same opportunities as others.  Use the bumps in the road to your advantage to help students.