School PD

On November 30th we had a school PD day. Originally we were supposed to have a workshop on restorative justice but the presenter had to cancel a week before the planned date so Darren, Sandi and I whipped up a presentation about student engagement based on what we had been learning about on our district PD days. Teachers in my school also indicated that they would like to learn about technology and they'd like to discuss some TED Talks so we tried to incorporate that too.

Sandi started off with an activity where we wrote a Haiku about a picture in small groups. The twist was that we could only write one line, then we had to pass the picture to the next group to write the next line and so on. In the end the picture was returned to its original group who then had to design some criteria for a good poetry reading and then recite the completed poem to the class. It was a fabulous way to start a PD day. Not only were teachers thinking about engagement but they got a chance to learn more about each other and have a good laugh. We watched RSA Animate's Sir Ken talk and discussed the main ideas.

In Alberta there are a lot of good paying jobs that do not require a lot of education. It is difficult for some students to see the value in education when they don't need it to maintain their standard of living. We need to provide students with other reasons to go to school. School should be somewhere for students to discover and explore their talents and passions, to increase their divergent thinking and creativity, not have it stifled.

Darren introduced the concept of student educational engagement using this Prezi which provided us with many opportunities to discuss the benefits and obstacles of student engagement as well as to discuss some of the things that we could do more/less of to increase engagement. Teachers all agreed that the key was to provide students with a variety or a choice of learning activities for each objective so that hopefully each child would be engaged at least once.

Finally, I ended with an introduction of the five seeds. We watched Dan Meyer's Math Needs a Makeover to start a discussion about how we can better challenge students and help them find value in the content they are learning. I love his ideas about providing students with less information and making them find the data themselves. One colleague has posted Dan's "viruses" and "treatments" in her math classroom to assist students in becoming patient problem solvers.

We also watched Dan Pink's The Puzzle of Motivation to learn more about empowering our students. He refers to monetary rewards and punishments in the workplace but the same principles exist in education with grades and other systems that teachers/schools put in place. This was my favourite video of the day and it sparked some great discussions about intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. It always bothers me when teachers think that students need to be "bribed" to read or learn or do something good. For example, earlier this month our school was offering a treat to students in classes that brought in food for the food bank. This seemed really contradictory to me. Why were we bribing them to donate when we had a great opportunity to teach them about generosity (which was also the virtue of the month)?

Throughout the day I talked to many teachers who said they enjoyed the chance to share their ideas and  felt that we don't have time in a regular day to do this. Some teachers at my school have organized muffin Monday to try to lure teachers to the staff room to socialize and chat, but the fact remains that we are all too busy in our classrooms, especially the junior high teachers who don't get any breaks during the day other than 20 minutes at lunch (if they don't have supervision). We talked about how great it would be to have time each week to collaborate, share and reflect.