November Learning: Expanding the Boundaries of Learning

Last spring, at the end of a full day of keynotes and presentations at BLC 11, @ewanmcintosh @dkuropatwa, a few others and I hit Beantown for refreshments and a kick at the day’s notes. The idea of problem-finding, of asking question to which no one knows the answers, emerged as a new model for pedagogy. Ewan took the idea to TEDxLondon.

Here it is again–six months later–on ISTE’s site: Teach your students to fail better.

BLC hits a sweet spot that I think puts it at the forefront of education: it’s big enough to draw a lot of bright minds yet small enough to allow serious conversation between keynotes and session. 

Today, we are launching our second BLC11 keynote video with Rob Evans, clinical and organizational psychologist and the Executive Director of the Human Relations Service in Wellesley, Massachusetts.

As you watch the keynote, we encourage you to reflect on and respond to the following questions.

• Rob Evans shared that for transformation to take place, there must be a balance of enough anxiety to stimulate change without having so much that people shut down. What are your ideas on how to acheive this balance?
• What do you do in your school to manage the overwhelming changes in technology?

This is a very special episode of our podcast series. It’s an archived recording of our first of what we hope will be many live webinars complete with audience Q&A at the end.

In this conversation, Alan talks again to Dr. Eric Mazur, Area Dean of Applied Physics at Harvard University and 2011 Building Learning Communities Conference keynote speaker. Alan and Dr. Mazur revisit his work on flipped learning along with peer instruction that is guided by the questions and misconceptions students bring to class each day. This process, being done using his Learning Catalytics software, is allowing him to visualize student learning in new and exciting ways.

Dr. Mazur will be back for the 2012 Building Learning Communities Conference to work with participants in a pre-conference session. For more information, visit http://www.blcconference.com.

Webinar with Alan November and Dr. Eric Mazur [ 53:54 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

In this episode, Alan speaks to Lachlan Hull, a first year teacher working with students between the ages of four and six years old at St. Joseph’s Primary School – Kangaroo Point, located in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia. During this discussion, Lachlan explains how he uses a classroom management tool created by ClassDojo to build a sense of group accountability through personal behaviors amongst his young students. In addition, Lachlan shares a very interesting project his students developed using the popular game, Angry Birds.

Lachlan will be a presenter at the 2012 Building Learning Communities conference being held this July in Boston. To learn more about BLC, visit http://blcconference.com.

Managing a Classroom Full of Angry Birds - An Interview with Lachlun Hull [ 30:24 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

While many individual and small clusters of teachers have been utilizing the flipped learning model within their classrooms, Greg Green, Principal at Clintondale High School, located just outside of Detroit, Michigan, has been pioneering the infusion of this model across his entire school. In this episode, Alan and Greg discuss how this effort began and continues to develop as well as the substantial improvement this model has brought over past failure rates amongst his school’s at-risk population.

Greg Green will be a presenter at the 2012 Building Learning Communities conference being held this sumer in Boston. To learn more, visit http://www.blcconference.com.

Learn From a School That Has Completely Flipped Out - An Interview with Greg Green [ 26:52 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Since writing my 3 Keys to a Flipped Classroom blog post, I have been reading many great contributions to the discussion around flipping classrooms. Last week I was commenting on Lisa Nielsen’s thoughtful post Five Reasons I’m Not Flipping Over The Flipped Classroom and something occurred to me…

I have flipped my Professional Development!

I’ve done this with my blog and with Twitter.

Professional Development for me used to be about going to sessions on specific days and then trying to ‘bring back’ what I’ve learned and incorporate it into my daily practice. Sometimes this was very challenging, I would get inundated with new information and find it very hard to apply what I learned into what I did on a day-to-day basis. Often my notes would be filed away, not to be seen again.

The Old Way

Sign up -> Go to session -> Take (paper) notes -> File notes away (with intentions to go back to them) -> Repeat.

Now Pro-D seems to be different for me. The key thing is that I don’t ever wait for Professional Development Days or conferences to initiate learning opportunities. In fact, my Pro-D choices stem from what I’m already learning about on Twitter, and sharing in other learning spaces like my blog, Diigo, and Scoop.it.

The New Way

Follow links on Twitter -> Dig deeper then blog my ideas -> Seek related Pro-D opportunities -> Connect to other participants -> Share as I learn -> Consolidate ideas and blog again -> Follow links on Twitter…

Now, Professional Development needs to change to accommodate a new kind of learning journey that participants are on:

1. Share resources, and make connecting easy, ahead of time.

2. Make sessions about action not information.

3. Use the skills of the participants (have them not just participate, but also lead).

Examples:

1. Share resources/connecting ahead of time

• Teasers, Sharing slide decks, conference #hashtags, participant profiles

• Learning in Louisiana – I joined a team from November Learning to present to groups of teachers on the topics of Blogs, Wikis, Podcasting, PLN’s and other Web2.0 tools. Most of the event was hands-on with teachers having a lot of time to try the tools out.
• Flat Classroom Conference – Beijing 2011 – We broke into teams and developed our own flat projects. I haven’t followed up with our ‘Reportizens‘ project yet, but I do think this is something I would like to pursue!

3. Use participants skills

• EduBloggerCon events which include a ‘Smackdown‘ where participants share tools they like in rapid succession.
• Edcamp – “…an unconference devoted to K-12 Education issues and ideas. A new kind of professional development dedicated to giving educators a voice.”

Putting these three pieces together isn’t easy. If you pre-load too much before hand, not everyone will come prepared. If you are all about action and not information, then why do people need to come to your sessions? If you empower participants to lead, some will thrive on it, while others will wonder why they paid if they had to help run a session.

You can please some people some times, but you can’t please all the people all the time!

It is hard for a one-hour session or even a conference to meet the needs of every participant. That said, I do think there has been a shift in expectations as more educators have become connected learners. For me and for many others, the Pro-D session of old can no longer meet our learning needs. We have flipped our professional development and now we want, we expect, to be active participants in our learning before, during, and after a professional development session.

[Cross-posted on the David Truss :: Pair-a-Dimes for Your Thoughts blog]

Today, we are officially relaunching our opening keynote from BLC11 with Dr. Eric Mazur. Dr. Mazur is the Area Dean of Applied Physics and  Balkanski Professor of Physics and Applied Physics at Harvard University in Cambridge, MA.

In his keynote, Dr. Mazur shares his vast research on teaching and learning. Students in Dr. Mazur’s class are moving far away from the traditional stand and deliver lectures given in many k-12 and university classrooms around the world, and they are gaining a much deeper understanding of the material being taught in the process.

As you watch this video, we invite you to take some time and respond to one or more of the following questions.

• Where does the balance lie in providing students with answers and having them discuss and apply reason to get to their own answers?
• Would you agree that the more a teacher is an expert in his/her content, the more difficulty this teacher has in understanding how a first time learner in this subject struggles? Explain your thinking.
• How practical is it for any teacher to apply a flipped learning model, like the one Dr. Mazur shares, where students guide themselves through content on their own at home and then send their questions to a teacher before coming to a class where this material is then applied at a deeper level? If it’s not practical, what are the barriers.