Any teachers out there do weekly self-evaluations on their own performance as it relates to their students’ learning?
If so, how and what do these self-evals look like? What kinds of things do you measure, and how do you go about measuring?
Posts tagged "education"
Facilitators of Group Learning #2
[Another great facilitator who is on my radar is known endearingly as Doc Klein. He has experience as a consultant, as an Outward Bound instructor and an expert climber. Doc sees to the heart of people. I asked Doc to participate in the conversation about facilitation.]
Me: Doc, In what ways do you measure your own effectiveness as a facilitator?
Doc: There are many ways of knowing in this world and our society tends to favor the ways of knowing that are logic based and can be measured. There is a reason for this of course as much of what we call intuition has strong biases and is not always reliable. When I think of successful facilitation I think of three main areas of focus:
- Creating a safe space for people to be vulnerable and share what really matters.
- The quality of the dialogue, which includes the degrees to which people sought inquiry, suspended judgement to better explore the subject, and the synergy of engagement (referring to degree which people moved from their own egos to a high level of group think).
- The degree to which the group arrived at a share vision and actions.
These can all be quantified if not measured.
My friend Peter Block in his book Community: The Structure of Belonging talks about six conversations that change the world.
They include:
- Invitation
- Possibilities
- Ownership
- Dissent
- Gifts
- Promises
He offers that if we can facilitate these conversations it will change the world.
Facilitators of Group Learning #1
- [Recently I've been interested in how, as teachers, we can become better facilitators in our classrooms. At a school which touts the Harkness conference model as the cornerstone of a student's educational experience, the importance of understanding how to facilitate a group cannot be overstated. I spent the year working with a number of expert Outward Bound Instructors. Just watching them lead a discussion and debrief an experience taught me a great deal about facilitation and forced me to think about what's really going on when we make the assumption that learning is happening in groups. I asked Arianna, one of the North Carolina Outward Bound instructors for some advice. She inspired me to begin a journey of conversations with people whose facilitation styles I admire. Be on the lookout for great bits of wisdom in these chats. I've already learned so much; I'm excited to share with you and work on practicing what they've taught me.]
- Me: Ari, What makes a facilitator effective?
- Arianna: when facilitators guide their work based on the tone of the conversation--what is being said, how it is being said, how it is being heard; when they are able to attend to the mood of the conversation and gracefully make the implicit, non-verbal conversation in the room part of the explicit spoken conversation. Authentically showing up, being fully present and listening deeply with all our senses (including the subtler senses like intuition and the heart) have been key ways for me to do this. Facilitators are also effective when the people involved in the conversation feel like 90% of the process was based on self-discovery and their own decision-making. (in line with Lao Tzu's wisdom "A leader is best when people barely know he exists, when his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say: we did it ourselves.")...
#education editors and followers
I’m amused by the discussions currently going on among followers of the education tag and the editors of the highlighted post stream. I like the idea that they could work together to develop some shared criteria that will push posts to the forefront. However, if I’m reading the responses correctly, it looks like people feel as though the posts featured on the tag only represent a range of viewpoints.
I think it’s hard when you’re on tumblr and you want to come in contact with varied points of view, but most of what you read in your stream comes from the same bloggers. I think if you’re like most people, the list of tumblrs you follow doesn’t shift dramatically or often.
I think if you really want to be a contributing member of the education community on tumblr, you should go outside the garden walls and find links, articles, and content that aren’t yet memes and aren’t yet showing up in your streams. Tumblrs that act as gatekeepers to the rest of the internet are the ones that, I think, are most valuable, because they give us a chance to broaden our perspectives.
Picked up the adonit jot pro and the wacom styluses. Testing out in sketchbook pro on the ipad. I’m moving my design class over to an ipad design class next fall, so I’m really looking to get-expert with these apps.
By the way — I learned something from using the ipad with my cultural studies course this term: The fewer apps you ask your kids to use, the better. It makes a lot of sense in retrospect. I guess I just have to limit my experimentation to a only a few strategies per term.
The Chapel, Lawrenceville School
digital painting
2012 Sheamus Burns
“
When Milton Glaser was sixteen, he decided to draw a portrait of his mother. “I was just sitting in front of her one night and I thought it would be fun to sketch her face,” he says. “So I got out a piece of paper and a charcoal pencil. And you know what I realized? I realized I hadn’t the faintest idea what she looked like. Her image had become fixed in my mind at the age of one or two, and it really hadn’t changed since. I was drawing a picture of a woman who no longer existed.” But as Glaser stared at her face and then compared what he saw to the black marks on the paper, her appearance slowly came into view. He was able to draw her as she was, and not as he expected her to be. “That sketch taught me something interesting about the mind,” he says. “We’re always looking, but we never really see.” Although Glaser had looked at his mother every single day of his life, he didn’t see her until he tried to draw her. “When you draw an object, the mind becomes deeply, intensely attentive,” Glaser says. “And it’s that act of attention that allows you to really grasp something, to become fully conscious of it. That’s what I learned from my mother’s face, that drawing is really a kind of thinking.Imagine: How Creativity Works
What if Schools Weren't Schools Anymore?
Seen through this lens, school is a place where people “learn to live a life of selfless service on behalf of the community; it’s where we find the path to virtue, subordinating innate self-interest as individuals to the interests of the community, the good of the whole.”
If it sounds a little pie-in-the-sky, think about the alternative. Students aren’t exactly breaking down the classroom door to learn disconnected facts that they’ll regurgitate onto standardized tests. Too many are bored, only jumping through the hoop of education because employers use degrees as screening tools.
The lack of purpose—think of all the times you asked a teacher “what am I ever going to use this for?”—gives students little incentive to not drop out. If students do graduate high school and college, too many don’t know what they want to do with the rest of their lives because they’ve never had to apply what they’re learning to the challenges facing the world. That could all change if students, parents, educators, businesses, government institutions, and nonprofit organizations all came together to make school a place that ultimately serves as a community-wide resource.
In this vision, schools would become hyper-local. The school community could, for example, collectively decide what neighborhood problems need solving. Students would then use their their creative and critical thinking abilities, as well as their academic skills, to tackle real-world issues like the dropout rate or homelessness. Then, when graduation day rolls around, a student wouldn’t just get a piece of paper signaling that she’s employable. Instead, upon completing formal schooling, “the highest possible title in a free society is conferred upon us: citizen.”
…
“
You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.Maya Angelou
Teaching the Creative Process
We urge all those concerned about the creativity crunch to consider the following: Just as one masters knitting and carpentry by apprenticeship to previous masters, so one masters creative know-how by apprenticeship to demonstrably creative masters. Let’s re-humanize education by putting people and their thinking processes back into the center of every subject. Let’s test our students not only on their knowledge of discoveries, inventions and other innovations, but on how well they have understood the processes by which they were achieved. The more paths to creativity that students explore vicariously and recreates mentally, the better prepared they will be to recognize opportunities for creative achievement in their own lives.
Creative spiral, creative path
IMAGINING WHAT COMES AFTER MUSEUMS
It’s not irony, but it’s close. Contemporary art – created to challenge conventions and alter perspectives – is shared with the public via institutions largely unchanged in 540 years. Visitors to the 15th-century Capitoline Museums in Rome would be at home in today’s contemporary art museum and unlikely impressed by our innovations, like gift shops, audio tours and Wolfgang Puck snack bars.
Think about it: over the past five centuries, humankind has sparked the Scientific Revolution, the Industrial Revolution and the Digital Revolution; dramatically increased literacy, life expectancy and individual wealth; and we’re still marching schoolchildren through stark hallways to see artifacts in antiseptic galleries.
…
“
In a landmark 2009 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Stanford University researchers compared the attention-switching abilities of people who said they multitasked often with those of people who did so rarely. It found that the frequent multitaskers were more easily distracted and performed worse on memory and attention tests than those who preferred to do one thing at a time.
Studies on Multitasking Highlight Value of Self-Control
Education Bloggers on Facebook
Discovered a group of 200+ education bloggers connecting and sharing their posts from various blogging platform in a Facebook group. Looks like a good resource to expand and broaden your PLN and education blogroll.
