Category: Curriculum

How Shakespeare Helped Me Get My Groove Back

How Shakespeare helped me get my groove back.
He totally is…

This school year brought a lot of new responsibilities and a lot of changes to my position. I was sharing a room. I was doing more math intervention, which is an interesting challenge, but definitely isn’t my strength. I was teaching a pull-out intervention class to 5th graders. Fifth graders are cute, but definitely not my favorite grade. I felt like I wasn’t making progress with any of my students. I could feel myself slipping into a pattern with my math interventions where I would learn about new strategies for math intervention, try them once or twice, and then slip back into what I was used to (yes, I am absolutely a Conscious Stage teacher when it comes to math intervention). I knew it was happening, but felt powerless to stop the cycle. For the life of me, I couldn’t figure out the best way to manage the behaviors of my 5th graders–all of whom had different needs, both academically and social-emotionally–and it was definitely making it difficult to deliver appropriate interventions. They weren’t making progress and I was worried I wasn’t supporting them.

I just felt frustrated and stuck.

I was also coteaching for the first time. I liked my time in the classroom and I love my coteacher Drew. But the unit we were working on at the beginning of the year wasn’t something either of us was really excited about and neither of us felt like we had a voice in the planning process. Honestly, I wasn’t sure what we wanted out students to know, understand, and do, and was just doing my best to infuse appropriate writing skills instruction into the unit.

And then, Shakespeare showed up. Specifically, Romeo and Juliet. Drew had done a Folger Ed workshop (taught by another amazing colleague, Gina) over the summer and was really excited to teach Shakespeare through performance. I was nervous. Because, you guys, R&J is really dirty. And we’re teaching 8th grade English. I also had to unexpectedly fly solo for the intro lesson. I was terrified.

But it turned out great:

And all of a sudden, I was feeling that high that comes from a great lesson with a room full of engaged students.

I stood in class trying to keep a straight face as kids began asking questions like “Mr. Murphy, what’s a maidenhead?”

Or:

“When he says ‘thrust maids to the wall’ he means…”

“Exactly what you think he means.”

“Ohhhhhhh…”

And then started having amazing, deep conversations about the role of women during Shakespeare’s time and how awful it was that Samson and Gregory weren’t really worried about raping Montague women, but were terrified of getting into an argument with Montague men. Because the second one is the thing that will get them hung.

They were interested and excited. And so was I.

They were engaging in close reading of Shakespeare without eye rolling.

They were on their feet and acting and directing.

 

Up on our feet performing and directing Shakespeare

And I was walking into school with a much more positive outlook. I was looking forward to English class, to planning with Drew. I was even looking forward to grading paragraphs about Romeo and his take on love in Act 1.

Now I’m even ready to dive into researching math interventions and trying out new strategies for my 5th graders. It’s amazing what one unit can do.

Have you had a time when you felt burned out and like you weren’t accomplishing what you wanted to in the classroom? How did you get your teaching groove back?

Games for Learning

Twelve a Dozen Screenshot via Game Revolution

This is what I’ve found this year: It is easy to add games to my classroom. It’s not, however, easy to use games for learning, either to support student learning as an intervention or to extend student learning. More importantly, it’s not easy to teach students to learn from games. Or at least the students I am teaching this year.

What I’m noticing is that many of my students are used to being passive consumers of game entertainment. They are mostly casual gamers, but some of them use systems like the X-Box to play FIFA Soccer. Otherwise they play games like Angry Birds and Fruit Ninja. Not that there’s anything wrong with either of these games. They’re fun, and can involve strategy. I even know someone who does a physics project that’s entirely centered on Angry Birds. But, the tack my students have taken on these games is, as they call it, “spray and pray”. They seem to lack the patience and problem solving skills that many of my friends who play RPGs or puzzle games seem to have cultivated, and that I even noticed in my youngest sister when she started gaming in middle school (I was in grad school at this point). When playing games like Dragon Box 12+ or Twelve a Dozen, my students quickly give up and try to sneak over to play 2048 or decide to take some selfies. However, I have another group of students who become totally immersed in these games. They stop by at lunch and ask if they can borrow my iPad to play Twelve again. They discuss strategy. They’re enthralled by Dragon Box and have even started making connections between the game and algebra tasks. What’s the difference between these two groups?

I know my approach hasn’t been different with them. I introduced the games in the same way, gave the same preview, and provided similar supports when they asked questions. Perhaps it is that one group is 7th graders and one is 6th graders, but I have a second 7th grade group where a majority of the students are more like the 6th grader group–engaged and interested in solving problems. It could have something to do with learned helplessness. It could also have something to do with the students’ respective understandings of what games are, and how their particular learning styles interact with the characteristics of my chosen games, and how my students’ experiences with school frame their educational gaming experiences.

According to Jane McGonigal in her book Reality is Broken, games are defined by four characteristics: a goal, rules, a feedback system, and voluntary participation (p 26). Each of these characteristics impacts a person’s engagement with a game–whether it’s  a board game, a puzzle, an iPad app, or a complex MMORPG.

A Goal

McGonigal defines a goal in a game as the specific outcome a player wants to achieve. This goal, she says, is what gives the player a sense of purpose. In Twelve the goal to get the main character, 12, home after an explosion in the city of Dozonopolis that destroyed the super-computer. In Dragon Box it’s to help the dragon hatch–it will only come out of the box to eat when it is alone on one side of the screen. But the idea of a goal becomes more complex when we’re talking about using games for learning. For example, I have a goal for my students beyond the explicit goal of the game. I want them to sharpen skills and begin to develop answers to our essential questions: How do patterns in the world help us to make meaning and become better learners?, How can I use known information to figure out new information?, and What strategies can I use to work through a problem when I’m stuck? I chose these games specifically because, in addition to having an engaging explicit goal, the implied goals of the games (the learning goals) matched up with my goals for my students. But are the explicitly stated goals of the game enough to give my students a sense of purpose? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. But if they don’t understand the implicit goals, will they be actively engaged with the game enough to achieve the implicit goals? This is where I’m getting stuck.

Rules

I really like McGonigal’s definition of game rules: They place limitations on how one can achieve the goal of the game, forcing gamers to think creatively and apply problem solving skills. This is another point where my students start to get stuck. I posted a while ago about how being comfortable with being uncomfortable, confused, or not knowing was an important skill for students to learn. In both of these games, the rules and obstacles reveal themselves slowly and new rules are added as the games progress. For students who aren’t comfortable with working their way through confusion, these games can be very frustrating. I don’t want to choose different game though. I chose these two specifically because I wanted my students to work on answering essential questions that lead them toward being comfortable with working their way through confusion to be problem solvers. Not having the skills or understanding of problem solving techniques to work their way through this, however, is making it difficult. This is another spot where using games for learning gets tricky.

We often think of games and gamification as a way to pull in reluctant or struggling learners, but as games become more than just a fun way to practice math drills (who around my age that’s reading this didn’t relish the opportunity to play Math Blaster?) or spelling words, some of these students end up at a disadvantage again. And it’s not because they can’t do what’s being asked. Many of these students are proficient problem solvers in other areas: video games, skateboarding, soccer, building go-karts, designing art projects, planning events. It’s possibly because they aren’t comfortable with the possibility of failure and trying again in school. Even if the gaming environment is supposed to be a safe one for making mistakes and for trying and retrying, as McGonigal asserts, the other difficulties many of these students have encountered in school is making these games for learning something that doesn’t connect them to the problem solving that they’re used to, but brings them back to school where they may have learned that not getting it the first time is failure.

The question now becomes: How do I pull these kids in? How do I scaffold this before and during game play so that they can use the games to help build their capacity for problem solving and their tolerance for working through the unknown? Perhaps I should be modeling game play more and talking through how I work my way through obstacles. Maybe we just need more time with non-digital games (which I use a great deal as well and have actually experienced similar challenges with), so I can do more of that modeling. I can also do more to model how in-game supports can help me work through problems and figure out how to work within the rules of the game. For example, Dozen has a hint button, and Duolingo (a gamified language learning app) will translate words for you as you’re going through practice mode if you tap them. I, wrongly, assume that as frequent game players my students understand these types of supports or know to look for them, but that’s not necessarily the case. I think we also need more conversations about growth mindset and about positive self-talk in order to improve their self-regulation skills.

A Feedback System

Feedback systems tell us how close we’re getting to the goal. It can be something as simple as a progress bar or points, to more complex forms of feedback like text or voice feedback. Feedback keeps us engaged in games because it tells us how we’re doing and lets us know if we’re breaking the rules. One thing I have noticed is that the students who are less engaged in the games haven’t necessarily picked up on the feedback that’s being provided. In some cases, it seems like there’s a genuine mismatch between the student’s learning style and the type of feedback they’re receiving. But in others, it seems like I need to do a better job of teaching them how to use the feedback that’s being provided.

I have one student who struggled with Twelve a Dozen. This game has a narrator that gives feedback on your performance, ranging from informing you of new rules or obstacles to overcome to telling the player that it’s time to rewind and try again. The narration is also captioned. The narrator serves several purposes: reconnecting the player to the goal during a long term game, explaining rules, and giving feedback. Since it serves so many functions, it is important to listen to, even if it is a little annoying (think of the Paperclip from older versions of Word, crossed with a fussy British nanny, with a dash of dorky mathematician humor). This child turned off the sound (because he found the narrator annoying and thought it was unnecessary) and didn’t read the captioned version, so he had no idea that he was getting feedback on the way he was trying to solve the problem (“Maybe we should rewind and try something different”). There are also more subtle forms of feedback that my students miss that involve changes in color on the screen or a simple “Yuck” from the dragon in Dragon Box. Players have to be closely attending to a game and be an active participant in the game in order to realize why the dragon is saying “yuck” instead of “yum” and adjust their game-play appropriately.

I’m not sure if the difficulties my students are having using feedback for determine what they’ve learned and what they need to do next is something that they’ll learn through experience, or something I’ll have to teach them. Either way, it seems that in order to learn from gaming, they need to be able to read and take in feedback from the games.

Voluntary Participation

This final characteristic of games is, I think, one of the most important when we want to use games for learning. Being a voluntary participant in a game, according to McGonigal, means that you buy into all of the above and are agreeing to the goal and the rules. And as I said above, my goal for having a student play a game (and the implied goal of the game) may not match up with why a student is playing a game. When that happens, can learning happen? I think so, but it’s more challenging. I think games really have the power to draw learners in and engage them in difficult work in a fun way. But I think we also need to start scaffolding their abilities to engage with the goal, the rules/obstacles and the feedback system in order for them to truly be voluntary participants and use games as tools for learning.

Nearly 2000 words later, I’m still in the same place that I started. I know that games are a powerful tool for learning and that I think they have great potential for engaging my students, but I’m not entirely sure how to make that happen. I think the most helpful thing I can do for them is to keep working with them to build their perseverance and their problem solving skills, as well as do more modeling of how I engage with games and learn from them.

How do you use games for learning in your classroom? Any advice for how to help students become active participants in game play, rather than passive consumers of game entertainment?

Mapping Our Common Ground

Everybody Learns--Common Ground Collaborative
Image from The CGC website

Last week I was privileged to be able to spend three days with a group of passionate, dedicated, international school educators in Miami to talk about a new curriculum initiative, the Common Ground Collaborative. As you saw last week, there was homework and reflection that happened beforehand, and now I’m trying to wrap my head around all of the things that I learned and to figure out what all of my take-aways are.

The Common Ground Collaborative is the closest thing to a grass-roots curriculum movement that I’ve ever had experience with.  It’s a group of educators who saw a need for changing the way teaching and learning happens, and set to work to make that change. I was really struck by how the standards and curriculum framework value all learners and values learners as whole people. Students engage in critical thinking, problem solving (or tackling dilemmas, as Kevin asked us to think of it), and delve deeply into concepts, while simultaneously learning how to learn, and connecting all of this to character development and common ideas and themes that are relevant to all people, called Human Commonalities.

Over the course of three days, we listened to Kevin Bartlett and Simon Gillespie explain the curriculum, engaged in activities and discussions with other educators, both about the theory behind the CGC curriculum, how we can convince our colleagues to get on board, and how, exactly, one makes change happen in a school. We wrote, we talked, we tweeted (although, apparently our hashtag is shared by a Christian youth rally…so you may have to scan through a bit). It was invigorating, intellectually stimulating, and exhausting. I’m so glad to have gone.

As I’ve been thinking through all of this I keep coming back to a couple of key ideas: reframing how we teach, the difference between an authoritative curriculum and an authoritarian curriculum, and, just generally, that change is hard.

Reframing Teaching and Learning
The Triple Helix--Common Ground Collaborative
The Triple Helix. Image Source.

One of the biggest things we discussed was a shift in teaching and learning. The CGC curriculum is a model that says all students can and will learn. This is something I am very passionate about. This is accomplished through defining learning before we design our curriculum. Schools need to have a common understanding of what learning means before we can decide what to teach and how to teach it. CGC defines learning with eight principles (see my responses to those here) and those principles can be distilled into CGC’s tagline: Everyone Learns. I find these principles to be the perfect map for an inclusive school that embraces differentiation and personalization of learning to make school relevant to students.

Instruction is centered on “The 3 Cs” or the “Triple Helix”: conceptual learning, competency learning, and character learning. By defining these three types of learning, and then defining how they are interconnected and spiraled throughout schooling, CGC gives a map not just for defining and designing learning, but for delivering it as well. I want to talk mostly about conceptual and competency learning, but if you want to read more about character learning, see Jen Munnerlyn’s blog post for TIE.

Right now, many schools focus on content (learning facts) rather than focusing on big ideas, or concepts, that cross over multiple disciplines and choosing particular examples to illustrate these concepts. Are the American or French revolutions the only examples of  the concept of “revolution” or “change” that we have? Do they need to be taught for children to understand that concept? Probably not. We can choose any number of revolutions depending on our purposes and where we are. Then, once students have built their understanding of that concept, they’re prepared to understand any number of revolutions and make connections between the concept and new event or piece of knowledge. Focusing our learning on concepts rather than isolated pieces of knowledge, and connecting these concepts to the 8 Human Commonalities defined by the CGC, makes the curriculum relevant to students’ lives.

I get really excited about conceptual learning, but I get even more excited about teaching students how to learn and teaching them skills in an authentic, relevant context. As a Learning Specialist, I see one of the biggest strengths of the CGC curriculum as being the competency learning is embedded in the curriculum. In my experience, most kids need to be taught basic learning skills: research, note taking, genre writing, reading for information, but the kids that end up in my program more so than others. Sure, we learn these things best when we’re able to apply them to an authentic, meaningful task or project, but that doesn’t mean that students will absorb it just by doing it. They need purposeful, sequential instruction that is embedded in these larger tasks. The only way this can happen is if we are teaching a concept (understanding) driven curriculum rather than a content (knowledge) driven curriculum. If we as teachers are focused on covering a curriculum jam-packed with facts, we don’t have time to teach these competencies, these learning skills. This is why all of the stands of the triple helix are essential. They work together to create the space where everybody learns.

Authoritative vs. Authoritarian Curriculum

We often use the words authoritative and authoritarian to talk about classroom management, but as my time with the Common Ground Collaborative in Miami went on, these words kept coming to mind as we discussed the curriculum. I hear from a lot of friends who work in public schools that the curriculum that comes from their school or district often feels prescriptive. “Teacher proof”. They feel like they don’t have the opportunity to do what they do best–deliver instruction to a group of kids, and modify it to meet the needs of that group. Or that there is a particular curriculum put in place and, as Kevin joked, it becomes more like a religion than a curriculum. Because of this, I often hear that curriculum would be better if it were put back in the hands of teachers. That’s why when the idea was presented that teachers shouldn’t be writing curriculum, I was a little taken aback.

There was a great deal of discussion about the fact that Gordon Eldridge (the other mind behind the curriculum) and Kevin outsourced the designing of content standards to experts in the field. The biology conceptual standards, for example, were designed by experts at Sheffield University. My knee-jerk reaction when this idea was that sure, biologists have the best understanding of the concepts, but do they know what’s developmentally appropriate? I’m sure we’ve all experienced curricula that seem to have floated down from some ivory tower without any connection to kids. But when Kevin talked about the back and forth that happened between the experts in content and concepts and a group of teachers, I was impressed. Authorities on a subject matter and authorities on student learning and the delivery of content having a conversation and engaging in a revision process together. Suddenly I realized I was seeing the smart way of creating a curriculum. And even more importantly, a great way of creating a curriculum that teachers and schools can trust, as well as a curriculum that implies a trust of teachers and their expertise.

Rather than being a disconnected, top-down, “do this or else”, “take our test to prove you learned/taught” authoritarian curriculum, CGC has developed a curriculum that has the authoritative weight of experts in content and concepts, and has left the decision about how to deliver the curriculum to those who do it best. Teachers. In particular teachers with a shared understanding of what learning means. Schools and teachers can choose to tweak modules to make them relevant to their learners, connecting different pieces of knowledge to the concepts in the curriculum. It’s a curriculum that’s all about doing what’s best for our students.

Change Is Hard

grumpy change

I think a lot of time was also spent talking about how to get everyone on board. I think almost everyone in the room was in. But how do we get everyone else in? I think that many of us were coming from schools where a lot of the faculty sounds like that Grumpy Cat picture above. Change is scary. It’s sometimes easier to complain about the way things are instead of taking the next steps.

What we need to remember is that change is a slow process. It happens in baby steps. In fits and starts. We start with the tiny changes that will lead to improvements in student learning and student engagement. All of those tiny changes, along with buy-in and accountability from the faculty, will add up to something great.

Maybe I’m too much of an idealist right now– you know, that post-conference or workshop high when everything about education has a rosy glow. But I think we can do it. It will take work to bring the CGC curriculum to life in our school and to get everyone on board with the philosophy. It won’t be easy, but what comes out of it will be great for our students. And that’s what we’re all here for, right?

Being a Reflective Educator: Doing My PD Homework

By Antonio Litterio [CC-BY-SA-3.0], via Wikimedia Commons
By Antonio Litterio [CC-BY-SA-3.0], via Wikimedia Commons
By the time I post this, I’ll be heading to Miami for the CGC Mapping Our Common Ground conference/workshop. As I’m writing this, I’m working on my PD homework. It’s not that I’m not enjoying it–I am. It’s useful, it’s interesting, I can see how it applies to what we’ll be doing at the conference. But  it’s hard to put down The False Prince. Seriously.

There were some articles to read, but there was also a “So What?” activity to complete. A “So What?” activity is a reflection activity that asks participants to think about particular ideas or concepts (What) connect to prior learning and their own experiences (So What?–CGC actually did this part for us, explaining a common definition of each “What”), and then figure out what they will do with these concepts (What Next?). In this case, we were given a list of CGC’s guiding principles with explanations and then we had to reflect on what this meant for ourselves and our school. How can we get there? What do we need to do? What’s the action plan?

I work hard at being a reflective educator, but sometimes it is hard to put in the time during the school year. I reflect on the basics–how my lessons went and how students responded; my interactions with teachers in coaching situations or meeting about students I teach, but the big questions take a the downtime provided by summer to really delve into. I’ve learned a lot by doing this activity and wanted to share some of my reflections with you, since I’m working on not just being a reflective educator, but a connected educator too.

The portions below in regular type are from the CGC “So What” activity. The portion in italics is my reflections on how it relates to my own practice. It was difficult, because this is a conference focused on curriculum planning and development, following a specific learning ecosystem developed by CGC. Since most of my work involves intervention or work with teachers, it was a challenge to think about how

We need to define our learning terms.

“Before we can teach for learning, we need common understandings, simply and practically expressed, about what actually happens when we learn. We believe learning includes conceptual understanding, mastery of competencies and development of character traits and have defined each of these components. We support schools in designing learning based on these definitions.”

My teaching focuses on scaffolding understandings and reteaching to help students master competencies. Helping the school to articulate these competencies and then create plans to help students meet them will be extremely important. 

People can learn how to learn.

The most important advantage we can give students is to support them to become proficient, self-directed learners. Through our Learning Standards, we support the explicit teaching of the competencies that underpin learning, supporting students in becoming the owners and directors of their own learning.

My job is primarily teaching students how to learn, but I want to work to be more transparent about the process, both with students and with my colleagues. What are the gaps that exist and need to be filled in order to teach students to be learners? How do I assess to find the gaps and then create an intervention plan? How to I instill a love of learning while teaching students to learn? I think the last one becomes the most difficult, because often I am asking my students to work on what is hardest for them, and perhaps connecting that to an assignment that doesn’t meet their particular learning needs. However, I really don’t want to use how others are constructing their curriculum for not making changes that need to be made. I’m just not quite sure what to change yet or how to do it.

Learning happens best in rich, relevant contexts.

Learning is more enduring in authentic contexts in which students can engage with issues, dilemmas and perspectives in settings that are meaningful to them. We support embedding the learning of concepts, competencies and character traits in relevant contexts in order to close the gap between the world of curriculum and the world our students actually inhabit.

This is something I struggle with…I do intervention/remediation work. It is largely skills based. The concepts are things like “how do patterns help us make sense of our world”, and lessons largely connect back to what’s happening in the classroom. It makes it difficult to do this, but I know I want to do more. I have been toying with the idea of creating a bunch of broad Learning Lab Essential Questions (like the patterns question above) to help students make connections between what they do in my class and what happens in their other classes. I’m not sure, however, how well this accomplishes making the context “rich and relevant”.

In learning, less really is more.

Content coverage does not equal learning. To learn conceptually, students need to inquire, think and theorize. They need the space to make meaningful connections between ideas. That means selecting sufficient content to support deep, sustained engagement with our three kinds of learning….and no more than that.

How can I create this space in an intervention classroom? Often it means taking a step back from my natural inclination to explain, and the worry that if, in my small group setting, if I’m not up and talking and constantly working with students rather than letting them work somehow I am not doing my job (or others won’t think I’m doing my job–and yes, this has happened and does happen) I think this also means that I need to try to shift teachers’ perspectives of what I do—if a student works on a project with me, I’ll provide guidance, additional scaffolding, graphic organizers, etc, but this doesn’t mean the work will be perfect, and it doesn’t mean I’m constantly hovering over her to make sure she’s getting work done. If I’m doing that it’s my work and not her work.

Learning is personal.

Individuals have different starting points, different interests and will follow different learning pathways. We support personalizing learning to the maximum extent possible, including the provision of appropriate levels of challenge and choice, and the provision of timely, constructive, personalized feedback, along with opportunities to act on that feedback.

My instruction is largely personalized, but how can I make it more so? I think integrating the International Learning Plan (ILP) into the program this year is going to help a lot with that. Last year was my first year, and yes, I assessed and set goals, but without a formal system to track those goals and the progress, I did tend to gravitate toward activities I could do with the whole group, rather than individualizing. I also would like to start harnessing the power of our 1:1 laptop environment to do this as well. I started a bit last year, but would like to do more.

 Everyone has a right to learn.

All people, no matter their learning differences or economic circumstances, should have optimal opportunities to learn. We support inclusive international education and concerted, collaborative efforts among our schools to contribute to the improvement of learning and teaching in locations where there is an expressed need.

Reading this I pretty much did a happy dance and jumped up and down. This is what I want to happen in our school–in all schools. Not that I’m always pro full-inclusion (e.g. is there more harm than good done if one does intensive phonics work with a 5th grader in the class when the rest are well past that or is it better to pull the student out?); however, I think a more inclusive environment puts the responsibility for the success of all students on all teachers.

I need to make more of an effort to work with teachers on how to reach all of the students at our school. This also means beginning to rethink how the school works with students who are having learning differences as well, and look at what is most appropriate for each student. Creating more opportunities for coaching teachers on how to differentiate and discussing students with specific teams (because we’ll have teams next year!) are really important. I’m still working on how to implement this, but I’m excited to try.

Learning is scalable.

The principles that apply to student learning apply also to adult learning and organizational learning. We support schools in applying this belief, bringing consistency and common meaning to processes such as professional learning and organizational change management.

This is a big one for me next year. I get to somewhat be a part of the PD process, since our focus next year is differentiated instruction. I really believe that schools need to make a bigger effort to differentiate their PD. I’ve been working on creating a self-assessment where teachers can rate their level of comfort with specific aspects of differentiation and use that to help guide them toward appropriate PLCs, in-house workshops, and PD experiences outside of school.

Learning is a social activity

While invaluable learning comes from personal reflection and moments of personal insight, we remain a social species. We support schools in creating cultures of sense-making through substantive conversation, encouraging planned, focused team learning and providing opportunities for students to lead learning conversations with their peers.

I really want to create more opportunities for students in my intervention classes to work together. I’ve done things like peer teaching, having a student who grasps a concept well teach another, and I often do group discussions about why particular strategies are effective, but how can I go beyond this? I tried something new this past year when I was teaching persuasive writing and added debate, having the students closely read an article together and then construct an argument as a group on an assigned POV, then the groups tried to persuade the other. Afterward the students planned and wrote their persuasive paragraphs for the side that they thought was the most convincing. I want to spend some time thinking about where I can integrate more of this. Writing is a natural point in intervention work to make this happen, but where else can I create space for learning that is social?

I’m really excited for a few days of collaboration, learning, and looking for deeper answers to these questions, and I’m can’t wait to share all of the new ideas and learnings that I’m sure will come from the conference.

How do you work at being a reflective educator?

Any answers to the questions above? Advice for me as I try to make my ideas into reality?