Teachers Guild

I have not written for a while. Inspiration is everywhere but the will to sit down and write sometimes is not! But I want to tell you about Teacher's Guild - so time to warm up the keyboard!

I discovered Teacher's Guild (TG) this summer, and had a blast! TG is the result of a partnership between IDEO and Riverdale Country School, and I received an email asking if I would like to join the Beta version during the summer. I answered yes and was invited to join a Google Hangout (GHO), which I did.

Here's how it works: the Guild posts a challenge and you are invited to come up with, develop and select ideas to address the challenge. The process is structured in phases: Discover, Ideate, Evolve, Select, Favorites and Reflect.

You will often start with your own idea,  and you will read other people's ideas, soon there are self-selecting teams forming around ideas and developing them, and you find yourself working with people who are enthusiastic and curious and creative and fun - remember, these are people you have never met! And, you are not just working on your idea - you may be working to develop several ideas.

I really enjoyed working on them with typically about seven people, sometimes more. I was surprised how much fun we had, and how committed people were to the process - remember, everyone is doing this because the want to. The discussions were amazing and rewarding. The Guild is a place that I found that the children and the learning community is center and front.

The specific question we were looking at was, "How might we create rituals and routines that establish a culture of innovation in our classrooms and schools?" and we brainstormed, we streched our minds and we worked hard as a team to answer a common question.

We started at the Discovery phase with 210 contributions, at the Ideate phase we had 121, followed by Evolve and Select with 51 then we had Favourites with 13 ideas. From this 13 ideas, 6 were from the NYC Design Team, the team I now belong to!

We don't have ownership of ideas, we have sharedship and I must tell you sharedship is AWESOME.

Check the Guild out:

Teachers Guild

There will be a new Challenge in October, and we would love to see you there! Let's collaborate, it is a safe place, your mind will be stretched, you'll meet some great people, and you'll have fun!

I Wonder & iTravel

I have been teaching kindergarten for quite a while now. Let's say that when I started teaching, telephones were not cordless, we had televisions where you had to stand up to change the channel, portable music meant a "Walkman," and hi-fi music was on vinyl.

The world is in constant change, and so are the children. Some people believe that if you teach the same year over and over you can simply fall into a routine... and that is so not true. The curriculum may continue to be the same, but the children are not.

The presentation of the curriculum must be adapted from year to year according to the needs and preferences of the children. 

Last year my classroom was mainly populated by firstborn children: this year I have lots of siblings. Last year, "Percy the Park Keeper" was the preferred book; this year they prefer the "Large Family" collection. Last year they wanted to "Wonder" about things, while this year they want to experience them.

So instead of "I Wonder," we will have "iTravel" on Fridays. Every other Friday the children will find the classroom chairs lined up in rows, like seats in an airplane. We will take the children, in their imaginations, to another country. We will have preflight briefings, and suitcases, and passports, to make it more vivid (the suitcases and passports are made out of cornflake boxes). Up on the board they will see where they are going, on a map, and we'll talk about how far away it is.

When landing, they will get their suitcases and passports and line up to go through passport control and get stamps on their passports, and they will be greeted by someone in the language of that country. After that the country guide will be waiting for them, to take them to see something representative of the country. (As you can imagine, I will play multiple roles during all this!) 

The children will mail a postcard from "the country" (actually from the school, of course!) to their parents, telling them where they have been. 

iTravel is based on an awesome book, which has all sorts of great ideas for us to use:

iTravel's launch generated enthusiasm from the children that exceeded anything we had expected. They LOVED being on the airplane, and lining up with their passports, and doing Flamenco dancing and saying "ole!"

During all this fun, we do have some sneaky ulterior motives. You see, we can slip many of the learning objectives for the year into the iTravel theme. For example, one of the things we talk about early in the year is "All About Me," where each child can talk about themselves, including where they are from, where their parents are from, what they eat there, what holidays their families celebrate, and what their country's flag looks like. We talk about "friendship" and "citizenship," and we talk about "processes" (such as getting on the plane, flying, getting off the plane, going through immigration...). 

Toward the end of the year, we will pull it all back in again to ask, "Where Are We?" We will zoom in, from looking at the whole world, to look at the United States, and then New York, and then to our own neighborhoods. We will talk about what makes a neighborhood, how they are similar and different, what all neighborhoods need, and the people in our neighborhoods and what they do.

We must reinvent ourselves every year and make learning interesting and above all FUN!

Happy travels!

57 flavours?

Last summer I attended two courses* in London. One thing that struck me quite forcibly, while there, was how teachers’confidence seems to reach a low point after a certain number of years on the job: even though they want to, they feel they can no longer grow because they feel the system they work within - no matter what it is - limits them.

On both courses we were told we would be asked to share "nuggets" of knowledge with each other at the end. I quickly identified the "nugget" I wanted to share, but as the course went on and I saw myself and my colleagues as students, I realized I was going to change it!

The original "nugget" came from an experience I had last year, when my good friend Adriana and I took an online course on Differentiation. One of the assignments we had to do was based on a Malcolm Gladwell essay on spaghetti sauce (seriously!).

Gladwell told how, for many years, makers of spaghetti sauce had tried to find the "perfect" sauce. They did surveys, they compared which sauces people preferred, and they gradually arrived at a point where they were all selling almost exactly the same sauce, which they thought of as the "best".

But then a marketer had a new idea. What if, he thought, there was a group of people who would prefer a different type of sauce? Then he could prepare a sauce to suit their taste and, even though most people would prefer the usual sauce, he would have the best sauce for those people! He tried it, and he was right - and successful. With each new sauce he could "pick off" the customers who were "odd" enough to think this new sauce was better than the "best" sauce. As the big sauce companies saw what he was doing, they all did the same. By designing different sauces, they could satisfy their customers’ tastes even better than they could with one sauce. Even though a relatively small number of people preferred any particular one of the new sauces, for those people it was better than the "best". Today, of course, there are tens of different spaghetti sauces, and each of us can select the one we prefer.

When I got to the course in London and was told I would have to share a "nugget"' I thought I would share that one. Now, most teachers (including Adriana and I), when they read that essay, think of the students as the product, the spaghetti sauces. Each one is different, and that’s what is so special about them, and as a teacher you have to be able to cater to all of them. But as I sat in a classroom in London, a student instead of a teacher for the week, I saw the story a little differently, and it changed the way I presented it at the end.

I now proposed this interpretation: the children are the customers, and the school is a brand (like, say, Barilla), and we, the teachers, are the spaghetti sauces, the products. The school wants to add each of us to its collection because each of us has something they cannot find in any product (teacher!) they already have. When they hired us, it was because we were the best complement, among all the teachers they interviewed, to the portfolio of teachers they already had. We were the perfect new product, the missing flavor! Each of us brings something unique, something that no other teacher in the school already has, something that adds a little "zing!" to the brand and rounds it out.

But as soon as this new product arrives, it encounters other products and sees that it is different to them, that it doesn’t really "fit in". We need to remember that the new product is there because it is different. We don’t need to be the same as the other products. We cannot forget that the brand does not need us to be the same as each other; it needs us to be a little different, so that we can satisfy the customers' different needs - whether for content, or teaching style, or personality. And, of course, we must never forget that each of us is an amazing product, one the school has selected for our uniqueness.

* The courses were,“Inquiry-Based Learning in the International Classroom,“ and “Classroom Assessment Strategies,“ at the Teacher Training Centre in Each ran for 5 days, from July 1-5 and from July 7-11.