Text

|
Where is the line that determines when “being out of the classroom” makes someone’s work with educators irrelevant? 6 months out? 1 year? 5 years? - Brendan Jones' Tweet

Coming up to three years out of the classroom and not being based in a school, I am often left thinking about what this means for my identify as a teacher. Although I still work within education, my current title of ‘subject matter expert‘ seems a long way from the classroom. This is something that I have been pondering for a while. Here then are some thoughts focused on three questions: legitimacy, context and relevance.

A Question of Legitimacy

A colleague recently put out the request for schools to invite them into their school as the experience of being in the classroom apparently provides ‘legitimacy’. For me, this is always the dilemma with working in a central organisation across a number of schools. Although you may have up-to-date content knowledge, this is not always based on lived experience. As I have contended elsewhere, I am doing ‘real’ work, however the question that remains is whether this work is ‘legitimate’ to be called ‘a teacher’?

The Cambridge Dictionary defines ‘legitimacy’ as “reasonable and acceptable.” Therefore, is the work my colleagues and I do reasonable and acceptable to be called a ‘teacher’? I have heard some use the word ‘transactional’ to derogatorily describe the tasks that we complete. This is based on the observation that many of the processes are seemingly repetitious and methodical. I have lived this label before when I was report report coordinator, timetabler and all-round data guy within a school. The problem I have with this is that simply labelling such actions as transactional is that although the outcome maybe set, there are often variables at play when it comes to the process. This variables demand a sense of perspective and empathy to the lived experience.

A Question of Context

An example of such a transaction is my recent work supporting schools with the loading of literacy data into the central repository. One of my many hats. We had created a guide that walked people through the process. However, as more and more schools made contact it became apparent that there were many assumptions at play. Whether it be user access within the system, expectations based on past habits or working through various data errors, each of these issues needed to be contended with patiently, especially as the problem was not always evident to the user at the other end. Although it is easy to step back now and breakdown some of the difficulties faced, how to improve such transactions in the future is not always clear.

In some ways the recording of data needs to be covered in training. The problem with this though is that currently such workshops are mash together of different focuses and needs. Added to the mix is the reality that every school context is different. In the case of literacy data, for some schools it is the responsibility of someone in administration who enters the results, for others it is the learning and teaching leader, or even the literacy coordinator. This all depends on the school and the outcome desired. However, the training workshops are usually aimed at those working in administration, because they are usually in-charge of ‘transactional’ matters.

In an ideal world, school users would be able to call on their prior knowledge to debug any issues. However, the templated nature of the technology neither allows nor encourages any notion of heutagogy and self-learning. Rather than working things out, people often fall back on guides, only then to scream out in frustration (usually on the phone) when nothing makes sense.

A Question of Relevance

Coming at the question of identify from a different perspective, Brendan Jones reflects on the world of conferences and professional development specialists wondering about the relevance of those outside of the classroom?

I think this is an interesting question. In part, it makes me think about teaching VCE English. I have not taught it for a few years, having worked in a P-9 college for much of my career. However, I feel that I could easily step back into that environment. I assume that there would be changes in the curriculum that I would need to grapple with, but I do not feel that my experience is irrelevant.

In regards to conferences, questioning the relevance of presenters speaks as much to our expectations from such situations. Even if a facilitator is currently practicing within a classroom, they will not be the one to deliver the outcomes within the school so relevancy does not always seem the prime concern. In addition to this, there are some areas where no amount of knowledge and experience is going to achieve anything as the topic or technique in question has never been tackled before.

There are also times when I think classroom experience and content knowledge is itself something of a distraction. I think that this can be the case with coaching, where the focus is on the questions, coachees and a culture of curiousity. I think that Tomaz Lasic captures this in response to Jones’ tweet.

I am not sure if I am still a ‘teacher’? However, one thing that has not changed is that I care. As Dave Cormier suggests:

Once we jointly answer questions like “why would people care about this” and “how does this support people starting to care about this for the first time” and “will this stop people who care now from caring”, we have a place to work from.

This means having empathy for whoever it is that I am working with, being mindful of their context and identifying how I may support. This was how I approached teaching and it does not differ now.

As always, any thoughts and questions are welcome.

Text

|
There's always gonna be another mountain I'm always gonna wanna make it move Always gonna be an uphill battle Sometimes I'm gonna have to lose Ain't about how fast I get there Ain't about what's waiting on the other side It's the climb Miley Cyrus ‘The Climb’

A reflection on my mother passing away and the song that will always take me back to that moment in life.

My mother would have been 60 on Saturday if she had not past away in 2014. I knew the moment was coming. She had been told months before that she had cancer. Although there were ‘options’ for treatment, there were no promises. There never is I guess. However, there was a part of me that was somewhat in denial. I was thinking not her, not now. Not only did I have my own young family, but my brother and sister were still at school.

I remember receiving the call that my mother had been moved to the palliative care unit. No longer able to speak or move, she was in her last moments. Nothing prepared me for this, especially not Hollywood. We were told she could pass at any moment. However, hours past by and she was still holding on We were asked if we wanted to stay or come back in the morning. My sister and I decided to stay, while everyone else left.

After spending time brushing our mother’s hair and wetting her lips, we started reminicing. I asked my sister what she thought our mother’s favourite song was. Having left home years earlier, all I really knew was that it wasn’t any of my music. Although I had grown up listening to her Whitney Houston CDs, that seemed like a world away and I could not remember her listening to it since I was child. My sister said that she liked the track ‘The Climb’ from the Hannah Montana film, something they had watched together.

In a world before streaming (or at least I had not gotten into it), I purchased the track on iTunes. We played it on repeat and listened until my mother eventually took her last gasp and left this world.

One day a few months later, I was teaching. For some reason the audio of the iPad I was using with students glitched and started playing. Being prior to when everyone was gifted U2’s Songs of Innocence, it played the only song I had in my library, The Climb. I stood mortified, I nearly lost it. I quickly opened the iPad, stopped the track and composed myself. The issue was that at that time I did not feel like going into any detail with the students. Other than a few odd looks, I managed to avoid any questions and kept on teaching.

When I think about my ‘changing track’, there is a part of me wishes it were something hip and happening. However, like family, we do not always choose our tracks. The Climb will always be that track that takes me back to that moment when my life changed forever.

Text

|
Quote from Edward Snowden's Permanent Record

There is something both strange and familiar about Permanent Record, Edward Snowden’s autobiography. The book traces Snowden’s story to now. Whether it is being mesmerised by his father’s Commodore 64, pulling apart a Nintendo as a six year old, growing up online, hacking his education by acing tests, but refusing to submit homework, automating work wherever possible or teaching others about the web, each act recounted is seemingly fated to produce the same extricable outcome – Snowden’s revelations NSA’s surveillance of the world and his life since.

Although raised in a world away from my own, there was something relate-able about growing up during the same time. Whether it be my own hand-me-down Apple IIe and then a Nintendo, I too was lucky enough to grow up with and alongside technology. However, I have never quite taken this fascination to the point where I truly appreciate the ghosts in the machine as Snowden has. Although venturing on the web at school and tinkered with my own computer, my family did not get the internet til late and I did not really grow-up in message boards. There seems to be something privileged about those who were on the early web. This maybe what helped created the close sense of community. (Listen to Howard Rheingold’s interview on the Modern Learners Podcast for an example.)

Although Permanent Record talks a lot about technology, it is far from just another technological book. Even with the discussions about privacy, content and metadata, this is not so much about ‘how to’, but rather a why. For me, the book is first and fore-mostly about humans, society and democracy. Therefore, I think it is best considered as a meditation on the world we want today and tomorrow.

Text

|
A quote from Nassim Nicholas Taleb's book ‘Black Swans’ describing our tendency to avoid randomness

Technology offers many opportunities. The challenge is sometimes how to make the most of these. Thinking of things from a system perspective, the desire to scale is often in contrast the reality of each school context.

Todd Rose opens his book, End of Average, with a discussion of the early fighter jets and the design of the cockpit around the ‘average’ pilot. He tells the story of Gilbert Daniels, a researcher who explored this problem in the 1950’s. Daniels measured ten dimensions, including height, chest and sleeve length. What he found, once he had averaged out all the measurements, was that an average pilot does not exist.

The tendency to think in terms of the ‘average man’ is a pitfall into which many persons blunder … It is virtually impossible to find an average airman not because of any unique traits in this group but because of the great variability of bodily dimensions which is characteristic of all men.source

Rose’s book unpacks this further, but again and again he comes back to the principal;

If you want to design something for an individual, then the average is completely useless.

Lately, my work has been focused on supporting schools with reporting and assessment. The application I support is very flexible, utilising Crystal Reports to produce the final product. Usually it is set up on a school-by-school basis, however we are deploying a multi-tenanted environment. With this comes the opportunity to create a solution that can be used for each of our schools, without having to go through the rigmarole of development from scratch each time.

My work has focused on creating a template that acts as a starting template of subjects and assessment items that feeds into the Crystal Reports. This was built on-top of the standardised configuration. The thought was that this would save users time in setting up their reports. It was easier to start with something, rather than build from scratch. However, the learning that has stemmed from setting up a number of schools is that no one has used this average starting point. There is nothing wrong with the underlying configuration, but it is often easier and quicker to build from the various solutions from scratch.

My first response to this was to create a second starting point that was dependent on the style of reporting that particular school was after. Although this alleviated the challenges associated with some of the differences, this still required somebody to add and delete various elements.

This all reminded me of Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s discussion of anchoring in his book Black Swans. Anchoring is a bias used for working around unknown possibilities. It involves reducing complexity by focusing on a particular object:

A classical mental mechanism, called anchoring, seems to be at work here. You lower your anxiety about uncertainty by producing a number, then you “anchor” on it, like an object to hold on to in the middle of a vacuum.

In my case, this object was the initial setup. We have since started exploring a different approach, which instead focuses on users working with the various dimensions. The hope is to provide some constraint, but also flexibility within this, rather than assuming that all schools are alike.

This all has me thinking. Too often the conversation around technology is around efficiency – replacing work and saving time. However, my experience with supporting schools with setting up reports, timetables and attendance, and technology in general, has me feeling it often changes things. This touches on the reality that technology is a system. In saving in once spot, it often adds to another. As always, comments welcomes.

Text

|
This is the feature image including a quote from Tim Klapdor

Andrea Stringer recently wrote a post about the people who inspire you. Rather than write a list of names, which is often the way with such movements as #FollowFriday, Stringer summarises the characteristics of those who inspired her and who she aspires to be:

  • Successful without sacrificing integrity
  • Place people before profit
  • Generous with their time
  • Build relationships & connections (established & new)
  • Listen to understand, not to respond.
  • It’s not always about what you can do for them.
  • Genuine & Authentic. How they act in public is who they are.

Stringer’s post and list had me thinking about two things. Firstly, how I myself stacked up against those characteristics? How successful have I been? At what? Am I still generous? As my family has grown this has become a challenge. Being less active on social media and more focused on comments and my commonplace book, I would like to think I listen to understand, but I am never quite sure.

The second wonder was what it means to be connected today? I have long been an advocate of being a connected educator, however I am not sure what happened? In recent times it feels like things have changed. Maybe it is me? Leaving the classroom to work in an administrative role three years has changed my position? Or maybe it is just connected education in general? Maybe the focus around online communities of practice has changed? Maybe the platforms have changed? Maybe people have changed? Maybe people move beyond paywalls and closed spaces? All in all, it just felt like an itch I could not scratch.

Dai Barnes’ sudden passing brought this all to the fore again. I did not know Dai in person, our connection was online, yet he felt like an integral part of my personalised learning network. In particular, he came into my world through the TIDE Podcast. I listened to each and every episode. I was always left thinking, reflecting and wondering. The perspective that Doug Belsaw and Dai brought together always felt novel and refreshing. I once reflected that each episode was like going to the pub for a quiet Sunday session only to be surprised:

I think that TIDE is akin to turning up to a shabby pub on a Sunday afternoon, thinking that you are just going to have a causal conversation about this and that, only to discover a session of drinking craft beer. The session seems to drag on into the night and somehow evolves into finishing things off with a glass of top-shelf single-malt whiskey.

The particular memory that will stay with me is of Dai recounting a job interview for a deputy head position in Episode 117. A part of the process involved modelling a lesson. For this he looked at creating a social credit system in school. In a conversation towards the end of the lesson, one student touched on the problem where a student may have built up so much credit at the end of year that they could do anything. Dai recounted how he continued this conversation, suggesting that you could even jump on the table. The next minute he found himself caught in the moment and subsequently “jumping on the table like Jesus.” Needless to say, he did not get that job.

Link to audio

What I liked about Dai was his seemingly carefree attitude and openness. He would say it as he saw it even if it ran counter to sentiment. He was not wedded to any ideas and technology in particular. Thinking about various problems, I would often wonder what would Doug and Dai say?

If TIDE was a Sunday session that seemed to drag on without realising it. For me Dai’s sudden passing was like having a moment where one of the party vomits and you just don’t feel like drinking anymore. I will miss Dai dulcet tones and his unique perspective. As Tim Klapdor suggested:

Dai made a dent in the universe, its shaped just like his bare foot.

This has reminded me that being a connected does matter, but that I have probably need to thank those people in my community that I have come to take for granted. If there is anything to come out of this it is to tell those around you why they matter.

Text

|
The power of query in sorting out data in Sheets

One of the challenges we have within the project I am currently a part of is that we have never had a contextual reference point for school information. Although different teams have had various lists floating around, we needed one that we owned as a whole. Added to this, the lists were often kept in an Excel spreadsheet meaning nobody ever really knew if they had the definitive version. Being an organisation that uses Google, I suggested to a colleague that we work together to develop a spreadsheet in Google Sheets and share a link with colleagues. Here then are some of the steps we have taken in developing this:

Data in, Data Out

If there is one thing that I have learnt from Ben Collins’ work, it is the importance of cleaning up your data before you do anything else. This includes avoiding merged cells, an issue we had with older versions of the data. The focus was creating a dataset with each cell telling a particular story. Other than using CTRL+ENTER to separate the different parts of addresses and locking the header, there was no formatting applied to the core data.

We were also deliberate with how we collated the information. With 40+ columns, we spent some time splitting the data into four groups – details, contacts, administration and learning – with empty columns at the end of each in case additional fields needed to be added at a latter date. Although I wanted to use Google Forms to structure all this, we decided not to because of the fluid nature of the dataset. There are also times when we wanted to be able to update the data in bulk for various reasons.

Ranges, Imported and Named

So that people  were able to access the information, a second document was set up, with the data brought in via the IMPORTRANGE formula.

=IMPORTRANGE("https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz/edit", "CONTACTS!A1:CA500")

This meant that the wider team could have access to the content, without messing up the original data. Although we could have restricted access to the tab or range in the source document, I was concerned that this would be fiddly to maintain, therefore chose a separate document altogether.

With the IMPORTRANGE, I imported this into a sheet and created a named range to reference this.

MAIN!A1:BE500

I tried to embed the IMPORTRANGE within my formulas, but for some reason it would not work, even after I gave permission. Therefore, I resorted to simply bringing in a copy working with this. I also thought then there is only one external call running.

Different Data for Different Purposes

Once I had my data in place, I used a QUERY to reorganise it. In addition to having a single point of reference, my argument to my colleague was that we can represent this data in different ways depending on the purpose. As David Krevitt explains:

QUERY combines all of the capabilities of arithmetic functions (SUM, COUNT, AVERAGE) with the filtering abilities of a function like FILTER.

Using the QUERY formula I created a copy of the core data removing any blank columns.

=QUERY(MAIN,"SELECT B,C,E,D,F,G,J,K,L,M,N,O,P,Q,R,S,T,U,V,Y,Z,AA,AB,AC,AD,AE,AI,AJ,AK,AL,AM,AN,AO,AP,AQ,AR,AS,AT,AZ WHERE C IS NOT NULL ORDER BY B")

As I set the data up with space to grow, I used

WHERE C IS NOT NULL

This removed any blank rows. I also used

ORDER BY B

As this column contained the school numbers (i.e. E1234). In order to get this to work, we removed the E from the source document and used the custom formatting to add the E back to the number, while also being able to sort numerically.

In addition to the main list, I created a number of specific queries, focusing on things such as pay periods, business managers and applications being used.

=QUERY(ICON, "SELECT B,C WHERE X = 'Yes' ", -1)

I tried to make a query where the user would tick a checkbox associated with the information required, but could not figure how to create a variable associated with the SELECT function.

Custom Lookups

Another way of engaging with the data was to focus on a particular school. To do this I created a series of VLOOKUP formulas revolving around the E number which was strategically placed in the first column of the dataset.

=VLOOKUP(B$2,vLookup,5,FALSE)

In the cell above, B2 is the cell where the school number is entered and 5 is the column for the information to be displayed. I then repeated this formula for all the other information to be displayed.

Another use was to create a lookup for the business managers associated with the different schools.

=VLOOKUP(A2,BM!Z1:AH500,2,FALSE)

This involved making a new named range with the name of the business manager in the first column. I also used data validation restricted to the names in the dataset.

I also then combined this search key with the QUERY formula to display the list of schools and their core information:

=QUERY(MAIN,"Select B,C,E,J,AZ WHERE Z = '"&$A$2&"' ORDER BY B")

Mix and Match Formatting

In order to make the data a bit more friendly, I added some conditional formatting. The challenge was that I wanted different colours for different groups of schools. I did this using the school number as the reference:

=left($A2,2)=”E1″

I then used an even formula to break up the lists:

=ISEVEN(ROW())

By placing the even conditional formula at the top of the list, this means that it is prioritised.

I have included this all here as a reference. I am not sure this is much use to anyone. As always, thoughts and questions welcome.

Text

|
The more leaders focus their relationships, their work, and their learning on the core business of teaching and learning, the greater will be their influence on student outcomes.

Sometimes it feels like some work is more important than others, but at the end of the day it is all real work.

An old colleague and I were recently discussing work and he shared the joy of doing what he termed ‘real work’ with schools. I stopped him in his tracks and explained that I understood where he was coming from. Working with teachers has always felt more meaningful, that it has more of an impact. However, I pointed out to him that the work that I do is no less real than his work.

Supporting student systems and those in administration, I have come to realise how much we often take for granted in regards to how schools run today. I was speaking to a coordinator at a school the other day about the various services and subscriptions they use. He explained that when there is a new student they need to be loaded into six different services. Technology is more than just a tool it is a complex set of connections that builds up over time.

One of the arguments for ‘real’ work is the ability to impact student outcomes. As Vivianne Robinson argues in her book, Student Centred Leadership,

The more leaders focus their relationships, their work, and their learning on the core business of teaching and learning, the greater will be their influence on student outcomes.

Although it may sometimes seem like a challenge to link some of my work back to the core business of learning and teaching students, I still think it is possible.

For example, one of the elements of the project I am working on is to provide schools a data analytics tool that supports teachers and leaders in making informed decisions. The challenge with this is that there are a lot of dependencies associated with it. For example, there is a dependency on schools having a recorded timetable. Although this is common for secondary schools, it is not so common for primary schools. I have therefore done a significant amount of work to limit how long this exercise takes. In regards to learning and teaching, this has the indirect impact of then allowing schools to spend more time focusing on learning and teaching.

The work that I do has many focuses. Sometimes it is about supporting simple transactions, other times it is about everyday efficiencies. Sometimes it is about helping schools reflect upon particular workflows to ease their workload, other times it is about improving a process, such as the creation of timetables. All of this though is real work that ends up having some sort of impact on student learning in the end.

What do you think? Is there some work that is more real than others? As always, thoughts and comments welcome.

Text

|
In our bid to have happy kids, I wonder what we might be robbing from them later in life?

This is another reflection on the lessons learnt about education from being a parent. This time it is the importance of trust.

At the swimming centre where my daughters have lessons there are two instructors who walk around while the lessons are on. They serve a number of roles. Whether it be providing suggestions to support the development of the swimmers, coordinating lessons and overseeing the safety of those in the pool.

During a recent lesson, one of the instructors came and spoke with me about my youngest daughter. She said that she wanted to move her up to the next class. Out of interest, I asked her why. She explained that she felt my daughter would benefit from being with older students and no longer needed the shallow pool. She then asked if that was ok with that?

I was a little taken aback by the question. I was fine with my daughter moving up. I was also fine if she stayed in the group she was currently in. The reality is that in this situation, I can only trust those in and out of the pool. Although I may ask where my daughter’s development is at and whether there is anything my wife and I could do to support her, I do not feel there is anything achieved in questioning the decision of the educators at hand.

I feel the same way about the classroom. In today’s age of fear, we worry about the ‘best’ teacher and the effect size associated with the ‘right’ teacher. I remember working in country town a few years ago where parents would move their children to a different school if they got the ‘wrong’ teacher. The problem I have is that sometimes the best teacher is a supported teacher. My daughter’s classroom teacher will often spend more time with her than my wife and I. In my opinion hovering around a teacher or the school creates an situation of stress and anxiety for all involved. I love how Dan Haesler captures this in regards to protecting children from any sort of risk:

Dan Haesler's take on helicopter parenting

I think we need to trust teachers rather than moving students around the market. Maybe this is just me? Maybe in time I may change my mind? As always, thoughts welcome.

Text

|
What if you stopped thinking about your ideas as things you need to let out of you, but things you need to let in to you? Things you need to be ready to receive? Austin Kleon ‘It’s not inside you trying to get out, it’s outside you trying to get in’

Things have been a little quiet here of late. I have started jotting down a few thoughts, but never quite finished anything. This feels a bit strange having written nearly 400+ pieces since starting this blog in 2013. I have been wondering if this is simply about time and energy, as work and home have been a little hectic lately. Although, this has never stopped me before. I have been wondering if maybe this is a part of the development of the blog, with a move to collecting and curating, rather than longer pieces of reflection. However, a recent post from Austin Kleon had me rethinking my reason for blogging.

Discussing the work of Tom Waits and Nick Cave, Austin Kleon argues that songs are best understood as coming from the outside, rather than from within. The challenge we have is being open to receive the inspiration when it comes. Thinking about ideas in general, this had me wondering about blogging as an exercise of being open to the outside. For example, Clive Thompson’s book Smarter Than You Think, he talks about the way the same ideas have occurred to different people at the same time:

The things we think about are deeply influenced by the state of the art around us: the conversations taking place among educated folk, the shared information, tools, and technologies at hand.

These opportunities are there if we are willing to accept them.

Activities, such as #28daysofwriting, #Blimage, DS106 Daily Create, Ontario Daily Extend, Microcasts and #LookDown can be helpful in providing structured opportunities to let ideas in. However, it is also about being a flaneur. As Ian Guest explains:

The flâneur is more of a serendipitous explorer, receptive to whatever comes along. They are a combination of curious explorer (having no goal other than to experience city life), critical spectator (balanced analyst, seeing beauty, but aware of social inequities), and creative mind (an interpreter who renders the urban landscape legible).

Rather than worrying about letting blog posts out, I wonder if my issue lately has been a confusion about what to actually let in. As Kin Lane touches upon,

[Blogging] is an essential part of making sense of the world as it moves by me so fast, putting it somewhere that I can continue to reference and learn from in the future.

Moving forward, I think my challenge is not reading, viewing, listening and walking, but being open to ideas on offer. As I write this, I am reminded of Bjork’s song All is Full of Love:

Maybe not from the sources
You have poured yours
Maybe not from the directions
You are staring at
Twist your head around
It’s all around you
All is full of love
All around you
Text

|
The more we immerse ourselves in the unexpected – like visiting different grade levels or subject areas – the more we benefit and can see possibilities for our own “classroom worlds”. Amy Burvall ‘PD Walkabout’

When it comes to change and transformation, a strategy often used to support the process is the classroom visit. The question though is whether the greatest benefit of such walkthroughs and observations is the feedback provided to the teacher or what we learn as an observer? This post was prompted by David Hopkins’ #OpenBlog19 series.

Alexis Wiggins, the daughter of the late Grant Wiggins, shared a reflection on her experience of shadowing a 10th and 12th grade students across two days. The focus was not on providing feedback for teachers, as is often the case, but instead on empathising with the learner. Her revelation was that high school students spend a majority of their time sitting passively and listening. In response, Wiggins left with a range of thoughts about what she would change in her own classroom, such as providing time to stretch, offer brief mini-lessons and dig into personal experiences.

Approaching feedback from the perspective of leadership, Peter DeWitt discusses some of the focuses associated with walkthroughts. This includes cooperative learning vs. cooperative seating or surface level vs. deep level questioning. In conclusion, DeWitt suggests that,

Too many times the success of walkthroughs is a myth because they focus on compliant behavior, and making sure te huachers are covering curriculum. Walkthroughs will be much more successful if they bring about deep learning on the part of students, teachers and the leaders who are doing them.”

What stands out for me is that, like Wiggins, DeWitt’s focus is on learning for all.

Continuing with the idea of learning, Amy Burvall explores the opportunities to engage with and give feedback to colleagues from disparate areas. The intent is to open ourselves to the serendipity. As she states:

The point is I think the more we immerse ourselves in the unexpected – like visiting different grade levels or subject areas – the more we benefit and can see possibilities for our own “classroom worlds”.

Through such strategies as the ‘Wow, How, Now’, Burvall demonstrates the benefits to being open to others.

Exploring effective teaching, Jason Borton discusses how giving all teachers the opportunity to participate allows for ownership over their own accountability.

Raising the performance of our entire teaching team is the focus as well as each teacher taking individual responsibility for improving their implementation of quality teaching practices.

With different teachers released each week, the focus is on collective feedback. However, on the flipside of this, each teacher is then given the opportunity to learn and reflect.

As someone who visits a lot of different schools it is not my play to provide feedback as to how things are. Like a flaneur, I am instead interested the lessons I can learn. Sometimes the best feedback is what we learn as an observer and self-determined learner, I think this is where coaching is so powerful.

As always, intrigued in your thoughts and learnings. Comments welcome.