100 Posts in 100 Days
This post will go live on June 15, 2022, the last day of the 2021-2022 school year at Graded. What a ride it has been! At any given moment, it has felt like the longest year ever. Weirdly, it also has felt like yesterday was the first day of the school year.
The concept that started this whole “100 Posts in 100 Days” was a prompt to think back on your year and consider 5 or so things that were big accomplishments. So, here’s my list, written with an important caveat. The “my” is because I am selecting and writing the list. The work, however, was “ours”. It represents the collective work of many, many people.
Deeper Learning Foundations
Course @ Graded
Our team of 4 Deeper Learning Coaches and 2 Curriculum Coordinators designed and delivered a 10 week course to 104 Graded faculty members. Teachers attended in small cohort groups, so the team taught the course 7 times, amounting to 63 days and 378 hours of face-to-face instruction coupled with over 1,040 coaching hours with teachers and students. 104 tailored inquiry cycles around common themes. The impact on our school is demonstrable. The emerging feedback and program evaluation results are indicating a measurable impact on student learning. We have built so much momentum and set a high bar for ourselves for next year. Go team TLC! 🙌
AMISA Educator’s Conference 2022, The Science of Learning: Educating Hearts & Minds
A conference 2 years in the making. Graded was slated to be the host school in March 2020, but then….COVID and a cancelled event. March 2022 was a different story. We opened our campus to 400 educators from around South and Central America. We gathered together and heard keynote talks from Dr. Doug Fisher and Dr. Derrick Gay. In my humble opinion, though, it was our ttwo Graded students and our team of 5th grade teachers who issued the challenge to create learning environments characterized by personalization, meaning, challenge, and relevance and also provided the inspiration to walk out the gym doors and make it happen. In a word, poignant. My tip to anyone planning a conference like this: get your students and teachers on stage. No one keeps it real like they do! As we say in Portuguese, “Parabens”! 🙌
Creating a Culture of Feedback
While not a discrete event like the previous two items on my list, this may be the most significant in impacting our school culture and the one with most potential to keep doing so. On 56 of those 63 days of face-to-face instruction in Deeper Learning Foundations, our team actively solicited and received feedback from our teacher participants. We immediately read every single piece of feedback, we shared the results with the groups the next day, and we made adjustments to our work based on what we learned. Not only did we ask for honest, constructive feedback, we absorbed it, talked about it, shared it, and celebrated the dialogic nature. In the process, we built trust and set an example. Our ritual and routine worked beyond our expectations. Across the campus, the giving and receiving of feedback in many forms is becoming more and more common. Teachers ask students their opinions more regularly, schoolwide perception surveys for teachers and students have been administered, and as an institution we are learning the best ways to use the results for even more dialogue and continuous improvement. 🙌
Labsite Observations
Okay, so if you are from Graded and reading this, you might argue that this is part of Deeper Learning Foundations, but I think this is an accomplishment and celebration in it’s own right. One of the most appreciated and impactful days of the course was “labsite day” when up to 15 facilitated peer observations would take place. Teacher-participants would host small groups of colleagues in their classroom for feedback related to their individual inquiry questions. The closing circle at the end of each of these days was nothing short of emotional. It’s not a stretch to share that the absolute respect teachers gained from observing each other was palpable. High school IB teachers observing in lower school PE, 2nd grade teachers observing in upper school band, English teachers observing in Portuguese classes, brand new teachers observing veteran teachers, teachers who are parents observing their child’s teacher, administrators observing alongside teachers. There was even a labsite observation held after school in swimming! Over and over again our teachers have conveyed that these mixed group observations were one of the most impactful learning experiences of their time at Graded, if not in their career. (If you are following my whole series, you will read “seminal learning experience” right between those lines.) For anyone who has studied anything about the sources of collective teacher efficacy, these labsites epitomized vicarious learning experiences. The only thing I can say is that there is no other professional learning like these days. 🙌
Just before sitting down to write this installment, I told my family, “For the first time since I started these blog posts, I don’t know what I’m going to write today.” Coming to the end of this post, I am suddenly and unexpectedly feeling a combination of pride and gratitude. I’m so proud of the work that the colleagues involved in each of these accomplishments achieved. More than that, I am grateful to have had the benefit to work alongside each and every one of them. Cheers to 2021-2022!