In June of 2019, nine faculty members (including at least one person from each campus and the coordinator of digital learning) from our district attended the Apple Coding Teacher Academy. At this academy, we formed the Digital Learning Team (nicknamed Code Squad). Our first collaboration as a team was planning and hosting a successful summer coding camp for students in our district.
In the fall of 2019, members of the Digital Learning Team continued to work together as we were involved with the Lamar/Apple Community Education Initiative. At this time we, as a team, committed to connect, create and inspire. One way that we did this was by collaborating and creating a district-wide Innovation Plan. During this process, we created a call to action, a timeline for implementation, and a research backed proposal. We presented this proposal to our principals and district leadership in a combined meeting.
Our plan for innovation is to give our students more authentic learning experiences via project-based learning. In addition, we asked the district to support additional opportunities to use computational thinking through expanded coding opportunities for students in the district. Since our initial pitch to the district, our plan has been further refined to give all of our students a real world learning experience once per semester.
In December of 2019 we held a district wide Hour of Code event. Before spring break, we were in the beginning phases of planning our Summer of 2020 coding academy and how to implement project-based learning at each campus when the worldwide pandemic caused everything to shut down. This included our plans for the summer coding camp and our plans to implement project-based learning on each campus during the 2020-2021 school year.
In the fall of 2020, three members of our digital learning team, Nicole Alexander, Patience Blythe Creech and Sandra Negro, enrolled in the Lamar Digital Learning and Leading M. Ed. program. Coursework in this program has allowed us to further refine our innovation plan. We worked to narrow our focus and develop our Why, How and What. This gives us a concise and focused message to share with others as we move to implement our innovation project.
During the DLL program we learned about and developed the vital behaviors and six sources of influence that will help us as we implement our project. We also developed our four disciples of execution and our five stages of change. The four disciplines of execution include our widely important goal of creating real world authentic learning projects once per semester, our lead and lag measures, a scorecard and a cadence of accountability. We discovered the importance of being a self-differentiated leader when leading change. This includes starting with the heart, learning to look, making it safe, mastering our stories, stating our path, exploring others’ paths, and moving to action.
Implementation of the Innovation Plan hinges on asking each district teacher to offer one COVA/CSLE project once per semester. Engaging teachers in training to build out this initiative was developed in Developing Effective Digital Learning, and involves training teachers in COVA/CSLE by doing a COVA/CSLE project of their own, using creativity tools teachers can implement with their students, and trains teachers in the utilization of hyperdocs for instructional delivery. (Codes for each Google Classroom course are available in the Resources section.) After that, they will take their knowledge back to their campuses and design projects within grade-level teams, determining their own theme for each project. Our goal is that every student in Elgin ISD has access to one of these projects at least once per semester. Our theory is that once this plan is fully implemented, the potential exists for more than one project to be rolled out each semester, but we are being conservative and cautious in understanding that we must get buy-in and show success before a transformation can occur.
At this point, we can say that the whole of the Innovation Plan has not been realized, however, despite COVID limitations, we have been able to implement aspects of the Plan at the classroom level. Nicole, Sandra, and Patience have been in daily communication over the last year, seeking opportunities to utilize what we have learned in the DLL program wherever possible. By participating in a district-wide crash course in online teaching and learning, providing professional development where possible, refining and reflecting and changing the way we are presenting lessons in classrooms and continuously building out our plans in the DLL program, we have strong foundations for learning and teaching this way now and into the future.
We have been building alliances by seeking to find teachers who are interested in real-world, interdisciplinary teaching and learning. We have also built alliances at the district level with the Bilingual ESL department, who recognizes the potential of this type of learning to level the playing field for EL students as they are learning by doing, can speak to each other in their primary language, as well as engage with English in non-threatening, low risk ways as well as our Director of Federal and State Programs who believes the badging program may be something that could be funded with Title IV funds and disseminated district wide. We have strong support from the CTE Director who also is seeking to make learning real-world and interdisciplinary in his programs.
On face, COVID19 disrupted our Innovation Plan, but in many ways, it asked us to get granular with the plan and utilize its concepts in our daily life. This means that we have a strong selection of example lessons, feedback and data on what works and what doesn’t. We have had a year to plan, discuss, and find team members. While the Innovation Plan as written two years ago is perhaps only 50% complete, we now know much more about what these concepts look like in real life, during a national emergency. We believe we can take our successes and run with them and will only see greater successes when students and teachers are interacting in-person again. We intend to document our processes in order to share them with others in the DLL program and in our school district. We do not intent to stop trying to move the needle in this direction as we have seen a few things this year: that teachers can change their teaching very quickly if needed, that we now have a semi-robust system of networked computers, 1-to-1, in each students’ hands, and that when you talk to teachers and listen to them, they will begin to think about new ideas and even get excited about them.
Improvement is a daily feature of our conversations regarding how to bring our learnings from our Apple/Lamar partnership and participation in the DLL program into reality. Being in this program and teaching during a global pandemic has made flexibility and an ability to pivot, even on a daily basis, necessities for success during the first iteration of wide-scale online and blended learning.
In terms of our implementation of the Innovation Plan, we think our space for growth lies in finding more collaborators and allies for our plans. Over the last several weeks, our sphere of influence has been growing to include district representatives and other teachers. This was not a specific plan, but an organic process that has resulted from being part of the district Digital Learning Team, presenting to district and campus administrators, being present for teachers on our individual campuses, participating in meetings, and listening to our colleagues. It is encouraging to us that this process is happening, and shows that our plan to become self-differentiated leaders is beginning to show success, as we move through the stages and begin to move to action.
In the few opportunities we have been able to take advantage of, our students have flourished in the COVA/CSLE model. Specifically, Fundamentals of Computer Science students were given a Pseudocoding project where they were to create a website via Google Sites. One student created a website for readers – where they could search for book recommendations by genre and get real reviews on books they had read. Another student took the opportunity to build a site for her tie-dye business. You could truly see the creativity in their work and they had so much fun.
We aim to pilot the grade-level COVA/CSLE project next school year with 8th graders as their fall semester final grades. We believe that we will have administrative support and now need to gather our team of teachers to train them and plan the project.
There are some summer activities scheduled for Summer 2021, including an ESL Newcomer Academy that will be entirely structured using COVA/CSLE strategies and developing computational thinking in middle-high school age ESL students who have been in the USA for less than three years.
What have we learned through this process? Perhaps a better question is: what lessons have we not learned over the last year to two years. There is no doubt that COVID19 exposed the cracks in our society and especially in our education system that many are aware of, but few acknowledge. We are still waiting for acknowledgment from a federal or state level, but on a campus and district level, realizations that not everyone has the internet or can even get it at their home if they want it, that about 35% of our students do not learn without serious interventions, that many of our parents struggle with digital and actual literacy as our students do, or that access to the internet is now as important as a textbook, paper, and pencil are a part of our daily lives and conversations with each other.
Additionally, we have learned that school districts and their administrators exhibit fear at the idea of the technological tidal wave that hit us over the last year will be lasting, or that it shows real potential to engage students who traditionally have been hard to attract to the concept of academic success. We cannot answer why this fear exists, only that it is obvious during meetings and district communiques. Quotes like, “Project-based learning will never be utilized in Elgin ISD, now or in the future” and “most learning is better-done old-school” show this lack of understanding, or perhaps expose a desperate desire to go back to normalcy.
Whether the reactions are fear-based, or inertia-based, it has become obvious that school districts exist to perpetuate a system of funding and accountability that is almost fundamentally separated from the day-to-day activities of students and teachers. While seeming an impossibility, change in a system like this, based on its immense power structure, can only begin to exist on an individual level, which may actually be a strength in disguise. We reference Malcolm Gladwell’s speech on “The Unheard Story of David and Goliath” (Gladwell, 2013) in which he argues that “giants are not as strong and powerful as they seem. And sometimes the shepherd boy has a sling in his pocket.” In this speech, Gladwell argues that the commonplace interpretation of the story of David and Goliath misses key details of the story that expose how Goliath was defeated not by luck but by his own, myriad limitations.
We have learned that strength and possibility come from communication: communication with each other, with our students, and with our colleagues (newfound allies). We have learned that having an attitude of daily responsiveness improves our own outcomes but also makes us sources of ideas and strength that others can come to, thereby widening our sphere of influence.
We have learned that the more we think about our teaching from the perspective of those who will learn from us, the better our work products are in terms of engagement and personalization and a willingness to try. We have learned that many more teachers are interested in these concepts but are too afraid to voice their desire, beginning to do so when conversations are opened in spaces of mutual trust by building the pool of knowledge.
Most importantly, we have learned to stay flexible and keep going. There have been many pitfalls over the last two years, and especially the last year, but we declare the experience, on the whole, as a hugely positive one that we will continue to iterate, grow and learn from.
In order to move forward with our Innovation Plan, we must continue to promote the change we are intending to create. Our plan to promote is simple – it’s all about getting our message out there! We will present our current, more refined proposal and plans to our district leaders at the principals meeting. We will show our principals how important the innovation plan is. We will use our examples from this year to showcase learning opportunities such as, building a website via google sites, choice boards, as well as creativity tools teachers could implement in their own classrooms. Once we have our principals on board we will move towards presenting at Professional Development Days. As we start at the 2021-2022 school year off we will present on our respective campuses. Our goal is to show teachers how the love of COVA/CSLE approach can truly be beneficial to our students.
Once we have teachers and campus professionals on board, we will set our sights on the school board. We plan to create an engaging presentation with student leaders, campus leaders, and show how COVA/CSLE has had a profound impact on our campuses. After the school board agrees we will make the COVA/CSLE approach a district-wide expectation for the years to come.
The DLL program has taught us how to refine our plans and focus on impacting change, one learner at a time. We work collaboratively with each other every day. We have started to have crucial conversations and grow a diverse network of teachers, district leaders, parents, students, and other stakeholders. Narrowing down the why, how and what of our innovation plan assisted us in really focusing on our goals and plans and we will use the same process moving forward with future innovation plans in our district. We learned how to develop our Wildly Important Goal, analyzing lead and lag measures which assisted us with designing and driving the path our Innovation Plan will take; we will use this process, again, in any future Innovation Plans (McChesney et al., 2012). We learned about the importance of a compelling scoreboard by designing it specific to our campus as well as developing a cadence of accountability; these tools will help others in our network implement the Innovation Plan by providing a structure that any network member may use for accountability purposes (McChesney et al., 2012). Both tools are critical for the communication and implementation of any successful Innovation Plan.
Resources:
Google Classroom Codes:
- Student Voice & Choice in Presentations of Learning code: jxubpmp
- Tools for Creativity Google Classroom code: odvbwpn
- HyperDocs code: qiefa5y
References:
Gladwell, M. (2013, September 30). The unheard story of david and goliath [Video]. TED. https://www.ted.com/talks/malcolm_gladwell_the_unheard_story_of_david_and_goliath
McChesney, C., Covey, S., & Huling, J. (2012) The 4 disciplines of execution: Achieving your wildly important goals. New York, NY: Free Press.
Sandra Negro 