My One Word: Can You Make the Connection?

I have worked my way through several words that I have even announced as my official “One Word” to focus on for the new year.  However as a change agent I reserve the right to change my word. This week was an enlightening week for me professionally where many connections fell into place.

I was awarded the unique opportunity to work with three different High School Algebra 1 teams from two different districts and three different building throughout the course of this week.  The interesting thing is that there was a connection between all three of the teams. They all utilize the same book and same online resources as the foundation of their instructional practices. This placed me in an interesting position to make some connections.  I facilitated learning for teacher teams to determine what works in two very different districts with the same resources three times! What I found was that shifting instructional practices towards a more personalized approach gets easier the more you allow the teachers to take the lead and the more they take the lead the more personalized the learning plan becomes and the more connections I could see in their practices.  

The three models we have developed are very similar. Each time I lead a team of teachers to design their personalized pathway towards the creation of a deeper learning model for their students the easier it gets for me to connect to the best approach.  I believe that this realization of a working model at the secondary level for blended learning is due to the connections that are being made. Not only the connections between teams, but the connections between the ideas, strategies, data, and resources.  I am connecting with teachers who are experts in their content. The teachers are the ones who need to be connected to the precision design process of the model of blended learning implementation that best suits the content that they teach. They are the expert, the implementor, and they must have a strong connection to the design of the delivery model.  

This week I made the connection that to achieve a next generation learning experience at the secondary level educators need to make connections between a few essentials when choosing an instructional delivery method within relation to the 7Cs of College and Career Competency.

When making these connections, teachers need to consider...

• the students prior knowledge of the content,
• the Common Core State Standards that the students are expected to achieve at the end of the task,
• the ability level of their students to independently discover the content,
• the common sense approach to content delivery to ensure a realistic pace and path are achieved, and
• that the content and assessed student need must be the main factors that drive the blended approach.

The connections that I make when speaking with administrators and teachers in various districts helps me to better adjust my approach to instructional coaching and continue to grow.  The connections that I make between the content, the prior knowledge, student need and ability, and the resources help me to facilitate the development of precision based curriculum delivery methods. The connections that I see not only in Math but cross curricular help me to facilitate the design of problem based learning experiences where teachers are co-teaching sections of their courses with each other at the high school level. The connection of a teacher and their students to their passions embedded in a learning experience is the most effective and rewarding connection I will always witness. The connections that I have made personally, professionally, content wise, strategically, vertically, horizontally, and intellectually are what ignite my passion to learn and continually encourages me to seek for more connections.  

Can you see the connections that this post has to my “One Word”?