I have encountered many quotes throughout all my readings this semester, but one quote really hit home and made me realize my purpose in life and where my journey was taking me. The quote reads, "Leadership means taking responsibility for what matters to you" In the past, I pretty much just stayed within my four walls and only worried about my 32 kids. Writing this down, makes me feel a little ashamed to be honest. It's just that I always felt overwhelmed and incapable of doing things or bringing about change. Half way through my masters journey, I feel that my narrow way of thinking has expanded beyond my four walls. As a society of education, we need to think beyond; the future, we need to think bigger, we need to move forward and think outside the box and do the things that haven't been thought of yet or done before. Children's education matters to me, helping my colleagues feel empowered matters to me making our new generation of students succeed matters to me more than ever. I have a new mindset and students success now seems tangible, something reachable, that we can all grab. I am now an Innovative leader, and I have a responsibility to fulfill, not just because I have to, but because I want to.
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Every step I take towards my learning, a new piece of clarity is added to my complex puzzle piece AKA my prototype. So on Friday I had a lightbulb turn on in my head for the first time. As I was in my plc with my colleague looking over the data from a quiz our students took in math. Admin came in and said 5th grade teachers wanted to know and were very curious of all the new things we were doing with technology! A few teachers had been hearing of all the wonderful tools the kids are using in their education and they also learned that we are using Google forms and getting quick feedback through them. Right at that moment, boom! I knew who my audience were and what they wanted or better yet, what they needed. My prototype will be a tool where teachers that want to bring about change and get the most out of their instruction will want to use it to move forward with me and other innovators. Hopefully I can come to a more concrete answer if technology tools can help increase student achievement or increase student agency? I'm still not set concrete on my DQ. Learning about TPACK I realize that technology is not the sole responsible component around innovative learning and teaching. Good learning begins or is made up of the content and the pedagogy knowledge first. Content knowledge is the "what" where we cover the facts, the concepts and theories. Pedagogical knowledge is the "how" we teach. This is where teachers get to incorporate all the instructional strategies we think will fit and work, the scaffolding and teaching styles. Once we have this and feel good about it, then we can see where we can incorporate the technology piece. We use the technology to deepen and make the learning last. I feel this is where I am at right now and I am feeling really successful with my teaching, and my students are feeling successful too, I know it and I feel it. Now I just need to find the right way to collect the data and prove it! "Can we do must-do's and may-do's please?!" is a question I get almost everyday with the start of reading. This school year, I have been giving my 4th graders more options in their learning. Student agency has made a good connection to the learning of new technology tools. I still remember the day I demonstrated how to do a presentation using google slides. I was running around like a chicken with it's head cut off helping kids here and there. Then little by little they started learning new features on their own, pretty soon they became more and more comfortable with the program and then they were helping each other. It would only take me to show one students, and then that students would show another, and pretty soon, they were all 21st century collaborators. Seeing them work like this, makes me feel like a million dollars. About a month ago, I introduced "Story Bird" because a group of girls were writing a little comic book about a cherry guy? I went online to see what I could find that my students could use to write their own comic books or stories. When I introduced "story bird" they did not seem into it at all. It was really frustrating because kids had to go and make up a user name and password, and I thought I need to continue looking for something else. then a few days later, two students, Raul and Brianna, came up to me and said "We have created a story, could we share it with the class?" As soon as my students saw the power of "story bird", they all wanted to create their own. Now many of my students have gone out to other classrooms and have narrated the stories they have created and love sharing with other students. This fever of excitement has now spread to two other classrooms! I think the next step will be that my students record their stories using screen cast o matic or flip grid.
so this takes me to my new adventure... I was talking with my 4th grade partner and told her I was thinking of having students create learning digital portfolios and possibly have them ready for open house. Doing a little research I learned of many platforms out there that my kids could use, but I think for the purpose of privacy, I am just going to have them save everything under their google suite. I am so excited because the possibilities are endless!!! I can almost see them creating timelines or story mapping using Popplet. Maybe doing book review on novels we've read using Canva or other creative platforms! Like I said, the possibilities are endless, I can't wait to see where this takes us. I A few years ago, when my daughter was little, she asked me, "Hey mom, why do you like being a teacher?"
I told her it was because I liked motivating kids. She then said, "Oh, I thought it was because you like teaching." I realized what gets me up in the morning is not that I'm going to teach kids, it's that feeling we get when we see their faces light up when they get something, or when they discover the answer that nobody can find, thats why I love being a teacher. Motivation to learn something starts in the social or cultural context. Humans say, whats in it for me? I want to learn this because.... its going to help me do this job faster, I'm going to learn how to record the superbowl, or this tool will help me analyze my budget, what ever it is, it all starts with the learners interest and their motivation. I liked what the SITE model states about how sometimes we don't formulate goals until we realize theres a possible way into them. The SITE model article gives the example of the man walking around hardware store and considers installing solar heating when he realizes how easy it can be done by just seeing a demonstration. I loved this line, "Human beings are not just problem-solvers but seekers and exploiters of opportunities..." We need to understand the context of the learner, so that we can empower them. In the SITE model outline, I learned the major factors that are connected to the learner and that designers need to consider when designing a product. The sociocultural subcontext, which considers the learner's motives and goals. The Technical subcontext, which looks at the ways, tools, or techniques the learner can use to feel empowered and achieve their goals. The Informational subcontext, the skills and knowledge learners will need to access the information as literacy and mediacy. Learning this, made me think of how our education system is evolving. When I was young in elementary school, we would copy pages and pages of math problems, yet when asked to do a problem in real life, we couldn't because we needed paper or we couldn't do it because it wasn't set up in a perfect way like in the books. Same with the spelling tests, we used to do these long lists of spelling tests thinking we would become better spellers and writers. Now we have realized that if we can teach the different patterns and rules, spelling becomes easier. I guess, what I'm trying to say is that the model of teaching in "one way fits all" is no longer possible. Everybody is at different levels, we all have different interests, skills and motives in life. There is more competition in everything, we need to train learners to be able to use and transfer skills in all directions. We are not giving the kids the fish, we are teaching them how to fish. In Spanish we have a saying, " La Union Hace la Fuerza" it similarly translates to "United We Stand Stronger". This is something I truly believe. I feel that in order to bring change into our classrooms and our schools, the change begins with the teachers, we are the ones on the front line. Therefore I assertively say that my most important audience for the remaining part of my course are my colleagues. My research was based on students developing ownership of their learning through goal setting. Students are not going to be able to become responsible and set their own goals from one day to the next. Through the readings of Clark, I came to the understanding that student responsibilities and ownership evolve through instructional systems development. Where we as teachers plan, develop and evaluate the trainings. Just as companies invest in their employees to receive top of the line training to help the company run smooth and effectively, we as teachers need to to the same with our students by carefully and strategically planning their instruction. At the moment, my students and I, are exploring and playing with different tech tools. I ask myself many questions: Will this tool meet the needs of my students different learning styles? How can this tools help teachers become more efficient? Is this tool supporting learning, or is it only a fancy pen? How can we think outside the box, and still meet the standards? Which tech tools work better and provide opportunities to develop student agency? I want to create a resource for teachers in which we use technology tools to develop a new culture at our school. A new culture in which teachers work smarter, not harder, and students drive their learning and become owners of their challenges and accomplishments. The more I learn about sense making and learning, the more I learn about myself and the more I think of how all this impacts my students. Coming to this country and being part of the education system was really difficult for me. My mom reminds me that I would always have F's on everything, except for P.E and Singing, on those classes I always had the best grades possible. Learning a new language on top of learning the content was confusing. when I think of those years, I see myself in complete darkness. I didn't come to grip with my studies until the end of middle school and still it took a lot of hard work to learn how to be a student. Until I was able to see the light to now, I still work hard to learn all I can to be a better professional and competent in my career.
John Keller mentions 4 factors that motivates adult learners: Attention, Relevance, Confidence, and Satisfaction, I strongly agree with him because I am living it, this is the cycle that I go through everyday. I feel successful in my learning today because everything I am learning has a purpose or direction. I want to meet my students where they currently stand and help them leap over that gap, I want to bring excitement into their learning, to make them grow and feel successful because when they learn, I learn too. No longer I am the subject matter expert that lectured from the front of the class , now I am the facilitator of an environment that welcomes curiosity. I have shifted my thinking of "How can I make them understand me?" to "I need to understand them first". Eager to learn something new, and find the theme of this week's topic, I dove into Brenda Dervin's article, From the Mind's Eye of the User: The Sense-Making Qualitative-Quantitative Medthodology, and a few pages later I found myself going in circles, trying to make sense of what I was reading. I continued marking the text and writing the gist on the side margins of the little information I was understanding. I understood, that sense-making is a methodology used to focus on human behaviors and to better help them and meet their needs. As I was reading, I kept connecting this methodology to sellers and consumers? This connection could have been due to the fact that I spent my weekend watching a Breaking Bad marathon with my husband? But then I got into thinking of me, the teacher as the seller, and my students as the consumers. They come to me with questions, and I try to close that gap by communication and offering tools that will make their situation a more pleasant one and one in which they will receive what they need.
After a while my light bulb turned on and I decided to click on the link of resources to understand sense-making. The video talked about Darvin's article and explained some of the key elements using graphics and bullet points. Through the video I was able to better understand the sense-making triangle and see the situation gap more clearer. How when we "the helper" ask questions, we tend to start from our world, and not from theirs, thus making it harder for them to close that situation gap. As I was trying to understand the different kinds of sense-making interviews and how through these different surveys: satisfaction survey, image survey, help chain survey, and message/Q survey, we can discover the barriers, questions of confusion, and the strategies the person used to arrive to an answer, I couldn't stop thinking about "Apple" products and their service and how every time I called with a troubleshooting question or anytime I went into the genius bar, I always felt like my needs were met. Again, it was all about sense-making and putting themselves in the shoes of the consumer or the actor instead of the observer as Darvin puts it. I think there is a connection with the surveys and collecting qualitative data, but I wish to understand that a little deeper. I hope that with my cohort and our discussions, I will be able to make more connections with what I read and saw in the video. I feel that Darvin's readings of the concept of sense-making is very hard to understand. I feel that presenting a situation or scenario first, kind of like the one Darvin explained in the video about not understanding the computer sales rep would serve as a little bridge and help students make smother connections as they read. In the end, I think its all going to come together and we will be able to understand that sense-making is just making sense of what one cannot see, |
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May 2018
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