Leadership

We share because we care. (design by Clarissa Bezerra)

Today we launched the Advanced Planning Hub project, with our first face-to-face gathering over at Casa Thomas Jefferson – Sudoeste Branch. This was an idea I had after analyzing the results of a recent survey I carried out with our Advanced level teachers. The purpose of the survey was to foster some reflection on the work developed throughout our first year using Viewpoint (Cambridge University Press) with our Upper-Intermediate level students. This was also a way to get feedback from our teachers as to how they evaluate the effectiveness of the material, as well as identify possible issues or difficulties that may have come up during these two semesters. The overall result of the survey was very positive. Acceptance of the newly adopted material is very high among our Advanced teachers, and we all know that’s key for successful teaching and learning in any course.

There was one aspect that called our attention in the survey results. Apparently, a few teachers had been having some difficulty planning and delivering the Conversation Strategy lessons (lessons C in Viewpoint) in a way that would be more meaningful for their students. It is worth mentioning here that the majority of our upper-intermediate and advanced student population is made up of teenagers, which makes our reality very peculiar, since most, if not all of the EFL/ESL materials available at this level target older learners (young adults and adults). Teachers felt that the way these lessons are structured sometimes yields quite mechanical responses from students. Therefore, we needed to find ways of making these lessons more meaningful, fostering more authentic communication in class. That’s when the idea of the Hub first occurred to me. As course supervisor, I’d been not only teaching with the material, but I had also been talking to teachers about it, as well as observing a number of classes. I knew that there were teachers who had been planning and delivering highly engaging, effective Conversation Strategy lessons, for example. What I needed to do was get those teachers who’d been struggling together with those who had been having all sorts of great ideas for those lessons, and let the magic of sharing work its wonders. And so it was that at 10:00 am today, we had a beautiful collection of thirty eight teachers (that’s about 40% of the total number of Advanced level teachers this semester, so wow!) eager to share their wonderful ideas with each other.

The Hub in action.

For our F2F gathering today, I had put together a workspace within our school wiki – The Advanced Planning Hub – a place for teachers to share their lesson plans (lesson goals, step-by-step procedures, and supporting materials) and also find help when they have run out of ideas. So this morning, I showed them our new workspace. Our Hub gathering began with two of our teachers, Diana do Amaral and Cristina Bolissian, sharing/presenting a lesson plan of their own, which they had sent me the previous week and which had been shared on the Hub workspace. After that, teachers worked in smaller groups, sitting in round tables spread in the room, and engaged in very productive lesson-planning dynamics. They organized themselves into the different levels they are teaching this semester and went about feeding our Hub with great lesson plans.

Macaroons of appreciation! (photo shared by teacher Anna Lúcia)

Time flew by, and it was already 11:30 am when I interrupted their busy work. I asked if anyone would like to share something they had learned during that time spent together with their fellow teachers. Some of them volunteered to share all kinds of tips, ranging from handling technology in the classroom (like using the class software and configuring the right screen definition for it to work properly) to actual methodological aspects, such as asking more challenging questions to engage students, and how the revised Bloom’s Taxonomy verbs may help us do that. After that, it was time to go, but not before getting a small token of appreciation from their supervisor – ahem, yours truly – in appreciation for the fact that each one of these educators had chosen to spend two hours of a lovely friday morning planning lessons together, having a good time together, and showing that they care for their own professional development and for each person sitting next to them.

This post goes to all of the people who helped this idea fly today. Hopefully, this was the first of many Hub gatherings to come!

Here’s to caring and sharing!

rhizo47

sensory experience: wanna try? Listen to this while reading

I see rhizomes everywhere

Last friday I conducted a routine test validation session with a group of twenty teachers. Although the ultimate purpose of meetings such as this one is to calibrate and make adjustments to a specific assessment instrument, it is also a precious opportunity to tap into the collective knowledge and experiences that those teachers are having in their piloting experiences using recently adopted course books. This was the second time I tried out a specific set of group dynamics in which small clusters of 4 to 5 people engage with the instrument being assessed and with each other. Once those nodes were all set, we were off. As we progressed in the assessment of the instrument, relevant connections began to sprang up in conversation about pertinent classroom situations, activities, approaches to a given subject/skill, and as we seized these opportunitites to ask questions, discuss issues, share difficulties, our co-constructed space seemed to be teeming with dense connection. Never before had I found myself answering so many questions with… questions… The silences that followed some of those, along with the intensity of their engagement with the instrument and each other, first within their smaller, more intimate networks, and then with the larger network, the community of teachers. Ideas abound in a free flow, it was all happening. And all I had been doing was answering questions with more questions.

rhizowall

On Power & Force

As a supervisor I am regarded as a leader, and with leadership comes responsibility and power. Which reminds me of the considerations Keith Hammon made in our last (and brilliant) #rhizo14 unhangout regarding the power play in human relations.

“I don’t know a way to engage with other people without engaging in power. I do distinguish between power and force. (…) what I mean force is… I have a small gravitational pull which will, in your presence, act upon you however slightly. Power is different in that it seems to imply some sort of intention, or some sort of decision on the part of the person exercising it. The power issue is as problematic for me as it appears to be for Clarissa, but I don’t know how to do away with it (…) and my only take is to recognize that everyone has power.”

I really might have been experimenting with the <power> <force> interface that day with my fellow teachers. My force being perceived in the mediation of interactions among the networks and, in specific moments, the exertion of power might have been more concrete when a decision had to me made, for example in my decision of reallocating a specific amount of points from one section to the other, but decisions which were, nonetheless, informed by the force of the individuals who were there, sharing that space with me, sometimes kicking the ball to a secret corner, one which had never been openly spoken of/reflected upon. Experts on tap.

Unrehearsed obsolescence

So many were the moments during that gathering in which my role as supervisor faded in the background. I answered questions with other questions also because I didn’t have the answers, and I came clean about it. (I’ll remix Dave’s words in our unhangout now.) > So much a part of performing the role of supervisor/teacher properly is to be honest and emotional about what you’re doing. It really might be that the way you make it work is by coming clean about your own vulnerabilities, candidly admitting your own uncertainties. Could that be the untold secret about leveraging the power play to create a space of equality?

And since I feel like exercising with my newly acquired literacy of remix, I’ll mash in some of Keith’s thoughts on obsolescence. I might be looking to make my supervisor/teacher role obsolete, which doesn’t mean that I want to make me obsolete. I don’t want to be above, and nor do I want to be left behind. I wanna be in equal footing with others, my students and my teachers. How else could I achieve that if not by becoming a co-learner and a co-constructor? As Keith so clearly put it

“I appreciate the fact that you (Dave) were able to share power (in #rhizo14), and maybe that’s another strategy for dealing with power. You can’t do away with power, but you can share it. And if you share it intelligently and sympathetically, maybe you’ve done the best you can do in handling power.”

What does it mean to ‘end’ an experience in rhizomatic learning?

I confessed to my fellow rhizoers that the rhizo journey has been, for me, a journey of deconstruction. In so many ways the rizhome has been creeping up all over me. In so many ways I have been unable to find the words that encapsulate bits of that experience. Little did I know at the time I had you locked on my radar that I had been about to embark in the deepest, densest, most significant learning experience I have ever had to this day. The rhizome did find an awful lot of fertile ground in me, at this time of my life – this, and not before, not after, not even by a day.

This is not a rhizo farewell post, even though I have been awkwardly postponing it in an attempt to un-end, suspend.

Having said that, I also feel the urge of declaring my absolute admiration and gratefulness to all of you rhizoers out there who have been pouring out your hearts, and sharing the works of your brilliant minds. What a privilege it has been.

Let us rhizo on together. > #rhizo15