change

Networked Innovation Pathway

 

I am writing this to share my process with the world. I am truly interested in the network effects that spur growth and creativity. So if you like the theme of change and innovation in education, I would love to connect with you. I am also writing in order to “process my process.” Writing for an authentic audience is very challenging and very productive. It pushes you to articulate your ideas as best as you can. Before I go on, let me give you some background information on who I am and the work I do.

I’m a Brazilian 42-year-old mom and educator who lives in Brasília, the capital city of our country. I have been in English Language Teaching for 22 years. After ten years working as a full-time teacher, I worked as an academic administrator in my school, Casa Thomas Jefferson, as course supervisor, a middle-management position of leadership. I have my English language and teaching credentials, but my academic background is in Anthropology. It was not until about a year ago that I reached a solid awareness that my social sciences background has had a tremendous influence on the way I view leadership. More about that in another post. =]

I have just resumed my work after a year-long medical leave. I am blessed. Having been through the health challenges that I have over these past 18 months has changed me completely. Somehow I managed to make the most of my time away from my very demanding job as an academic admin, and in the meantime I became Google Certified Trainer and more recently Google Certified Innovator in the BRZ17 cohort.

As I said, I am blessed. My innovation project is to design an innovation ecosystem to enable teachers to develop the skills and awareness needed to design meaningful 21st-century learning. (Here are links to my vision deck and my vision video.) I have recently had the go-ahead from the high leadership of my school to develop this transformation program with our teachers. The program is called Vision 2020, and I am also calling it a networked innovation pathway.   I am literally standing in the shoulders of giants in this innovation pathway. Their ideas and their experiences as educators and as innovators are inspiring me and helping me shape this program to suit the needs of my particular context. I am going to mention three people I consider my mentors. I follow them on Twitter and I read their blogs. I have to start with George Couros (@gcouros), because reading his book “The Innovator’s Mindset” was (has been, it keeps giving, it’s amazing) a turning point in my innovator trajectory. So I consider him my go-to mentor for inspiration and for connection. He is a major connecting node in my personal learning network. With this tweet, George introduced me to my second mentor, Mandy Froehlich (@forehlichm) and BAM!

Mandy’s series of posts on her Hierarchy of Needs for Innovation and Divergent Thinking provided me with a no-nonsense framework for developing this transformation program. I am planning the stages and actions of the program based on the ideas she proposes. 2018 will be the Climate/Culture and Effective Leadership development/consolidation stage of our program. In 2019, we will focus on Mindset and Professional Development, and in 2020 we hope to achieve our vision of Innovation and Divergent Thinking in our school. Although I’ve just described a timeline here, the real deal will not be that clean-cut, of course. It will be rather cyclical and messy, but Mandy’s framework gives Vision 2020 direction. Mandy Froehlich is my go-to mentor for direction and structure. She has made sense of what this path to innovation entails, and her hierarchy of needs is a valuable compass.

Time came for me to meet my third mentor, Katie Martin (@KatieMartinEdu). And (again) it was via George Couros on Twitter:

Now THAT post! Oh my. Treasure trove doesn’t begin to describe it. Katie Martin has this clarity of ideas, she just says it as it is. It’s powerful. 5 Reasons Professional Development is NOT Transforming Learning explains what NOT to do if you want to orchestrate productive professional development opportunities. Katie Martin is my go-to mentor for keeping me grounded and preventing me from spinning out of control with all the inspiration I get. She has been the sensible voice of experience and clarity in my head. I went on to watch Katie Martin’s TEDx on her website and was blown away by the simplicity and clarity of her words:

“If we understand that every system is perfectly designed to create the results it gets, then think about these two questions: are you creating systems for teachers to comply and implement your ideas and your programs? Or are you creating systems to bring people together, to learn and create better opportunities for the kids in their classrooms?” Katie Martin

Yes, Katie, I hope to be able to co-design Vision 2020 so that it grows to become a system in which WE create new and better opportunities for our kids in our classrooms. Thank you for this. And there are many more posts by her that have constantly brought me back to the reality of change in education. I had been meaning to write about my creative process throughout Vision 2020 for the sake of openness and learning together with the global educators community, and I decided it could no longer wait nudged by this tweet:

Katie Martin tweeting Mandy Froehlich. Yep. It does feel like George Couros quoting Steven Johnson on this blog post: 

“Chance favours the connected mind.” Steven Johnson

That quote actually sums it all up, I guess, the very spirit of what I’m trying to say in this post. I’ll be sure to stay connected with these three amazing mentors and the many, many more I have the privilege of following on Twitter. I’ll be writing about Vision 2020 here, and I welcome everyone to take part in this networked innovation pathway with us.

Change

I have been thinking a lot about change lately. I look at how my life has changed over the last twelve months and I’m in awe. Those closest to me know about my latest struggle, one which I have been overcoming thanks to luck, a great deal of self care and, well, change. But this change that I am talking about here is of a more primal nature. It has been happening in many inner dimensions and it has now come to a stage where it’s impacting my outer life – how I show up in the world. I want to reflect on that here because it means a lot to me. It means I am still here and I am pursuing the idea of a metaphor for learning, which I suspect is strangely connected to another metaphor – rhizomatic learning. And that’s where it all began. It’s where change began.

Learning is changing. Depending on the nature of the learning, the deeper the change. We have all heard of (or lived through) life-changing experiences, experiences in which you learn something so impactful that it alters who you are, how you show up for others. It’s a natural, evolutionary process; we are always learning, and we are always changing. To learn is to change. My Rhizo14 experience changed me, it greatly contributed to who I am today, how I view education and learning. Why? And how was it that it managed to do that? First, I had choice. In fact, I had all the choice I wanted, to participate whichever way I wanted. To engage with people the way I wanted, to share and show my reflections the way I wanted. To approach the prompts from the perspectives that made sense to me, and to me only. But also the very choice to keep engaging was a powerful drive. I kept choosing to keep engaged. So choice is the initiator and the driver of change.

My engagement came from collaborating and communicating with others. It was born of the connections, and it gave birth to connections with other people. We celebrated each other in our connections. We were curious about each other’s change process, the words, the artifacts, the play. Now it needs to be said that I was a newbie to the whole digitally connected educator ethos. My Rhizo14 fellows were already swimming in that pool with lots of confidence, but that was not a hindrance, that didn’t prevent me from feeling connected to them. I felt appreciated. The virtual company of my ideas was being appreciated. Celebration. It changes you.

So I suspect there are certain behaviors, certain actions that promote change when an educator purposefully engages. Change is driven by constant choice. Change happens in collaboration with each other (create together). Change happens in communication with each other. Connection equals collaboration + communication. And change happens in celebration of each other. I will be pursuing this idea, the articulation of these 6 C’s of BECOMING a 21st Century Educator.

Reflections on Context

I teach English as a foreign language to Brazilian upper-middle/middle class teenagers aged 14 to 17. All of them are at that stage of their educational trajectories where they are being primed for academic life in university. A vast majority of them go to renowned private high schools whose core goal rests in getting their students into the best universities and colleges in the country. That means that these kids are being prepared for competition, especially those who are aiming at prestigious careers, such as Medicine or Law, to name a few.

Pedagogically speaking, these kids’regular schools are pretty conservative. Students are grouped in large numbers (30 to 40 students) and classses are delivered lecture-style, with the teacher being the expert in charge of passing on the knowledge necessary for these kids to make it to the next big thing in their lives – college and the prospect of a promising professional life, which will provide the means for ensuring a comfortable life, much like the one they already have with their parents. Another contextual aspect particular to our city (Brasília, the capital city of Brazil) is that a career in public service is also among many of these kids professional future prospects. Being able to pass a public examination for a prestigious career in Congress, for example, means high salaries and life-long professional stability. On top of that, many of these kids parents are civil servants themselves, naturally being role models for their kids.

It’s a culture of competition the one in which our teenage students are born and raised. High-stakes tests are the gateways to a prosperous future, and the gatekeepers are the schools and teachers who make getting as many of their youth as possible inside a good university their highest priority. Schools actually use college entrance exam rankings for the purpose of advertisement. They are highly competitive and lucrative enterprises. It makes perfect sense that these schools prepare their students to do well on tests. After all, we live in an assessment-driven culture. Students’ performances are measured and primed for passing tests, and passing tests equals successful professional future. It is common for these high schoolers to spend their Saturdays taking tests at school and spending their whole week, mornings and afternoons, in school, both attending their regular classes and engaging in academic activities, such as writing workshops, where they practice writing academic essays in a product-oriented approach.

These are only some aspects of the cultural fabric of which we, EFL teachers, are also a part. It is our goal to teach these kids English, the language that will open even more doors to a prosperous future. Any job or career worth pursuing nowadays requires individuals who have very high levels of proficiency in English. These kids’ regular schools fail at teaching the language itself, since their goal is to prepare them to pass a test about the language, something which they can do without being able to speak or write fluently in English. That’s where we come in. Our goal is to teach these kids the language itself, and not only about the language. Our classes are taught in English, and we adopt a no-Portuguese policy in the classroom. We adopt communicative methodologies, aiming at developing students’proficiency in English in all four skills, understanding (reading and listening) and producing (writing and speaking) the language fluently and accurately. A majority of our students start their English studies with us as little kids, staying with us until teenagehood, when they will have reached upper-intermediate to advanced levels of English proficiency. By the time they reach these high levels of English proficiency, most of them will have been studying with us for about 6 to 7 years.

The schooling experience of most of the teenagers that I have in my upper-intermediate and advanced level English classes is a very traditional, teacher-centered, high-stakes-test driven experience on a daily basis, as I have briefly described above. It’s a grinding routine in which they wake up very early, have classes the entire morning, have lunch (many times at school) and come over to our institute for their twice-a-week English lessons. Their classroom experience with us is different from their experience in their regular schools in some aspects. Our classes are smaller, with about 18 students in each group. The classrooms themselves are smaller and we adopt a U-shaped seating arrangement of desks. As I’ve mentioned before, we adopt communicative methodologies. Our teachers are trained to facilitate classes that are student-centered and dynamic, fostering plenty of genuine communication. We adopt course books that are the core of these classes, though teachers are encouraged to make the necessary adaptations to course books in order to address their students needs. Group work and pair work dynamics are widely adopted and are an important element in the communicative dynamics implemented in our classes.

Still, my teenage students are tired, and understandably so, given their high school routines. And even though their schooling experience with us bears many differences from their regular schooling, written tests, essays and grades are also important components of our courses. They need to do homework, write paragraphs and essays, and take tests on grammar and vocabulary, as well as reading and listening comprehension. I have often felt that my classes might be coming across as more of the same for my teenagers, despite all my efforts to engage them in energizing discussions and collaborative dynamics with their peers. I mean, these kids have been our students for nearly a decade. It’s as if they have already been intensely exposed to our repertoire of communicative dynamics and activities, no matter how much we personalize and adapt and revamp what goes on in the classroom.

I’m thinking of ways to rethink their engagement. I’m thinking, and looking around, and getting acquainted with other pedagogic practices. Lately something has caught my attention – project based learning. I have been really curious about it and on a quest for learning more about what it is, and how to implement it. I want to write more about it soon, but for now, I will let these reflections on my context sit in my mind a while longer.