empowerment

7 Ways in Which our VISION 2020 is Coming to Life

2018 has been an exciting first year in our Innovation Project – Vision 2020! Have a look at how much we have accomplished so far:

We began the year with our 1st Maker Summit during our In-Service. All our teachers engaged in it either as facilitators or as participants of a series of hands-on and maker learning experiences with the purpose of giving you guys a taste of what maker-centered learning could look like in our classrooms. The 1st Maker Summit was also the kick-off of Vision 2020. Over 2018, an important step was taken in the realization of our innovative Vision for 2020: Our team of Course Coordinators partnered up with our Innovation Mentors to design Maker Activities to be incorporated in our courses. Since then, many teachers have been exploring the creative possibilities of maker-centered language learning with our students. Our Facebook group is sizzling with new activities and projects being shared by teachers every day.

Right after our In-Service and Maker Summit, we began engaging in the CoDesign Labs. The name itself says it: the Labs were creative sessions designed and facilitated by our Innovation Specialist, Clarissa Bezerra, in which our school leaders, Asa Norte and Águas Claras teachers engaged in co-creating innovative ideas to be implemented in our school. The hottest ideas, as selected by the groups themselves, have been compiled in our Community’s Innovative Ideas Platform, which you can access HERE. In 2019, teachers from Asa Sul, Taguatinga, Sudoeste and Lago Sul will have the opportunity to create together in the CoDesign Labs.

We have just finished the third Digital Learning Lab Module on Google Slides! This year we offered three modules: Google Drive, Google Docs, and Google Slides for teachers to learn the basics of these very useful tools for learning. We had around 35 teachers taking the modules and tweaking their Google skills in order to design and facilitate new and better learning experiences leveraged by these intuitive and friendly Google tools. The Lab modules were co-moderated by Clarissa Bezerra, Mariana Sucena, Ana Netto, Erika Oya, and Innovation Mentors José Antônio, Pedro Tapajós, Bárbara Duarte, and Flávia Franco. In 2019, we will offer a rerun of those modules, but we also intend to offer a module on Google Forms and Google Classroom.

The Shifting to a Maker Mindset mini course ran twice in 2018, with a group of around 15 teachers attending it in May, and a group of around 20 of our school leaders in August. The mini course was designed and facilitated by teachers Ivna Trevas and Leonardo Sampaio, both Lago Sul teachers working in the Bilingual Adventure course, where maker-centered learning plays a major role in the learning process. Teachers and leaders were able to experience the thrill of making as part of learning, and also understand and discuss the methodological and pedagogical implications of MCL (maker-centered learning) applied to language learning. Also in October, Erika Oya designed and facilitated a workshop on Bilingualism for teachers interested in diving into the bilingual teaching and learning universe, which has become increasingly more important for our school. In November, two sessions also on Bilingual teaching and learning will be offered and facilitated by Daniela Lyra, our Makerspace Instructional Designer, and Lago Sul Branch Manager Denise De Felice.

In July, during our In-Service, a group of around 20 teachers, including Course Coordinators Domingos Di Lello and Maria Da Luz Delfino, designed and presented posters in which they shared Maker activities that were successful in the classroom. Teachers engaged in discussion with poster presenters and were able to ask all types of questions about the activities. It was a highly energizing morning. The idea was to get everyone motivated and confident to try new approaches in their classrooms. In October, we ran a mini showcase again with the participation of teachers Bárbara Duarte, Alan Borges, Victor Hugo Andrade, Tatiana Faria, Ricardo Nardelli, Flávia Franco, Daniela França, Talita Lima and Hugo Lima during the 1st Maker Day Brasil in our Asa Norte branch. The larger community could see all the innovative activities that our teachers have been facilitating in our classrooms. Our 1st Maker Day Brasil was a huge success!

One of our goals within the Vision 2020 innovation project is to have all our teachers and academic staff become Google Certified Educators – Level 1. Last year, around 12 teachers became Google Certified, some of whom at Level 2, such as Paola Hanna, Leonardo Sampaio, and Ivna Trevas. This year, Branch Managers, Course Coordinators, Resource Center and Makerspace staff members will also engage in preparing for the certification at Level 1. We believe that the very learning process that takes place as a result of the Bootcamp training could be rather transformational, enabling the educator to find and design new opportunities leveraged by technology. In 2019, we will keep pushing towards that goal of certifying our educators.

In September, a group of approximately 30 early adopters entered our Vision 2020 Shared Learning Platform. They have begun engaging in a learning cycle which has been structured inside a Google Classroom. During their learning journeys, participants engage in the self-assessment of their educator digital competence levels. They will later engage in self-reflection and will establish an attainable goal to increase their digital competence and apply their learning to the classroom. The platform is running in beta mode, and soon the group of early adopters will be invited to take part in a face-to-face gathering that will help them take the next steps in their Vision 2020 learning journey. Invitations to join the platform will soon reopen, so stay tuned!

2018 has been a year to nurture a CLIMATE and a CULTURE that are welcoming of innovation. We are gradually learning to take more risks, to fail fast and apply our learnings in our everyday practice as a community. Our LEADERSHIP is also working on incorporating those values in their everyday practices and in changes that have been and will continue to be implemented from now on in order to drive innovation.

In 2019, we will continue this cultural work, which will help shape a new MINDSET. We will also keep encouraging PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT by offering a framework for learning via our Vision 2020 Shared Learning Platform, along with plenty other learning opportunities for all those who share an Innovator’s Mindset in our community.

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.

Claim your own growth

Photo: Grow by David Joyce on Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0)

I learn a lot in conversation with others. I learn so much blogging. There are some insightful people who take their time to read me and respond to what I say. This post was initiated in one such exchange with my friend Scott Johnson. Reminiscing on my learning a few months ago when attending the Edtech Team Brazil GAFE Summit, I poured out what resonated with me regarding the use of portfolios and how they fascinate me. Scott chimed in with the following words:

Clarissa, I’m interested in the portfolio idea as a form of claiming our efforts as authentically won plus as a tool of being a conscious learner. Sometimes we need to remind others that we are serious about our growth.

There’s so much packed in those two sentences.

Life is not easy, and professional development is most definitely an effortful endeavor. It requires commitment, a vision, and a purpose. We learn so much on the way but so many of us end up not keeping track of our development by engaging in some kind of self-reflection. To me that’s the true purpose of a portfolio. It’s a way to track your progress, to take stock of what you’ve learned. But it is only when we engage in reflection, when we actually examine the curves and the paths we chose to take along the way that we are able to attain a more concrete sense of achievement, of development. It is your reflecting on your own development that makes you aware of your own learning. And I guess that openly engaging in that reflection and declaring yourself to the world impacts your self-image and your self-worth more deeply than we might perceive if we go about our lives in auto pilot, just reacting to whatever experiences happen to us along the way. Being aware of your own achievements makes you care about achieving anything to begin with.

It is all about reminding yourself and the world that you are serious about your own growth. That you care. And that you purposefully work for it.

This blog is my portfolio. Here I have shared so many reflections on what has happened to me along my way of professional and in so many levels my personal development. This is my way of claiming my little bit of space in the world. As my friend Scott put it:

Clarissa, in art class we did portfolios to demonstrate that we had some claim to a place in the world. Not just dreamy and lost in ourselves but tangible actors with presence. This was very hard for some I think they had never been asked for THEIR thoughts and as students we were used to only being asked for what others thought.

Tangible actors with presence. Engaging in self-reflection and declaring our learning and our worth to the world is powerful. Forming our own opinions about ourselves is powerful. Asking ourselves the questions that enable us to dig deeper and find our hidden talents, our voices.

How do we come to feel worthy to put ourselves out there? To show what we can do? Some are confident and just blast ahead but that leaves a lot of students behind. And even confident people can hesitate when they feel less than competent. How to remove the barrier of not being “good-enough-yet” might be possible with a portfolio where a student can see their path and understand it as growth from effort?

I believe that we come to feel worthy to put ourselves out there by leaning on people who care, who believe that we all have something unique to contribute to the world. I believe that we all need to go through the “not-good-enough-yet” feeling and conquer it – not be paralyzed by it. Going through that process is an important part of your growth. We need a support system, a group of people who are willing to start the reflection process. We need other people to read us and talk to us about our reflections. That’s how we grow.

How can we start a culture of self-reflection on one’s own professional development? I guess we need to value our own answers to questions like What have you achieved so far? What are your goals? What is your vision? If we want to create a portfolio culture among our students, we first need to inspire and support teachers along the way. We need to create a sandbox for teachers to feel as learners and engage in building their own portfolios. Teachers need to experience first-hand the empowerment that comes from claiming their own growth.

Thank you, @scottx5 , for taking the time to talk to me here.

Looking forward to hearing from you, and from whoever feels they have something to say on all this! That’s how we grow.