Tag Archives: presentation

Working weekend

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I’m at school putting the final touches on a presentation I have to give tomorrow. The presentation is to the Ministry as part of a quality assurance process for provincial online schools. I find that working at my workstation with multiple displays makes this kind of work much easier than trying to do it at home.

The hard work is done, all I’m really doing to the presentation now is redacting personal identifiers of any students for privacy, and checking my math on the stats I’m sharing.

If you were to give me a grade on the prettiness of this presentation, I’d probably get a failing grade. A lot of the slides are dense with words and information. However, I’ve been assured by the ministry that it’s the story I’m telling that matters, not what the slides look like, and I think our team is telling a pretty compelling story about how we support a few of our most vulnerable kids, as examples of the supports we have in place.

That said, when telling a story, it’s easy to miss key elements or not recognize how they connect to more universal supports we offer. So, we will tell the stories, the slides will make the connections to evidence requested… and that means we’ve got some dense slides to share.

As an online vice principal and principal for the last 15+ years I’ve seen how online schools can be a great choice to get extra credits for a multitude of good reasons, and I’ve seen students come to us as a last resort when nothing else is working. For the students who come to us by choice, we do an amazing job getting them what they want. For those that come to us out of necessity as a last choice, we might be less successful statistically, but each of those statistics is a student, with their own stories and challenges, and we don’t forget that. These students take much more of our time, and resources, and we do everything we can to help them. It is these efforts I hope to share with the ministry tomorrow. And so the stories are what matter most… but the slides will (dense-as-they-are-with-information) demonstrate the evidence and details we are asked to provide.

Take action despite fear and doubt

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This weekend I had the opportunity to see Chris Williamson speak at the Vogue Theatre.

A few things he said seemed to circle around a theme of taking action despite fear and doubt. Here are some of the ideas he shared:
(I took notes not perfect quotes, but all the ideas below came from Chris.)

He quoted Christopher Hutchins, “In life we must choose our regrets.” This is a feature, not a bug. You can’t pick the right path and not still have regrets for not making another choice, choosing another path. Which regret do you want? Which regret can you not live with?

Contemplate the consequences of inaction. Don’t pretend that inaction does not have a price. (ie. The anxiety cost of ‘I still have X to do today.’)

Belief: Self-belief never waivers when the hero decides on his journey… But there is doubt ALL ALONG THE WAY! That’s why it’s so easy to fall back into old patterns.

We aren’t afraid of failure, we are afraid of what other will say when we fail… Don’t outsource your self image to the opinions of others.

Best question to ask: What is it that ‘you tomorrow‘ would want ‘you today‘ to do? Optimize for your future self.

Don’t follow what most people do… you don’t want the results they get.

You make the most progress when things are hard… and looking back, in retrospect, would you avoid them if you could, now that you’ve accomplished those hard things?

You don’t need to be certain, just confident that you are moving in the right direction. Have a bias for action.

He also quoted Jocko Willink regarding the fact that you can’t fake bravery. Pretending to be brave when you are scared IS bravery. Motivation is similar, just do the thing… Preparing isn’t the thing, neither is telling people, writing about the fact that you are going to do the thing, reading about it, or fantasizing about it. Again, just do the thing.

And finally, on this topic, an audience member quoted Chis during the Q&A, “The magic that you are looking for is in the thing that you are avoiding.

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How much of our lives are spent questioning ourselves, doubting ourselves, and avoiding action for fear of an outcome we don’t want?

I’ve shared this before, but when my wife and I were deciding if we were going to take our young family to China to take jobs as principal and teacher in a Foreign National school, we discussed it for over 2 hours late one night. We didn’t come to any conclusion, and the next night after work we put the kids down to sleep, and we sat down to continue the conversation. We made tea and popcorn and prepared for another marathon discussion, and then one of us (neither of us remember who) said, “If we don’t do this, will we regret it?” Absolutely. We had decided. The discussion moved to how to tell the kids. Any regrets for going would be overshadowed by the regret of not going.

As a photographer, I never regretted taking a photo, but I regretted the photographs that I never took.

We avoid time under tension, even though we know it strengthens us, “We cannot strengthen our resilience unless we face things that are challenging us for longer than we could previously tolerate.”

And as a final thought from me, Avoidance is easy, “How much time do we spend in a state of busyness rather than dealing with business? Avoiding the real task by doing other things, or worse yet doing something that’s merely a distraction. Some things get automated, habits get ritualized, and the work just gets done. But sometimes the struggle is real. The action avoidance becomes the easy task and the work doesn’t become the work, but actually just getting down to work. Because once you start the work gets done.”

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Also related: Be Fearless, James Clear on The pain of inaction, and many posts on failure.

Celebrating challenges

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I watched a few student presentations yesterday. Each one was excellent in their own way. But my favourite moment came when one student presenting on her Independent Directed Study put up a slide with the single word, ‘Challenges’ on it. She got excited and started with, “OK, I’ve been waiting to share this with you!”

I love the way our students perceive challenges and failures. They recognize that this is part of the learning journey. They celebrate the discoveries they make and the effort and perseverance it takes to overcome unexpected challenges along the way.

Here is a student that has done an amazing project, with a great outcome, and she can’t wait to share her challenges that lead to success. This happens because we embed the expectation that students will find challenges along the way. We expect them to share those challenges as part of their learning journey. As a result, the challenges become a big part of the learning, they become the focal point of where real learning begins.

An ‘A’ student that breezes through problems as if they were not problems doesn’t learn as much as another student who stumbled along the way and got to the same results. The journey is less memorable, less rewarding. It’s overcoming challenges that make a learning experience valuable, and seeing our students celebrate the challenges they met on there learning journey is extremely rewarding.

Do we always need the flash?

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Yesterday I spoke to 6 grade 12’s taking a new Teacher Education course in our school. I had a framework built for my talk in PowerPoint, but just text on a plain white background. I had calendared an hour before the presentation to add some images and touch it up. But as I added the first couple images, I realized that I really didn’t need them.

There are only 6 students, my second and third slides were question that I wanted them to answer and I would add their answers to the slides, and the 1-3 bullets on the other slides were not as much talking points but cues for me to share experiences as examples of what I was going to speak about.

It occurred to me that the images were not going to add anything except cosmetics. I think sometimes presentations become more about the flash and imagery than about the message.

If I were to be presenting to a filled auditorium, I might have thought more about beautifying my slides, but it’s easy to see whether or not I’ve got the attention of 6 kids. It’s easy to ask them questions and feel like I’m giving everyone a chance to respond. And it’s easy to make the presentation more of a conversation.

I presented to 6 kids who could all probably make better slides than me after three and a half years at a school that has them presenting weekly, and explicitly teaches them about visual messaging…. And I shared 10 slides with black printing on a white background. Reflecting now, that’s all I really needed.

Passion Project

At Inquiry Hub we don’t just have genius hour where students spend an hour a week on a project. Instead we have a full for-credit course that students take to follow their learning passions and interests. Yesterday I got to see a couple progress presentations, where students shared where they are on their current learning journey.

I’m always surprised by the diversity of questions students choose to tackle. Students find both creative topics and also creative ways to express their learning. But what I enjoy most is seeing the enthusiasm with which they go about learning. Having a specific course that lets students pursue their interests and actually get credit for it, rather than it be something extra that they do, adds an element of purpose to the project.

Imagine being an inquisitive student who spends their entire day learning what is on someone else’s agenda. Go to class, get the work for that specific subject, then go to the next class and repeat. Then lunch, then repeat for two more courses. The courses could be engaging, the teachers can be fantastic, but the choice of what to study is completely predetermined.

I think genius hour is great when there isn’t a full inquiry course to take. So are assignments where students have choice to make the assignment follow their interests. But maybe students should have inquiry/passion project time every week, at every grade… Scaffolded more in the younger years, but provide to every kid, every week.

Who owns the learning in a school? Who should own it? If you think students should at least partially own their own learning, then at some point in the school day or school week, they should be allotted time to do so. School should be a place where students have a say in what they get to learn.

Full appreciation

Last night Inquiry Hub Secondary had our open house to introduce our school to potential new students and their parents. It’s a bit of a challenge being a very small program that requires students to decide not to go to their closer, local high school and commute to another school away from their friends. But then we run an event like this and we hear speeches from our Grade 12’s, who share how rich their experience has been, and I realize why kids come here.

For me it is the student participation on a night like this that charges my battery. They come to share their interests, their inquiries, their time and labour, to showcase our school… their school.

It makes me feel lucky to be their principal; to be part of this community; to work with an amazing staff. An event like last night’s open house leaves me in full appreciation of the job I have, and the work that our team does to support students, who are also our amazing school ambassadors.

When students lead

We have a Professional Development Day today and so we held our Remembrance Day Assembly yesterday. It was completely organized by our student leadership club. My only contribution was a suggested theme, and it was shared because I was asked. Beyond that the agenda, setup, sound, performances, and every word spoken was done by students.

The main organizer, in Grade 12, is an exceptional writer, and I could hear his voice, his excellent vocabulary, weaved through the presentations. But he didn’t speak, he sat with the team working on the sound system.

I didn’t get to hear the rehearsal like I’d hoped, but one of our Grade 10’s assured me that it went really well. This was obvious in the assembly, because everything went smoothly. The performers were mostly from Grade 10’s, all future leaders capable of taking on running the event next year.

There’s a difference between student leaders who help a teacher run an event, and student leaders who take full responsibility for an event. There is an authenticity that comes with full control. Of course the students need to be ready for this. Putting them fully in charge but unprepared is not a recipe for success, but there is another side to this.

What if things go wrong? Well, there are different kinds of going wrong. If a student is playing an instrument and misses a note, that’s not a big deal. If a student says something inappropriate in a formal assembly, or obviously doesn’t take the event seriously, that’s different. If someone forgets a line, that’s different than if the event feels ad hoc and unplanned.

When students are ready, they need to be provided with authentic opportunities to lead. And when they step and truly lead, it’s impressive to see what they can do. One of the highlights for me, a thing that really made me feel impressed, was that the main organizer did the same thing we did. He stepped back, work done before the event even started, and he let the younger students MC, he let his team run the show. He distributed the leadership the same way it was distributed to him.

Community of Learners

Yesterday we had the incoming Grade 8 class join us for the day. Our Grade 9’s, under teacher supervision, organized the day. We welcomed our nervous, shy Grade 8’s with some icebreakers and a challenge to work in groups to do maximum 3-minute a skit that showed a challenge of working in groups. Then a 1-minute solution.

One example of a skit students came up with was a team worked hard to get a presentation ready and then the day it was due the person responsible for building the PowerPoint was away and didn’t share anything… and hadn’t actually done what they were supposed to do. The solution the students came up with was asking for a one day extension. The other things our teacher and other students suggested as a solution included:

How could they share their knowledge without a PowerPoint? Could they come up with about 5 slides in 10 minutes that would be a good backdrop to their presentation? And going further: What could they do to ensure that this student does more visible work before the presentation next time? And/or what would be a better role for that student next time?

The skits were not judged on how good they were, they were about a team facing a challenge and seeking a solution. They were dissected to learn, as a community, how to work effectively in a community. The skits were humorous, and often included things like dealing with tyrannical teachers with unrealistic actions or expectations. One skit had a teacher that threatened to beat kids up with a ruler. But even in this silly scenario, there were lessons to be learned.

Our Grade 9’s made sure everyone felt welcome. Our teachers made sure students worked together and shared what we expected from learners at our school. And the Grade 8’s moved slowly from nervous visitors to members of our community. After school a few students stuck around for an hour waiting for their parents to join us for our PAC (Parent Advisory Council) pot luck and then AGM Meeting. During that wait, the Grade 8’s mingled with the Grade 9’s that were also waiting, and it was great to see them all in cross-grade groups chatting and laughing.

We will continue the community building in September, and the beautiful thing about hosting a visit like yesterday is that there is already some momentum built. We won’t be starting from scratch, and our new students will start in September excited to reconnect. It’s so much easier to build a positive learning environment when a strong community of learners is established.

Passion Project Presentations

I’ve had the privilege of watching a few final presentations for our IDS courses – Independent Directed Studies – at Inquiry Hub. Our students choose a topic and put 100-120 hours of work into research, design, and creation of their own courses. The topics vary considerably from making a movie to learning to suture stitches, to designing a facial recognition doorbell, to creating a tabletop role playing game based on the student’s heritage.

I love seeing the diversity of the presentations, and the passion and enthusiasm students have sharing their work. I’m so impressed by both their presentation skills and so their slides. These students could teach a thing or two about how to create a slideshow to many professional presenters I’ve seen.

That’s because they get a lot of practice designing presentations and presenting. They have to do so in groups and on their own many times a year… more than in any typical school. And they get feedback, lots and lots of feedback, from peers as well as teachers.

For these final presentations parents are also invited, and even if parents can’t make it, students still have an audience beyond just the teacher. Students can invite anyone they want to watch, and we’ve even had two of our secretaries invited because they have similar interests in the topics, one on hairdressing and another on embroidery. The community aspect of these with parents, mentors, and community members joining in is absolutely wonderful. Our assistant superintendent also joined for a couple presentations.

It’s pretty special watching these final presentations. I think that every student should get a chance to delve into an area of interest that they choose. Learning shouldn’t just be about transmitting knowledge but about knowledge construction, and what better way to do this than to have students design their own learning experience?

The habits project

I have a project that I’ve been working on for quite a while now. I’ve been telling myself that I want to finish it, but I haven’t put enough time in (yet). It involves making 10 short (2-3 minute) videos based on James Clear’s Atomic Habits for students in a school where they get a lot of self-directed time. I’ve actually spent a fair bit of time white-boarding and developing the idea.

I have spent a few more hours going through James Clear’s 30 Days to Better Habits lessons, and I’ve worked on creating a script for the 10 lessons I have in mind. I’ve done a lot of work, but now comes the execution. Now I’ve got to actually record and edit/produce the videos.

I’ve used so many strategies I’ve learned in this book to create regular routines around health and wellness, and also to be more productive at work, but for a project like this, I have really not used the strategies. I have blocked off time and worked on it in large chunks, but I haven’t made any routines or habits to get this done… and I probably won’t. Instead, I’m going to block a bunch of time to do the recording all at once, and what I get will just need to be ‘good enough’, and then I’ll block some more time and try to do a marathon of editing.

The big question is, will this be shown to students this year or to start next school year? I won’t know until I start recording and then see how long it takes to edit one of these. But this has been a project in the making for almost 2 years now and I feel like if I don’t share my plan, I won’t get it done for another year. Wish me luck.