It’s 15 minutes to midnight on the first Monday after March break, and I still haven’t done my #SDFitnessChallenge exercise yet today. I will work on my handstands after writing this and I’m not waking up early to workout and finish this post tomorrow morning, like I usually do. I’ll sleep in a bit later. Today the work day just kept going and tomorrow is already a busy day.
My fitness progress is incremental. My commitment to daily writing is a marathon, not a sprint. Even my dedication to transforming education moves slowly… but the school closures for Covid-19, and the Provincial commitment to a ‘Continuity of Learning’ is promising to be exponentially transformational.
I wrote a post a while back called Isolation vs Collaboration, and in it I said,
“Educators who work in isolation improve incrementally, while educators who collaborate transform exponentially!”
Kathleen McClaskey posterized the quote, and shared by in a Tweet and on the Personalized Learning website.
Recently Michael Buist also posterized this quote and shared it in a tweet:
https://twitter.com/buistbunch/status/1244352249947660289
With almost every educator in the province looking to connect with students digitally, many are quickly realizing that trying to do this alone is overwhelming. They are connecting with colleagues, and district support teams who are developing resources to support them.
With endless resources available online, educators are realizing that information is abundant, and students developing literacy and numeracy competencies, and skills, are more important than just focusing on content.
With an inability to proctor tests and supervise exams, teachers are rethinking assessment and evaluation.
Doing this all at once can be a bit scary and overwhelming, but working with colleagues and mentors can help. Collaboration will be key. This is not a time to try things on isolation, it is a time to work together. For now changes have been forced upon us. These changes can lead us to rush and just do small incremental changes in individual practice. Or we can be slow and thoughtful and ensure that these changes lead to a collective, exponential transformation in the way we look at content, skills and competencies, as well as our assessment and evaluation practices.
Let’s commit to working together, sharing openly, and transforming our practice exponentially.
David, I really liked your closing remarks about moving ‘slow and thoughtful’ in this time of change.
There is a lot written about the move online, such as Dean Shareski’s This is the Time. Although this time provides us an opportunity, I think that if we rush too fast that we will get the bends. I will continue to come back to Dave Cormier’s pre-pandemic piece on sustainable change. Working together we need to use the opportunity to bring everyone along with the journey.
Also on: Read Write Collect
I had read, and shared with my staff, the Shareski post, but the Cormier post was new to me. Culture change is hard, slow work but it is meaningful and lasting if done well. The hardest part is that when people resist culture change, that resistance gets embedded into the new culture… so authentic collaboration is needed or the lack of buy-in undermines everyone’s efforts, not just the efforts of the resistors.