Yesterday our I traveled to downtown Detroit for the Michigan Association of Computer Users in Learning (MACUL) conference with the rest of the members of the Secondary MAC program. We spent the entire day at the COBO center attending talks and I most definitely feel amped up to incorporate some new things into my own classroom.
The first talk that I attended was by Mark Dohn (@mdohn) entitled "Failure is an Option." The primary message of his talk was that in order to learn we must fail and our current education system does not provide the opportunity for failure.
"Failure is a step, not the destination. Failure comes first."
Charlie Wollborg, Failurelab Detroit
We must provide opportunities for our students to take risks and stress that with reflection we learn from our mistakes. Not only should we provide these opportunities to our students we should also model failure for our students. For example, when a project involving technology does not go as planned and is falling apart, we as teachers should not quit and give up we should persist, potentially fail, and discuss and reflect upon the failure with our students. I found this talk to be particular interesting, as in my current placement, we do not provide students with many opportunities to take risks and when students do fail we do not embrace and grow from those failures in the ways that Mark suggested. I think that as a new teacher it may be challenging, but it's a great time to start having this mentality with my students as I am sure that in my own practices there will be plenty of failures to grow from in the years to come.
The second session that I attended was by Gary Abud (@MR_ABUD), who is the 2014 Michigan Teacher of the Year, and was titled "Evaluating Teaching with Google Apps: A Case Study." To be quite honest before this session I did not know about teacher evaluations in general, but I feel that I not only learned about how these evaluations are typically done but ways in which Google Apps can be used to improve and streamline the entire process. At the beginning of his talk he had all of the teachers in the room move to a corner of the room that described how their school's used evaluations. Most teachers went to a corner where the evaluations were used to measure students progress and not to help teachers with professional development, while some did think that their schools used evaluations both as a measure and as a tool to provide feedback to teachers. During this activity, one of the teachers gave us some advice that we should talk to our mentors about the evaluation process and see what kind of feedback they receive (if our mentors will share the info). In addition she suggested that we also interview our current principals about evaluation and the process of becoming a new teacher in the school. I plan on taking her advice as I think it will add significantly to my perspective as a new teacher. I feel incredibly oblivious to much of the evaluation process and business of being a teacher and I think that gaining some perspective will allow me to manage actually being a teacher much more professionally. Gary's talk then continued on how his school district has streamlined and adapted how they evaluate teachers using Google Apps and how this has improved the entire evaluation process. One final take away that I think will also help me as a new teacher is to have the perspective that it is a teaching evaluation not a teacher evaluation and that I should not take feedback personally but that I should take the opportunity to improve my own teaching practices.
We concluded our day by listening to lightening talks. These talks varied in topic from allowing students the opportunity to explore to being conscientious of students' backgrounds and providing support and high expectations for them. Overall, these lightening talks served as the final cherry on top of a very motivating and exciting day. I left MACUL feeling amped up and ready to start planning how I can provide my students with more responsibility, opportunities to explore their world, and provide opportunities for failure.
Kaitlynn,
ReplyDeleteThank you so much for including the failure lab! I have been following them for the last couple years and I wholeheartedly agree about providing opportunities to model failure and creating low risk situations. In my previous program, this was a major theme, small experimenting, that in order to people to learn they needed opportunities to test out ideas, new models of thinking. As educators, in my opinion, we need to provide these opportunities for students to "small experiment" or "adaptively muddle" to build new mental models or knowledge. But, one of the biggest components that you mentioned in this is modeling how do you respond to failure? Have you seen this in practice? How would you go about doing so?
You found out some excellent advice, as I have started looking for jobs, I had considered asking about the evaluation process. However, it will be a process, that impacts my teaching and my professional practice. Also, I appreciate the distinction you emphasize between an evaluation of the teaching and not the teacher. That I feel is always one of the hardest aspects of receiving feedback and that maybe that I need to not only remind myself of that, but my students as well. Kaitlynn, you provided me with a lot to think about and questions I should be asking like : How can I model responding to failure for my students? What questions should I be asking about evaluations as I begin my job search?
I'm really pleased to hear that you attended Mark Dohn's session and took so much away from it (and it's great that you know about FailureLab Detroit, Meghan!)
ReplyDeleteIt seems that Dohn and his colleagues are trying to bring a fundamental element into science education that is often missing (and not just in science, either). Sometimes we need to make a case for inefficiency in education, and that can be a tough sell.
Meghan's question about connecting this idea to the job search seems like JUST the right thing. My feeling would be that if you framed a question around this--"I worry sometimes that we don't allow enough room in our science classrooms for kids to experiment, to do science, and to make mistakes and learn from them. Is that a concern that you share here at your school?" or what have you--that it could only be good. I should think that any science dept. worth its salt would appreciate the question and note positively that you asked it...and if they say no, well, that might not be the place where you would want to teach.
-Kaitlynn
ReplyDeleteThat talk about failure sounds very interesting. I too agree that we need to model how to handle and preserver through failure for our students. This goes right along with teaching our students for the real world because some type of failure is inevitable. I find it very interesting when teachers look past it, and act like it doesn't exist because I find that impossible. I find it very important to be straight forward with my students and point out when I make mistakes to show them that it is ok for them to make mistakes too. Without failure, growth is not possible and I think that this needs to be a founding principal of education. We are learning when we make mistakes, so failure is not all bad.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts!
What a great reflection on the experience at the MACUL conference. I really appreciate hearing about FailureLab too. I would like to attend a future event of theirs. How interesting! I had similar questions as Meghan when I was reading your blog. I wonder if Mark mentioned any examples from his own classroom experience of how he provided space for students to fail? I also wonder what might have done other than show examples of his own failures to facilitate a safe environment for this?
ReplyDeleteThank you for the sharing the suggestion of discussing the teacher evaluation process with our current MTs and possibly the principal at the schools we are at. I did not think as a process we had much control over but with more information and preparation we can definitely feel more comfortable with how it works.
Kaitlynn,
ReplyDeleteThanks for sharing your experiences at MACUL! I am particularly interested and interested in the first one you attended, "Failure is an Option."I completely agree with the message that Mark Dohn was sharing, that students need to have opportunities to take risks and challenge themselves. Similar to your placement, my placement does not really provide many opportunities for students to take risks or challenge themselves. If anything, I feel as if the school does everything that they can to nurture students and make sure they succeed. While I think success is important, I think there are so many things that we can learn from challenging ourselves and more importantly that we can learn from our failures (or the things we are not successful at). I am glad to see the are others out there who have similar thoughts. Thanks again for sharing!
Hey Kaitlynn,
ReplyDeleteYou are the first post that I have seen to talk about the presentation done by Mark Dohn. It sounds really awesome! I think it is so important for our student to know that so much learning comes from failure. It seems like such a scary thing to have to model failure as a teacher since we spend so much time planning to try and avoid failure in front of our classes. However, in order to truly make failure seem like an acceptable option, it is necessary for us to show them that even we fail, and we learn from it and move on. Failure and mistake making is really important for me as a language teacher because I must create an environment where students are okay making mistakes while speaking the language. I also attended the lightning talks as my last session and really loved those as an end to the day. The teachers who presented in the lightning talks were confident and passionate and it was really inspiring to hear them talk. Thanks for your thoughts!