There is clearly not enough time in the day. I have a never ending to do list that seems to grow more than it shrinks. Recognizing that I don’t have enough time to do all the things that I have to do, much less what I want to do, I still feel like this post needed to shared.
Collaboration isn’t an option, it is now a necessity.
Knowing that we can get bogged down in our buildings, or in our classrooms, can make us feel like taking an extra step to communicate and collaborate with other teachers may push us over the edge. But sometimes? It can lead to the most organic of discoveries!
Last week, I was scrolling through Instagram, I came across a post from another educator friend talking about the website Popplet. Popplet is a visual mind mapping tool that students can use to organize facts and thoughts and learn to create relationships between them. I took a screenshot and sent it to two of my teachers whom I thought would enjoy teaching with it.
The next week, one of them, a second grade teacher, had her students use popplet to write word problems. They had to roll a dice and get three numbers. They then used those three numbers to create a math word problem and had to show different ways to solve it on a popplet.
The other, a fourth grade teacher, used it to illustrate all the different forms of numbers they had been studying. The students wrote one form of the number in the middle and then connected all of the different ways it could be written around it.
His comment? “You never know what a students doesn’t know until you ask them to create something.” It began very clear, and very easy, to see which students were struggling.
I couldn’t have required such an epiphany!!
The point here is that I didn’t pay to go to a conference. I didn’t sit through a webinar. I didn’t read a book. I simply saw a picture on a form of social media and shared it. Something that quick and easy allowed these teachers to add another tool in their toolbox to gather formative assessment data from their students. Sharing doesn’t require a tremendous amount of effort, you just have to do it!
Hey Amber,
I think that you are so right about collaboration and the benefit of it, and basically how you can learn about whatever you want and however you want. That is powerful. What I think is important though that people have time to work on their own to focus on things and dig deeper. I would say that as I get older, I actually am becoming more of an introvert in many areas and that meeting after meeting takes a lot out of me. I would say that there are a lot of introverts in education. How do we balance the space between providing time for collaboration and giving people time to just be on their own?
Thanks for the share…you just sparked a blog post for me 🙂
G
Thanks to George and Amber for these timely posts! From a collaboration standpoint, I learned of a Texas educator’s post by reading the tweet of a Canadian educator…from my kitchen in Massachusetts.
Our faculty explored this very topic yesterday in faculty meeting after reading chapter 3 of Susan Cain’s “Quiet”. With a lot of schools – ours included – focusing on helping students collaborate effectively, we took time to think about the ways and physical spaces in which we allow for introverts to learn most effectively. While I did not agree with everything Cain wrote, I benefitted as a teacher and administrator from hearing the perspectives of my colleagues. It was time well spent as we processed current strategies in use for introverts, cataloging the findings of each small group in a Google doc. Collaboration to process how we work with introverted learners.
I look forward to reading more of your posts!
I love it when organic, impromptu, and usually surprising learning happens like this. It reminds me of the huge need for a change in mindsets about what counts as authentic professional learning. We’re supposed to be offering our students these authentic, personalized learning experiences, yet we aren’t allowing our teachers to do the same and have it legitimately count for something.
Hey Amber,
Wonderful post and as a teacher I could totally relate to it.
To help my students learn quickly, I use Mind Vector. Its pretty simple to use and has various colors,
something my students totally love.
Anyways, thanks for a great post.