Heather's EDET668 Blog

Essential Question 11: What is the role of knowledge creation and sharing in a healthy educational organization? "If you remember one thing about information, it is that it only becomes valuable in a social context." (Fullman, 2001, p. 89).  This really says it all.  As teachers, it feels like we are constantly reinventing the wheel. "It is one of life's great ironies: schools are in the business of teaching and learning, yet they are terrible at learning from each other." (Fullman, 2001, p. 103).  I observed this phenomenon  when I completed my student teaching in 2010.  After spending a semester in the high school science classroom I wanted to see other teacher's classrooms, so I sent an email to everyone in the district asking if I could come and observe their classrooms.  I only got one response.  Since then, many teachers have retired and there has been a change in the sharing culture at our school.  The majority of teachers spend lunch t...

Essential Question 10: Explain and give examples to argue why the following statement is true or false: “Get the right people on your team, and get the wrong ones off.” Starting on page 77 of  Leading in a culture of change, Fullman writes an example about two different departments in the same school.  The English department had a strong community of teachers who shared lessons and assignments, helped new teachers, and had positive attitudes about their jobs and their students.  In contrast, the social studies department kept their resources to themselves and were bitter about their jobs and negative about their students.  This example made me think the statement about is true because I'd much rather surround myself with people like those on the English team. However, upon further reading I think the statement could also be false because if you only work with the "right people" there may be no one to challenge the team and ultimately push the team to grow.  ...

Essential Question 9: How is mentoring adults different from teaching children? The purpose of mentoring is to provide support, guidance and advice to teachers to enable them to enhance their teaching skills to develop professionally. ("Introduction to supporting," 2018). In my mind I could change just a few words and have the purpose of teaching. They are very similar, but there are many differences when mentoring adults or teaching children. Adults are more likely to be motivated learners since they are gaining knowledge about how to be more successful at their chosen career. Children usually are there because they have to be and may lose enthusiasm for the subject matter. Adults tend to be more independent learners and can be left to problem solve and make decisions about the direction of the lesson. In my experiences, children are willing to spend less time working on a problem before asking someone to help them. And many of them do not like open-ended assign...

Essential Question 8: What strategies do you use that are related to your “moral purpose”? How do these contribute to your overall leadership? "Leading with moral purpose means having a commitment to making a difference in the lives and outcomes of students as a result of their experiences at school." (Bezzina, 2007)  While I formally teach science, I frequently make my students aware that my job isn't to make sure that they know the element symbol of gold, but rather that they can grow into successful adults that positively contribute to society.  "Moral purpose is about both ends and means. In education, an important end is to make a difference in the lives of students. But the means of getting to that end are also crucial." (Fullan, 2001, p.26)  There are two main strategies I use to encourage my students to be their best selves along the way: modeling and communicating.  Modeling :  If I have learned anything from being a mother, it is that childre...

Essential Question 6: What are the challenges in shifting content from "what" to "where" and "how"? When I first read this question, I began thinking about how we make information relevant for our students.  I thought the question was asking how I make my students understand the where and how specific information (what) can be used so that they have a better understanding of the information.  Upon reading chapters seven through nine of A New Culture of Learning , I found that I was mistaken. According to Brown and Thomas (2011), what is the information we know.  It is easy to test whether or not students understand the what and therefore is particularly useful in school. They go on to explain that where is when we put that what into context.  Since we live in the Information Age, the what has become less important than the where and that should be reflected in the way that students learn at school (Brown and Thomas, 2011, p. 95). So that leads u...

Essential Question 5: What are your thoughts about “learning in the collective”? Before this essential question, I had not heard of the collective.  Brown and Thomas (2011) wrote an entire chapter trying to explain the collective and from that I gathered it is a collection of people that are actively engaged in the learning process.  Collectives are successful when there is participation and "improve with size and diversity" and they "are not bound by physical or geographic constraints" (Brown and Thomas, 2011, p. 53).  I read through Chapters 3 and 4 several times and still felt unsettled with the collective due to the line on page 54 that reads, "Any effort to define or direct collectives would destroy the very thing that is unique and innovative about them." (Brown and Thomas, 2011).  This seems like a cop out and the exact opposite of a the point of a collective.  Instead I expected to read examples and stories of ways to create collective enviro...