St. James-Assiniboia School Division
Workshop resources for my workshop and world cafe at St. James-Assiniboia School Division Administrator retreat, November 1 and 2, 2018 in Winnipeg, Manitoba. This is a draft and will be updated on Sunday November 4.
[slideshare id=121604481&doc=mb-udl-6cs-181102215535]
I started with the the map tool native-land.ca to acknowledge that we were on the traditional lands of the on original lands of Anishinaabeg, Cree, Oji-Cree, Dakota, and Dene peoples, and on the homeland of the Métis Nation. Whenever I have the privilege of being the one behind the microphone or behind the podium, I try to use ensure that I always keep the “TRC calls to action close to my heart. I showed the drawing I did of Kory Wilson‘s talk at the University of Saskatchewan’s Indigenous & Open Teaching and Learning conference where she urged us to move from reconciliation to reconciliACTION.
My friend and colleague Andy McKiel who invited me to Ride the Wave and this administrator retreat introduced me and shared our UnPlug’d story by way of describing my love for doodling. I always tell how I use doodling as a learner as a way to self-regulate towards effortful, focused attention. For me, this facilitates moving the content of conference talks from my working memory into my long term memory. Since 2011, I have drawings for over 450 talks. It seems mind boggling to me but I love how my drawings act as anchor points for my memory and allow me to recall so much from each session. I call it my “memory palace” after a participant at one of my sessions said my description of how I use my drawing as a memory aid reminded him of Joshua Foer’s book, Moonwalking with Einstein and related Ted Talk about how he became a memory champion.
I’m heavily influenced by How Learning Works, which was the basis for the Teacher For Learning Module I created this last summer with eCampusOntario as part of the Extend Ontario professional development project. These principles for learning are also aligned with the principles for universal design for learning.
This most recent summer I spent studying Peter Senge’s Fifth Discipline to see if visual practice could facilitate the kind of change he highlights in his book to foster “learning organizations”. I see a lot of similarities between this systems-thinking approach and the one that over 1400 schools have partnered for the “New Pedagogies of Deep Learning” (without the brief side tangent on the fact that “deep learning” refers mostly to Artificial Intelligence according to Google).
In any case, good teaching is ultimately about caring about the learner. Effective learning involves trying and reflecting. This also happens to be what both Senge (1990) and McEachen, Fullen, and Quinn (2016) want us to do with our organizations as an act of “collaborative inquiry”. Our collective inquiry scaffolded from simple drawings towards a World Cafe
I reference Sunni Brown and Dan Roam and the activities I use are from other brilliant people I’ve been lucky enough to meet over the years.
For example, the standard, “I can draw” circle, I learned from the brilliant and magical Nancy White; the incredible work of Nick Sousanis with his fun and abstract comic making activity #GridsGestures activity, maps the shape of our day; some inspiration can be pulled from Mike Rhodes, Sketchnote Handbook
Or, we could, as Nick suggests, pull inspiration from our ceilings, as my friend Claire Coulter does here:
For our #gridsgestures activity with @giuliaforsythe we were encouraged to look up for inspiration. #IDIGOntario #oext119 @Nsousanis pic.twitter.com/WT9b7QVLf2
— Claire Coulter (@CCoulter11) March 22, 2018
I’ve been a big fan of Nick for ages and I love to reference his book Unflattening whenever I can. Breaking the barriers of text in academia is a huge accomplishment. Also, the book is stunning and brilliant so I think everyone should have a copy.
Liberating Structures activity: Drawing Together to identify a professional challenge only using 6 basic shapes. Using another liberating structures format of 1-2-4-all to pull out themes.
Leading into the World cafe, we used the Drawing Together again to identify what we want for students. Then we classified our drawing into one of the 6 Cs (collaboration, communication, creativity, citizenship, critical thinking, character) or one of the 4 elements (pedagogical practices, leveraging digital, learning environment, partnerships).
The Deep Learning Cafe tables focused on the 6cs and the 4 elements for a total of 10 tables. Each discussion ran for 20 minutes and we had 3 rotations. We spent the last 50 minutes with 5 minute debriefs from each table and I visually recorded the harvest.
