On a bright and warm Saturday morning, the Madison Meadows Middle School administration and teaching staff met with several members of our #OofSI team for the kickoff workshop event to the yearlong project: Developing a Professional Community of Practice at Madison Meadows Middle School. This first kickoff event served as the cage-busting event, in which Punya Mishra, Sean Leahy and Ben Scragg worked with the teaching staff to learn to see things differently through a variety of prompts including:
- Making the strange familiar / familiar strange
- Looking for subject (specific) Wow! Moments
- Making connections through empathy, creative mindset, backward design and identification of key elements.
At the end of the kickoff, workshop participants were given the charge to begin thinking about their own teaching, subject area, and classroom and identify areas in which they would like to develop a Novel, Effective and Whole (NEW) change. This item could be a single lesson, a project or an entire unit that they can focus on.
As part of the Madison Meadows Middle School project, the Office of Scholarship and Innovation will be conducting a series of workshops over the 2017–18 school year with the goal to create a unified, transformative, compelling, aesthetic experience for teachers grounded in the creative use of technology for teaching and learning.
At the foundation of the workshop series are the tenets:
Learning by Design. The instructional approach involves real-world, hands-on engagement with tools and pedagogies and their relationship to core constructs (big ideas) in the disciplines, through an open-ended collaborative backward-design approach.
Innovative use of technology. The emphasis in the professional development would not be about the latest and greatest tools but rather be aimed to help teachers to thoughtfully and creatively repurpose existing tools at their disposal to meet students disciplinary (and cross-disciplinary) learning goals.
Development of learning communities. Seek to develop a learning community that extends beyond the time spent in the professional development opportunity through the use of digital and networking technologies. Through this workshop series participants will be guided through the process creating Novel, Effective and Whole (NEW) experiences, and developing an implementation strategy through backward design.