Monday, December 7, 2009

Big Ideas Fest 2009, Day #1

At the core of Sprout Classrooms is innovation. We're working on new ways to give teachers access to classroom resources. We're developing custom products that will make organizing your classroom easier. We're working to bring environmental responsibility to your classroom without effort on your part.

For the last 10 hours, I've had the privileged to listen to innovators in other areas of education speak about their experiences, and I am feeling incredibly inspired and overwhelmed. The more ideas I get, the more questions I come up with!

One of my favorite speakers of the day was Dennis Bartels, Executive Director of the Exploratorium in San Francisco. His focus was on informal learning. When examined, students only spend 18.5% of their day in the classroom-what are they doing with the REST of their time? What if we developed a school day that was arranged around 4 hours of content learning, 4 hours of hands-on/museum learning and 4 hours of independent study? Sounds fabulous, right? How many teachers, yourself included, do you know that have 12 hours with their students? I believe I had closer to 5 hours after lunch, recess, specials, assemblies and dismissal. How do we support this system of learning? Will we get student buy-in? Will they trade after-school cartoons in for independent study? Does independent study need to be structured-will students be held accountable for what they learn during that time?

Marco Torres, a Social Studies teacher from San Fernando High School, inspired me with a fabulous speech on perspective in learning. How many students go to school every day, and how many students go to a learning lab? How many students are taught each day, and how many students are engaged each day? Great food for thought.

Yvonne Chan is the principal I wish I had taught under my year in San Francisco. What a fireball of ideas and passion for education! She has taken a large group of students in inner city Los Angelos, given then a charter school that 'rallies the wagons around the students' and has achieved 100% success. Favorite quotes from her speech include 'You cannot create a ripple effect when the lake is frozen' and 'When leading change and innovation, always proceed until apprehended!' Words to live by!

An interesting silent thread that connected all the speakers I heard today was the fact that they had to break out of the traditional education system before achieving success with their ideas. I'm finding that relying on the current system to embrace and support innovative ideas will often lead to disappointment (not always!). With the exception of Marco Torres, all the speakers work for independent learning institutions such as museums, charter schools, independent schools they created or private companies. Why is it so hard to implement these ideas within the current school system? Yvonne Chen spoke about how she had to mortgage her house to support her dream of the charter school. Those who are truly making changes are finding they must not only arm themselves with ideas, but also with courage and funding.

My action collaborative group is working on ways to change the larger educational system to accommodate creativity and differentiation within the classroom, yet still have accountability for students and teachers. Our big question has been structured as 'How do we create a flexible and relevant system that benefits all learners?' This is not nearly as simple as it sounds! Everyone has different ideas on how much, if any, assessment should be given to students, what kind of assessment should be given, what standards should be used, how standards should be created, how students should be held to the standards, etc. We have exactly one more day to create a new system that somehow appeases all involved-wish us luck!

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