A Plan Comes Together...Slowly

The innovation plan at the heart of my work in the Digital Learning and Leading program is intended to provide teachers a path toward helping their students engage in deep learning and develop growth mindset thinking. In true constructivist fashion, teachers learn to help their students do this by doing it themselves, examing their own learning process and investigating ways to apply that process to the discipline in which they teach.

Details, Details

The first half of my professional learning plan's online course component is up and somewhat running--submitted for evaluation as part of my coursework in EDLD 5318: Instructional Design in Online Learning.

As I share my thoughts on this, you may want to buckle up and prepare to go down a metacognitive rabbit hole. Yes, I am aware that rabbit hole trips typically do not involve seat belts. My blog, my rules.

The Dirtying of Hands

Two-thirds of the way through my DLL master's program, and I feel like I'm finally getting to put all of my thoughts and ideas from my innovation plan into concrete form, designing the online course portion of the professional learning program I'm proposing. 

Learning From The Best, And Also From The Rest - Innovation Plan Update

As I have continued to develop and refine the innovation plan I have been working on as part of my graduate coursework, I've had the opportunity to learn from both the successes and the mistakes of others in their own innovation efforts. This research has led me to identify two key elements that I need to keep in mine as my innovation plan gets underway.

The Good, The Bad, and The Untested

A call to action, refocused and reimagined. What can we learn from the successes and failures of others, and how will we apply that knowledge. Tune in below to find out....

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1I9dIC2NgRIgpPOcOkJNWjX25UkhJpU2IgZkPimkA2X4/edit?usp=sharing

Talking the Talk

The concepts of self-differentiated leadership and of crucial conversations both have, at their core, the idea of harnessing one's emotional responses and of looking through, over, and beyond the emotions of oneself and others toward a larger goal. While both theories will provide assistance as I implement my innovation plan, the decentralized, teacher/learner-driven nature of the plan suggest that the crucial conversation methodology will be of more direct and immediate use.

Exerting My Influence

As the time to actually try and convince my colleagues to sign on to my innovation plan draws nearer, I have begun to examine the fundamentals of exactly what that plan is trying to accomplish, and how, and why. (Of course, I have that backwards, as the title alone of Sinek's 2009 video Start With Why indicates.)

We'll Start At The End....

In my last post, I outlined goals (both Big Hairy Audacious ones and...Little Bald Reticent ones?) for my innovation plan, which can be found here. In that post, I used a modified version of Fink's 3-column table to map out goals, activities, and assessments for the Technology-Assisted Music Course that is the keystone of that plan.

In this post, I've taken a different approach to do a deeper dive into one part of that class. Using the "backward design" principles put forth in McTighe and Wiggins' Understanding By Design (2005), I designed one of the culminating projects of the TAM course: an "audio self-portrait," in which students attempt to express part of their personalities through self-produced audio recordings of their own compositions.

Big Hairy Audacious Goals and Where to Find Them

In my innovation plan, I have proposed an online Technology-Assisted Music course for my district. There will be a year-long version for students, and a quarter-long professional development version for teachers, aimed at helping these teachers bring the ideas of a growth mindset and creative thinking into their own disciplines and learning environments. The entire innovation plan can be found here; below you will find the learning outcomes and learning and assessment activities for the teacher-targeted professional development version of the course, as well as a description of the driving motivation behind the plan, expressed in the form of what Collins describes, here and in many other places, as a Big Hairy Audacious Goal, or BHAG (2018).

Creating Significant Learning Environments

As part of my DLL coursework in EDLD 5305, I created an innovation plan which involves establishing an online course in Technology-Assisted Music. The details of that plan can be found here, but, in summary, the intent is that this course will help both students and teachers use the study of digital audio production to enhance their creative skills, both individual and collaborative, and to develop a growth mindset, which is vital to any sort of learning.

EDLD 5305: Bringing It All Together

With a nod to Harapnuik's 2015 blog post "The Head Won't Go Where the Heart Hasn't Been," and its breakdown of Bloom's cognitive, affective, and psychomotor domains as "head, heart, and hands," I present the anatomy of an innovation plan.

2, 4, 6, 8, Now It's Time To Annotate!

In addition to the many resources I referenced in my literature review, these are some of the materials that I came across and intend to make further use of as I develop and implement my innovation plan.

Ready, Set...Innovate!

As promised in a previous post, I have a plan. Below is my detailed innovation plan for an online technology-assisted music course, designed both for students and their teachers, as a way of fostering creative skills, developing and sustaining a growth mindset, and just letting everybody express themselves a little differently.

Making My Case: A Literature Review

The following literature review will explore research into the benefits of deeper learning, the particular capacity of arts classes and creative projects to access those benefits, and the necessity of developing these skills for both students and teachers. This research will demonstrate the value of establishing an online Technology-Assisted Music course as part of the Chesterfield County Public Schools high school curriculum, and of developing a teacher-targeted version of this course to promote the course competencies across multiple disciplines.

A Man, A Plan....Or At Least A Proposal

Below you will find the most current version of my initial proposal for a plan to implement an online version of the high school Technology-Assisted Music course that I currently teach, with an eye toward helping both students and teachers in all disciplines develop and promote collaborative learning, critical thinking, and a growth mindset, as well as fostering creative skills.