professional learning community
I’ve been back to work for a week and many of our faculty will be back next week. My staff has been hard at work all summer setting up new machines and reimaging old ones. We’ve rolled out 50 new desktop computers in two computer labs and classrooms. We are in the process of rolling out 30 new faculty laptops and servicing the other 40 that are already deployed to faculty. This includes service packs, an Outlook upgrade, and SmartNotebook 10. As we do these laptop upgrades, we’re requiring faculty to participate in a 30-45 minute training session when they pick up their laptops. During this training session, we’re reviewing basic laptop maintenance, spending a few minutes training the faculty on Outlook, and making sure our backup script works.
In addition to the nuts and bolts above here are some of the projects that I’m working on for the school year (Thanks to Jim Heynderickx for the inspiration here):
Outlook Training: During the first month of 
school we have to make sure to provide enough support to faculty, staff and students so we can complete our transition from FirstClass to Outlook. So far, so good as our transition over the summer was completed with only a few minor issues and with a positive reaction from the community. Change is hard, so I don’t expect that September will be a cake walk, but with appropriate communication and preemptive training and support, we’ll be in a good place in October.
Continued Professional Development including New Faculty and 
Student Orientation, Collegiate Connect (our SIS and communication hub for school constituents), Gradebook, Smartboards, and Moodle. This is a big one.
- New Faculty Orientation is a big one as we need to bring our faculty in, show them what we have to offer and how to find resources about technology at the school. Luckily, we have two one hour sessions with the new faculty this year and that will allow us to do a nuts and bolts session: file sharing, printing, Outlook email, and Collegiate Connect (SIS). The second session will be a technology scavenger hunt that our Academic Dean and Lower School Assistant Head are putting together. This is going to be a fun exercise to see if new faculty can use the training and FAQ material we’ve posted on our department web site to get the scavenger hunt done.
- New Student Orientation includes much of the above, plus a heavy dose of Acceptable Use in 20 minutes. Any ideas?
- Collegiate Connect training is usually done in conjunction with division meetings as it consists of specific administrative responsibilities of the faculty in each division. We’re creating lots of documentation in the form of FAQs on our Technology web site for this.
- Gradebook, Smartboard and Moodle training. None of these tools
are required so we’ll be providing as needed support on them in September and then rolling each out via targeted monthly themes with professional development and communication with the faculty during those periods.
Powerful Learning Practice — This is very exciting. Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach and Will Richardson are running this professional development program for five of our faculty/administrators. Here’s how they describe it:
Powerful Learning Practice offers a unique opportunity for educators to participate in a long-term, job-embedded professional development program that immerses them in 21st Century learning environments.
Day one of this is September 8th. I’m psyched.
Website Upgrade — Yes, we’re upgrading our web site. This collaborative process has taken longer than I planned, but we’re on track for a January launch providing us a much better look and feel and more integration between our site and Collegiate Connect.
And a few smaller ones —
Faculty Professional Development Reports — Last year we did these in a DrupalEd environment. This year, they will be in Moodle. Just waiting for MoodleRooms to finish up our Moodle config and we’ll be rocking and rolling.
New Media Gallery Training – Whipplehill just released the new version of their Media Gallery which is a Flickr like upgrade to their photo galleries but 
also includes a slick video and audio player. Tagging and all sorts of web 2.0 goodies available. We’re starting with our archived digital photos from 2001 to the present. Our archivist has two parent volunteers who will be working on this all year. Very exciting!
Oh, yeah — On the personal front we’re a few weeks away from a working kitchen — you can check out some of the pics here. Feels like I have two 10 hour a day jobs lately.
arvind and I will be webcasting again over at EdTechTalk in the next few weeks. Just need to wait for his teaching schedule to get going.
I’ve also decided not to subscribe to all of the listserv’s I traditional participate in and concentrate on Twitter, the ISENet Ning and my Blogroll this year. See you all there.
I’m sure there is lots more, but that’s it in a nut shell right now. See you all on the other side!
This year is a rebuilding year. As I wrote about in my reorganization post in the summer, I have three new staff members in my department this year. We are physically 
spread all over the school, creating divisions that can negatively effect department cohesiveness if we do not stay in frequent contact.
To work around this, we’ve been meeting bi-weekly as a whole department. I meet daily with my Network Administration and Technical Support Specialist. I have also scheduled bi-weekly meetings with individual department members. I know, you’re saying, that’s a lot of meetings. But these meetings are critical to keeping things going. To check in and move projects forward. To know how my staff is feeling. As we grow more cohesive, I can see taking some time off of these meetings, but for now, they are critical.
In the support staff meetings, we have been digging through our network settings (active directory policies, Internet settings, and router and switch configs), desktop and laptop image creation and configuration, policies and procedures, and how to communicate with faculty and staff. These conversations allow us to share best practices. It allows us to know what our technical issues are and to wrestle with making decisions for next September.
In full department meetings, we started by discussing how we are communicating internally, what we have been doing over the semester, and which tools we will be rolling out to the academic community over the next year. We’ve used so many different technologies over the past few years, that keeping up is tough. So we created a list of the department blog, wiki, and our web help desk. We discussed how to use each one. We use these tools in our day to day work with the school and the department.
So is this and effective management technique?
In order to evaluate them, I need to look back to the goals of my department:
- To provide reliable and consistent access to technology for students, faculty, and staff
- To develop technology skills in students, faculty and staff that support the curricular goals of the school
If I measure us against those goals, we are definitely more prepared to support our faculty and staff. This is a slow process because we are going through all of our configurations with a fine tooth comb, but we’re fixing support issues that have been nagging us for years and we’re looking to the future for major improvements.
On the classroom integration front, I see progress in taking our more technology savvy faculty to the next level. We are also making progress in implementing student and faculty curriculum standards. We are building out our Intranet where we can support Wordpress MU, Gallery, Moodle, and some group Drupal sites. We’ll be concentrating on how we use these tools in the spring.
How do you manage staff transitions?
How do you keep a dispersed department cohesive?
Over on Dangerously Irrelevant Scott links to the latest version of the National Staff Development
Council Standards or Staff Development which notes, effective staff
development:
- has small groups of educators working together over time in professional
learning communities; - is based on principles of effective adult learning; and
- deepens educators’ content knowledge.
According to the North Central Regional Educational Laboratory,
The term professional learning community describes a collegial group of administrators and school staff who are united in their commitment to student
learning. They share a vision, work and learn collaboratively, visit and review
other classrooms, and participate in decision making (Hord, 1997b). The benefits
to the staff and students include a reduced isolation of teachers, better informed
and committed teachers, and academic gains for students. Hord (1997b) notes,
"As an organizational arrangement, the professional learning community is seen as a powerful staff-development approach and a potent strategy for school change and improvement.
Human Capital and Creativity
The demands of the 21st Century has created a need for schools to become learning organizations that focus on developing human capital and creativity in their teachers to prepare them for changing the educational landscape. Peter Senge in his book, The Fifth Discipline describes a learning organization as a place "where people continually
expand their capacity to create the results they truly desire, where new and
expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured, where collective aspiration is set
free, and where people are continually learning how to learn together" (Senge,1990,p. 3). Unfortunately, most schools simply aren't there.
Wisdom of the Teacher
Roland Barth dares to discuss "the elephant in the room" a recent Educational Leadership article (March 2006) by which he means the various ways educators compete with and isolate themselves from one another. "Relationships among educators within a school range from vigorously
healthy to dangerously competitive. Strengthen those relationships, and
you improve professional practice." One way to strengthen relationships is through meaningful collaboration around a common task or shared vision.
School culture is such that it often under utilizes and underestimates the wisdom of teachers in terms of school improvement and school reform. Rather than create professional development experiences that tap what teachers know and help them to develop their professional voice, teachers are often removed from the decision making process that directly affects classroom practice and professional
growth opportunities.
However, through networks—both physical and virtual—
teachers are beginning to draw on external communities that promote divergent
thinking. Some of these virtual networks develop into powerful learning communities that connect the ideas of educators from around the world as they explore together and push traditional education boundaries.
Relationships are Key to Change
Collegiality builds relationships. I personally belong to several of these external virtual learning communities and value the relationships I have cultivated there. For example, as Steve Dembo demonstrates within the twitter community there is a great deal for educators to learn from each other. Often, someone will throw out a need, only to have it met within minutes by several different members of the community. Though twitter we laugh together and sometimes offer prayer and words of encouragement- all part of the trust building that occurs in a community of practice. I also am a part of several Ning communities, Tapped In communities, Flickr groups, listservs, and the edublogospshere. All having their own flavor of community and each helping me to grow in my knowledge and further refine my online voice.
Something Seems to Be Missing
What is lacking though is the link from my external community to the professional learning communities in schools. Teachers need to experience the same kind of collegiality within PLCs made up of their on site colleagues as they do out on the Web. Virtual learning communities can work just as well as a tool that connects colleagues who are together under the same roof as it does to bring educators together from around the world.
PD providers in a school or district should consider using virtual learning communities as a way to allow for anytime, anyplace development of personal learning networks. Teams of teachers within a school could collaborate and learn together with other diverse thinking educators from around the world. This type of professional learning community would allow for job embedded professional development that was shaped from a global perspective. In this setting, teachers could develop a change agent perspective and a voice in educational reform.
Change vs Control
This of course is very scary stuff for traditional education, steeped in the formal structures of the past. If teachers know how to lead, how to be
effective in evoking change, then that creates problems. Teachers start
asking questions. Things get messy. We awaken the sleeping giant and change is no longer incremental and controllable.
I use to say, "Change takes time." Well look around you, change no longer takes time, in fact change is happening at exponential rates. The challenge is to adapt to the rapid pace of change before as an institution we find ourselves irrelevant in the lives of the students we seek to help.
With all of the conferences happening over the next few weeks (K12Online, AIMS, and NEIT2007, it’s kind of hard for me to think about January, but EduCon 2.0 coming fast.
EduCon 2.0 is being hosted by Chris Lehmann, Principal of Science Leadership Academy from January 25 - 27 in Philadelphia, PA.
Please take a Chris’: EduCon 2.0 — A Call for Conversations and the Conference Wiki.
This is going to be a great event. Don’t miss it.
Recommendation for Jeff Lebow
I first met Jeff Lebow while listening to an EdTechTalk podcast that was published in the Winter of 2005. EdTechTalk and Worldbridges were foggy to me back then. I was not sure if it was a few or many people. A huge server farm or just a few.
After listening for a while, I realized that it was only Jeff and Dave Cormier supporting the servers, putting in the time, and creating content for EdTechTalk. Then Jeff offered something called Webcast Academy. A way for the average user to learn how to webcast — to participate and use the EdTechTalk servers to enhance the community that Jeff had created. I thought, “I would never be able to get into that class — There must be so many people signed up by now — and plus — I have three young children and can’t participate live.” I signed up anyway and started listening to the podcast recordings of their Webcast Academy sessions. After a few sessions, I actually learned how to webcast, found a co-host and started to do a weekly show with arvind grover, Director of Technology at Hewitt School.
Fourty episodes later, we’re still webcasting with the support of Jeff Lebow. I’ve never given Jeff a dime, and he has happily funded our servers and training by working at his day job over the past two years.
Watching EdTechTalk develop over the past two years has been amazing. We now have over 8 weekly webcasts and an environment that supports teachers integrating technology around the world.
With this type of influence, Jeff Lebow, deserves your award. As the world changes, alternative ways of professional development will become more and more common, and I believe that the professional learning community that Jeff Lebow has created is a powerful example of this new world of professional growth.
Thank you for your time.
