Tim Wilson Blog ePortfolio

It's been a full day.  I was not sure how we were going to fill an entire nine hours with introducing ourselves, but we did and it was a quite a pleasant change.  We each were asked to create a powerpoint about ourselves and our educational journey.  Each one took 15 to 20 minutes and then afterwards we discussed different aspects of administration, mostly coming in the form of questions from Larry Molacek (the instructor) tilted to make us rethink our positions.  It was a day of introductions, it was a lot, but I now actually feel like I know each person in my cohort whereas if we had just gone around quickly introduced ourselves and moved on to discussions or group work, I probably wouldn't have had this much information about them.  I probably wouldn't have remembered their names for the most part.  Now I already feel like I know Liam, Maria, Maria, Mirelle, Kelsy, Ciro, Julie, Lianne, Doug, Heidi, and Ross (spellings may be a bit off). The main thing ...

In reading Ronald Barth's article The Culture Builder I had a question I am wondering about.  Barth argues that the most important goal that we should have for our graduates "is some evidence that that this youngster is becoming or has become an independent learner." And that more so is that each of us in our community are independent lifelong learners.  My question is then, does it matter what our teachers are choosing as their continued professional development or is it enough that they are simply continuing their learning? To me it seems that I would be as much better an educator for choosing to learn a musical instrument or a foreign language as I would be taking mastery classes on say differentiation.  Some of the teachers would still choose to focus on differentiation or assessment.  What if the professional development goal for each of your teachers was to learn something new and present their growth at the end of the term, given the one hour a week (?) ...

I've just finished reading How to Innovate: The Essential Guide for Fearless School Leaders  and I am reminded of the statement that came up at the Innovate 2015 conference at The Graded School here in São Paulo that I wrote about earlier.  In the panel disscussion on the first evening  Denis Russo Burgierman  Editor-in-Chief of  Superinteressante , Brazil's leading monthly magazine, made the point that innovation is a process.  It doesn't just happen as a good idea pops into your head and away you go.   From the reading I see that this is very true.  The movement that happens due to the innovative idea happens when structures are put into place to allow for and encourage the following through with.  I've worked with many teachers and admin who have innovative ideas but no culture within which to flourish.  This is probably the most difficult portion of becoming an innovative school.  The process and suggested exercises that Brown ...

In reading "How to Innovate: The essential guide for fearless school leaders" I had an idea when reading the chapter on Rethinking Your Space and this line in particular: "Your vision, in addition to the constraints of realities of your physical spaces, can lead you to develop innovative solutions later in the school design process." What if I started a collaborative blog or Google Doc with all of my friends from the around the world in their different schools and asked them to contribute to different categories of best practices, scheduling, use of space, curriculum... to create the visionary school that I know we all have been working towards (or complaining about how our school is not there). What if we gave these plans to an architect still in University as their final project?  We would be providing the student with a real world opportunity to be designing for and the strong possibility of the project being built.

Recently I listened to a "Start with Why" podcast entitled It's Not About the Coffee! Finding Clarity of Why .  In this episode the two host talk to Lori Collins about her experience of getting to the "Why" of her business of coffee roasting.  When she gets down to her real passion and why she does what she does in this statement, "I really want to serve through love, that people feel wanted, cared about, and loved" you know her "why".  I wanted to go and stay at her hostel (which I don't think exists) and drink coffee all day. Have you ever met someone that just oozes out their why or passion that you want to drop everything that you are doing and join them and their cause?  Earlier this year I had an opportunity to attend the Innovate Conference at the Graded school here in São Paulo.  At the conference I attended a session called "blue sky schools" lead by Dan Kerr (I happen to have worked at the same school as Dan p...

In the Research Methods course we will be choosing a topic that we are interested in and will be able to cross reference against other studies.  I thought here I might start to start to flesh out some ideas. What happens to language/vocabulary acquisition as measured by? when first-time language users learn from interactive software for the first 6? months The reason I thought about this is 1 of 2 native English speakers in his class in Brasil. When we arrived everyone that we spoke to said "Oh in 6 months your kids will be fluent in Portuguese, their friends will all speak it on the playground". Well we don't just learn languages being surrounded by immersion alone. What I've noticed is that he is having a hard time making the jump from knowing nothing and not being able to interact in Portuguese to having just enough vocabulary to start to hear the language while others are speaking creating the snowball effect of knowing and more importantly using more ...

One of the most important ideas to consider from How to Innovate: The Essential Guide for Fearless School Leaders , is the constant asking of both "Why" and "What if".  We are far to often bound as teachers and school leaders to preconceived notions of what school should be, how we allocate our time, when and where learning should happen, who should be doing the teaching and who the learning.  Many times these notions come don't come from written policies but from our past experiences in other schools or when we were in school.  If we are to truly begin to change how our schools work we must continually ask "Why" and then creatively "What if". -Why can't a teacher who does not teach during the first 3 periods on Thursday come in at 10:00? -What if we included into our professional development expectations a personal wellness provision, and that teacher uses that morning time to go for a run in the park -Why do we separate new languag...