“There is nothing more constant than change”
– Heraclitus, 535 BC
I feel in my work environment — this is what my colleagues and I identify with — constant change, masked in self-improvement and betterment. My international school is a reputable school with a strong faculty where there is a continual desire to improve and better our practice and strategies. Our current building, which was initially meant to be a temporary structure built 15 years ago, has turned into our permanent facility. It was not developed with the idea of shared spaces or collaboration in mind – a huge issue. The design of the physical space (or lack thereof) makes it extremely difficult to connect with colleagues. Adding to this, the stress that our schedule, demand for academics, and hectic pace of extracurricular activities, makes it difficult to find time to connect with each other and our community. We have struggled with, in either excess or limited, communication with all stakeholders and attempting to find the happy medium.
LP#1: Communication with faculty (Learning Leaders)
Our school values opportunities for leadership and encouraging professional and personal growth. In particular, we have a group of teachers in leadership roles, designated as learning leaders, who lead subject-specific teams such as English, Science, Math etc, and are used as a layer of leadership in our organization to help make decisions with the administration as far as grading, assessment, school-wide impacts, etc. Also, this talented group of teachers is relied on for their ideas, input, and pulse on their team.
This team is valuable to our organization; however, as an administrative team, we are unable to find the time to gather these people together to help us in curricular and administrative decisions while encouraging a supportive and team approach to this layer of leadership.
The proposed solution is looking at another digital collaborative platform that can support us until larger structural shifts can be made, such as redesigning the schedule or physically redesigning the building. Having a digital collaborative platform will help build a structure that allows communication to be open and readily accessible. It would be the base of a digital community, for learning leaders, that can be fostered and supported.
LP#2: Communication with students and parents
Currently, there are many platforms that students and teachers use to connect with students and then parents. Our school is a 1:1 school, and although we claim we technology savvy, we are not as savvy as we think. In fact, in most cases in education, the students’ ability supersedes that of our faculty. Here in lies the problem.
The LMS is Veracross, a great platform that is doing a lot of tasks for all levels of school. It is not unlike Moodle; however, it serves our purpose better with communicating academic achievement, formative process, and comments to the parents and students about progress. Comments and grading are happening simultaneously as report cards — it is pretty amazing, and it continues to build its platform to be superior to other rival systems such as PowerSchool. It is the main communication tool for students and parents, but it is used to varying degrees among staff because of preference and level of understanding.
However, not all teachers have bought in or willing to learn all that Veracross has to offer. There is a comfort with other platforms for managing class and assignments, thus, depending on the teacher, the student will navigate a series of websites, webpress sites, and google classrooms work through their class material. Students comment they go through click-icide to navigate their day. This is the problem.
Although the students are very digital literate, they are finding student life confusing with the uses of many platforms. In examining what is most useful for students, making their life easier, not necessarily the teacher, what would create a more sustainable, purposeful, cohesive learning model? There is a policy that every teacher has to use Veracross. However, it is in a minimal capacity, and this allowed teachers to choose what they felt the most comfortable with or to shy away if they were not as competent with the tools. The debate is to renew the learning practice of Google Classrooms for EVERYONE or to renew the thorough use of Veracross. There are pros and cons for both platforms, and they are not equally sharing the same perks and extras. This makes it difficult to decide and unsure of what level or degree our school should move toward mandating one platform.
The downside is that an online collaboration and a student management system discourages face-to-face conversations and relationship building.
With careful consideration and looking at the renewed practices, I will be examining the learning practice of collaboration online.
With this context in mind, I will be analyzing ways to:
Use time effectively
Establishing a culture
Benefits of an online environment
Digital collaborate: MURAL
Tutorials and time to be familiar program