Moving on

tracyrosen on January 26, 2020

I have returned to the classroom. After 5 years with the RECIT Provincial Service to Adult Education, I decided to return to my roots as an elementary school teacher.

I have learned so much over these past 5 years and I know that all of it will make me a better teacher for my students and my colleagues.

Just as I am moving on, so will this blog. I started blogging in the early 2000s on various platforms and moved everything over to Leading from the Heart in 2007. From now on, I will be writing there. I will also maintain a site with my PD Practice articles and you can find them at Leading from the Heart as well.

I hope to see you there! I have learned so much from all of my colleagues in Adult Education, the RECIT, and the larger Quebec education community and I am looking forward to applying everything I have learned within my new school. It has been about a decade since I taught in the youth sector – this should be an interesting ride!

Thank you for everything.

Tracy

Getting Better Together

tracyrosen on June 25, 2019

Smiling people sitting crossed legged on a field with the text: What is collaboration?

Digital Action Plan. New courses. New partners. New projects. New people.

It has been a busy year and if there is one word to describe the past 180 days, it has to be collaboration.

Four smiling people sitting cross legged on a field with text: What is collaboration?

Collaboration in education usually invokes images of smiles and people getting along while working on projects. When we say collaboration, maybe this is the picture we have in our head. And when we don’t want to collaborate with people, maybe it is because we think that it will be really difficult to attain that image with the particular people involved – if not impossible.

I think collaboration needs to be so much more than getting together (smiling and getting along) to achieve a pre-set something – whether it be a learning resource, an evaluation situation, a video, a set of ideas, a workshop, or an article.

Years ago, I read an article that I keep coming back to, Conflict amid Community: The micropolitics of teacher collaboration by Betty Achinstein. Her research demonstrated that, too often, what was missing from collaboration and community was conflict. (Not the yelling at each other and fighting kind of conflict, the opposing viewpoints kind of conflict.)

Now, we might think that to be a good thing. But, really, it is not. Conflicting opinions exist in community. When we ignore that, when we think there is only one way to do things, then we get into dangerous territory of privilege and oppression. When we focus on only one way of doing things, then we lose out on a diversity of ways of doing and being that, when put together,  become something new, something great. 

And that is what Betty Achinstein found. That when teachers collaborated on various projects, they very often met with conflict. The knee-jerk reaction to conflict is to make it go away – to smooth things over, to concede to something that we may not agree with, or to choose to exclude diverse viewpoints from the conversation. But, when conflict was allowed to happen, when teachers listened to each others different points of view and worked together anyways, they were able to achieve great things. Together. And the community got stronger. And individually, people felt better because they were heard and together they were contributing to the betterment of their community.

This year, I worked on many projects with many different people. Our Adult Education RECIT team in the English community doubled in size, beyond that, the RECIT network more than tripled in size. There was a demand for more resources to support the English network and so I have been starting to work with more people across it – from the youth sector into the adult sectors – and we each have our ways of doing and being that become part of our collaboration process.

And so of course – conflict occurs. When it is talked about and worked through and accepted as a part of the process, I believe that what we are working towards is better. Universal Design in education is steeped in empathy – the designing of learning environments and products with the greatest possible potential users in mind. How can we do that without listening to, considering, and integrating opposing viewpoints? 

Each year around this time, as I start to think about the year to come, I ask myself – how are we getting better? When my ideas were challenged this year during collaboration, the end results were always better because they included multiple points of view. It wasn’t always easy for me and sometimes it took longer than I wanted, but it was always better. So my wish for next year, is that we continue to challenge each other so that we can continue to get better. Together.

From differentiation to accessibility through Universal Design.

tracyrosen on June 19, 2019

from differentiation to accessibility through udl

I have been thinking and talking a lot about accessibility this year. As teachers, we want our students to be successful in our classrooms, in our schools and centres, in whatever their goals are. But how do we do this? Concretely, what do we do to ensure that this happens?

For many, the quick answer is through differentiation – when we tailor instruction to meet the individual needs of our students.

With differentiation, we get to know our students needs and/or learning styles so we can create lessons, activities, or environments that cater specifically to those needs.

Focusing solely on differentiation can be problematic on a variety of levels:

  • Differentiation is reactive – it begins after meeting our students
    • …(What happens when we have continuous intake of students like we do in many adult education centres?)…
  • Differentiation entails a lot of work that happens while we are with our students in order to modify lessons and instruction to accommodate a variety of individual needs as they are presented to us.
  • Designing lessons based on individual learning styles is not backed by evidence of improved learning – in other words, if we focus on individual learning styles it is a lot of work that is not proven to be worthwhile.

Where does accessibility come in? Well, it doesn’t. At least, not right away. In fact, I’d even argue that with differentiation, we are looking more at accommodation than at accessibility.

When we train our focus on accessibility, we can use frameworks like Universal Design to anticipate possible obstacles to learning in our lessons and environments and then design them away before the students can encounter them.

I think that both universal design and differentiation have similar motivations:

  • Empathy for the learner experience
  • A focus on choice and flexibility
  • An understanding and acceptance of multiple access points to learning

Their differences lie within their approaches.

With differentiation, we respond directly to individual needs. But we have to wait until these needs are presented to us in order to respond so it is a reactive approach.

With universal design, we anticipate obstacles and get rid of them so that the largest number of people can access the learning. It is not directly focused on the individual but on the collective, yet in a way that honours the individual.

I found differentiation exhausting as a teacher. Mainly because so much of the work had to happen once I met my students. When I started to move my focus towards creating learning environments and situations with multiple access points from the get-go, before I even met my students, I found that I was actually better at meeting individual needs than when I was working so hard trying to differentiate based on them! It was still a lot of work but much of the work could happen before I was ‘live’ with the students, which made things much easier.

As I wrote at the top, I have been thinking and talking a lot about these ideas lately. How we widen access to learning – especially in a context like adult education where we may only be with our students for a short while – is becoming increasingly important for me and the people I work with. I see accessibility being directly tied to empathy and, ultimately, respect for our students and their learning experiences.

Here are two videos I made recently based on some workshops I gave this year, some on my own and one with my colleague Sandra Laine of the RECIT service national, domaine des langues.

Part 1 answers the question Why Universal Design for Learning?:

Part 2 answers the question What is Universal Design for Learning? And it addresses some differences between UDL and Differentiation.

These videos were originally created for an article I wrote with Emilie Bowles, RECIT regional service to general adult education, for a special edition of the Carrefour FGA newsletter on Universal Design for Learning (pp. 11-13)

For more discussion about UDL and Differentiation:

UDL and Differentiation and how they are connected

Distinctions between accommodation and accessibility

Similarities and differences between Universal Design for Learning and Differentiated Instruction

Flexible spaces for individualized classrooms

tracyrosen on November 12, 2018

A place for everyone.

I taught a multi-level French Second Language course a number of years ago. The students were following a mix of Pre-secondary through Secondary five programs – and I had one student studying math. The students were part of a special program offered through Tewatohnhi’saktha and Nova Career Centre and they had one morning of French class  a week. The work was immense. And there was one French class a week. 

When I think about multiplying the work 3, 4, or 5 times a week, I start to shake. Yet this is what many teachers in Adult Education in Quebec do on a regular basis. The longer I work in Adult Ed, I am seeing that individualized classrooms are more the norm than the exception. I am humbled by teachers like Janie Lamoureux and Karine Jacques (and so many more!) who strive to make their classrooms work for all of their students, regardless of level, background, or course they are taking.

…& they do this through flexible learning environments.

But of course, flexible learning is SO much more than just a pretty space! And this is what Janie & Karine spoke about at the first après-cours for individualized teachers of the year, November 6, 2018.

An après-cours for individualized teachers.

Avi Spector, Véronique Bernard, and I decided to create an online community for Individualized teachers so they could have a place to meet with others and talk about the unique challenges and opportunities that come with an individualized classroom. 

The theme for the first meeting was changing things up in the classroom and I think the best thing we did was to hand the content over to two master teachers – Karine Jacques & Janie Lamoureux. They spoke about how their flexible classroom environments help their students as well as their teaching. The meeting was completely bilingual and it was great to see the chat box blow up in both English and en français!

Their presentation/conversation was nothing short of inspiring. Below is a video of the meeting and some links to other resources from the après-cours. Enjoy – and I hope to see you at our next meeting! We will announce the date soon.

Resources

A huge thank you to Janie and Karine!

New E-book – Giving a Shift: Sharing classroom practice around change

tracyrosen on October 3, 2018

Kish Gue (EMSB, youth sector), Avi Spector (RSB, adult sector), and I (CSSMI, adult sector) are excited to launch our new, self-published, e-book, Giving a Shift.

http://bit.ly/givingashift

In it, we describe how we organized a day-long workshop for teachers… a little bit differently. We describe what we planned and our intentions behind it. We also share images and videos that we took throughout the day as well as our reflections after the fact. Some of my favourite parts of our book are the videos of teacher testimonies taken throughout the day. They give me hope in the work I do.

Both the workshop and the book were labours of love for us and our hope is that it can inspire others as well! It is available here – please share with your colleagues and friends!

More than just a pretty space

tracyrosen on May 1, 2018

Flexible learning is so much more than just a pretty space

A recent edsurge article talks about how the race to buy fancy furniture is turning flexible classrooms into a fad.

What then happens is instead of designing classrooms that positively impact students, we are decorating classrooms, celebrating the new, and then moving on to the next shiny thing. Pinterest-pretty classrooms bring instant gratification, but little else.
from: How Furniture and Flexible Seating Is Turning Classroom Design Into a Fad by Robert Dillon, Jan 4, 2018, on EdSurge

And that is true.

As I like to say – flexible classrooms are so much more than just a pretty space.

Flexible learning is so much more than just a pretty space

If we focus on good pedagogy and design our classrooms according to that, we can stay away from jumping on a fad that will soon disappear when we ultimately discover that it isn’t a magic bullet on its own, just like any number of other education fads – remember differentiation, flipped classrooms, multiple intelligences, teaching to learning styles, technology infused learning, *insert education fad here*…

But what is good pedagogy? Even the term pedagogy is thrown around so much that its become jargon.

I think that terms like pedagogy and ideas like good teaching and learning are fluid. My belief is that good teaching and learning need to be based on theory, yet are then made very personal as they relate to each teacher’s classroom and practice.

It is no secret to those who follow my writing here or who have been to my classroom or workshops, that I define ‘good pedagogy’ as access to learning for our students. And for me, that is closely connected to how we design our learning environments.

The way I see it, it comes down to these things:

As long as we keep our goals in mind when we begin to design our learning environments we are off to a good start – and these goals need to be strongly intertwined with whatever program goals we are committed to teach

Then, if we ensure that the largest number of our students can access these goals we are off to an even better start. We can do that by providing diverse resources, diverse ways for students to see the course goals, and examples of how we can achieve these goals (processes and strategies). Actually, it is not enough to just provide them. Explicitly teaching students how to access all of this (and/or getting out of their way when they figure it out!) is an important step.

I can’t just expect success to happen. I explicitly design for it.

Build it and they will come? No. We need to change the conjunction –> Build it SO they will come.

—-

My ideas are heavily influenced by this article by CAST as well as the experiences of teachers across Quebec, some are seen here: bit.ly/qcspace and on PD Mosaic – UDL + flexible environments. A special thanks to Avi Spector, of course – we explore these ideas together a lot!

A note on keynotes

tracyrosen on February 14, 2018

Do big conferences still have keynote speakers because it is what has always been done?

We talk about the prime real estate in our classrooms – how the start of any period of learning sets the tone for the rest of the day, at times, the rest of the year. So why don’t we apply this to our professional learning as well?

I have been to a number of conferences and most of them have one thing in common – the keynote speaker. After a few minutes into a keynote presentation I usually look around at everyone in the room and think: What an opportunity we have here! …If only we could all connect with each other right away. Recently, I was at a conference with hundreds of teachers, consultants, and administrators from primary, secondary, and adult education centres across the province of Quebec. The keynote was interesting for about 20 minutes and then… people started fidgeting. The woman across from me was playing candy crush. The person next to me was reading the upcoming workshop descriptions. You get the picture.

Conference organizers spend a lot of money getting big-name keynote speakers. WHAT IF we reframed the keynote?

A keynote is supposed to energize participants and get them primed for the learning to come. WHAT IF we focused our energy on finding great workshop facilitators and asked one or a handful to energize participants for 20 minutes? We know that the shorter, and more concise the message, the more potential there is to light a fire and to keep us wanting more.

There is nothing worse then getting all excited about going to a conference, hearing all of that buzz in the lobby of the conference centre as people see colleagues they haven’t seen in a long time or meet others for the first time…only to have that energy quashed by sitting on plastic chairs and listening for 45 or 60 or 90 minutes. Think about it – so many initiatives in education are moving away from lecture based teaching and learning… so why are we modeling this kind of learning in education conferences?

WHAT IF we limited our keynote presentations to 20 minutes? And if keynote presenters were forced to use technology in ways that make sense for learning by using powerful images with simple bits of text to support what they were saying?

Think of the potential for igniting our excitement for learning and for harnessing that valuable real estate at the beginning of a learning cycle. If a group of people are gathering in one place to learn together, is the best way to launch the learning through…lecture?

The Magic of Flexibility

tracyrosen on December 7, 2017

(if you are reading this in your inbox, please go see the original article on PdPractice in order to see the videos and other media. Thanks!)

Last Friday, Avi Spector and I facilitated two very intense professional learning sessions with two very different groups of teachers in two very different parts of town.

On a Friday.

When I started the day, I felt exhausted and thought to myself – 8 hours until the weekend! But by the end of the day I felt invigorated. THIS is the magic of working in stations and offering flexible opportunities for teachers to talk about what matters to them. If I had gone in there to present a fancy slideshow, I would have ended the day even more tired from talking all day long.

Listening to teachers talk, watching them interact at different stations, seeing them use technology as par for the course, and hearing their feedback on the different activities, such as this reflection activity using flipgrid, was absolutely inspiring and affirming.


Click here to view the full grid

Friday’s sessions were two in a long line of different PD opportunities since August. Each of them represent another chapter in this year’s story about learning environments. More and more, both Avi and I are examining how we embed the principles of UDL (Universal Design for Learning) in what we do as we redesign our professional learning environments. Because – if we want to see this in our classrooms, we want to model this in our PD. I believe that, deeply.

So here are some highlights from various sessions since August.

We arrive early in order to set up our space. We want to model flexible learning environments that include different stations to facilitate small working groups as well as opportunities for personal learning & reflection. The stations tend to look something like this:

  1. Design Station: a station where teachers are invited to design a learning space, choosing specific design criteria from a booklet of 3 different choices. Sometimes we ask teachers to take pictures of their spaces and share them at the teacher station or on twitter.

  2. Resource Station: a station where teachers can view different resources on PD Mosaic and other platforms, and write or talk about what they learned. We usually offer a lot of choice here, so people can choose the resources they view.

    3. resource cards to choose from

  3. Presentation Station: a station where teachers guide themselves through our presentation and have a discussion or take notes about what they view (we usually have a presentation, we just don’t present it ourselves!). I learned this strategy from Natasha, a teacher in one of our adult centres.

    4. tweet about collaborative presentation notes

    presentation station

  4. Reflection Station: a station where teachers can reflect and respond to different prompts. Sometimes it is an article or a set of questions. Sometimes the reflections are done individually or in pairs. We are starting to use flipgrid to structure these responses.
  5. Teacher Station: a station where teachers can talk to the workshop facilitators about any ideas or questions that come up from the other stations. In the classroom, this would be a great place for some conversation-based formative assessment.

    6. An instruction card from one of our teacher stations.

    teacher station instruction card

Here is an example of what our spaces might look like before we set them up:

And this is what our learning environments tend to look like once we set them up:

We are very intentional in our planning for these kinds of workshops. We design each one based not only on our subject matter but we want to make sure we differentiate our content and activities so that each of our participants can access what we are offering to them according to their comfort level and background knowledge.

To help us do that, we cycle through these orientations, adapted from CASTs 5 tips for designing learning environments:

Design the space to match the goal

Provide resource areas that everyone can access (This includes technology & digital resources)

Make learning processes visible in your environment

Make learning goals visible in your environment

In my next article, I will write about these orientations in more detail. They are becoming super influential in how I approach the learning environments in which I work.

Learning Environments + Professional Learning: Updates

tracyrosen on November 14, 2017

autumn image of leaves from pixabay How has your fall been? Everyone I talk to lately agrees that this fall seems even busier than ever. At first, I thought this was just in Adult Education since we are implementing a ton of new programs this year but I am hearing this from people in multiple sectors and I am starting to think that has something to do with a growing shift to re-examine teaching and learning within the context of our learning environments.

As I wrote in my first blog post of the year, I am looking closely at learning environments and the role they play in learning, in using technology while we teach and learn, and in changing how we offer professional learning opportunities to teachers.

The more I work with teachers, the more I realize that when we start to consider our environments of learning, the closer we are getting to ensuring equal access to learning for our students. And THAT makes me super happy!

Here is a quick look at some of the professional learning opportunities and resources that Avi and I have developed over the past month or so. You can click on the images to visit the different resources if you like. (direct link to the document: http://bit.ly/recitoct)

What’s new? Learning environments + Modeling

tracyrosen on September 25, 2017

This post is about my plans for the year. I call them my plans, but really they are a result of great planning and collaboration with a number of partners, in particular Avi Spector. Thank you!

I am also going to include some brand new resources that are available for you at the end of this post. This year is going to be great!
—-
Happy New Year! This means a few different things at this time of year. It is the Jewish new year of 5778 and, I just discovered, the Muslim new year of 1439. We are also about a month into the 2017-2018 school year. This particular school year is a time for renewal as we transition into our new courses, the bulk of which will be mandatory by the end of this school year (breathe, it will all be fine!).

Collaborative Networks

As we continue to try on our new programs in Quebec Adult Education, we are experiencing greater collaboration than ever – which is great. We are modeling what we want to see in our classrooms and what we want to teach our students. I feel like I have spent much of this past month sharing my work from last year and my plans for the upcoming year at different venues. In fact, I did it twice last week and will do it twice again this week! I do this because I believe it is important. It is important that we are all aware of what we are all doing. We want to work in concert and not alone in our own sections of the province. It reminds me, though, that collaboration can be hard work – something we need to remember when we expect it of our students.

I feel like everyone must know my action plan by now, I’ve been talking about it so much, but I know that isn’t true so here is what is important to me this year.

what environments are best for learning with tech in our new programs and how do we model this with our teachers
Environment
There are a whole slew of reasons why teaching and learning environments are important to me. Our courses are competency based. As a teacher, I need to make sure I can observe my students as they are developing competencies – as they are doing things with learning situations. So I need to provide an environment that allows for this. More centres and teachers are starting to make significant shifts in their environments for these very reasons.

Technology
I work with the RECIT so I’m a technology consultant, yet I hate the idea of asking teachers and students to do special projects just for the sake of integrating technology. We just need to make sure that our teachers and students have access to resources and to devices in order to better share and collaborate with others. When we change our environments, we can make sure that our spaces allow for better use of technology to do those things.

Modeling
A couple of years ago, Avi and I realized that it was no longer enough to talk about cool ideas for teaching and learning. We had to just do it. The first time we did a workshop IN the style of what we were talking about (Stations) resulted in a number of teachers integrating stations into their classrooms. Almost immediately.

We learned the importance of modeling. It’s harder work for us. It would be so much easier for us to create our PowerPoint presentations and to talk for the entire workshop than to design active learning situations and participant-driven professional learning oportunities that model implicit use of technology for competency development. But we do it because we know it’s important. Teachers have told us and we are starting to see the results in classrooms.

So, this year the work I plan on doing will be framed by those ideas. I will continue to make videos and PD Mosaic tiles in collaboration with some of you. I will continue to share what we do on this blog, on Twitter, and additionally through Carrefour-FGA and RECIT newsletters as well as on The Launch. I will also share all of these resources in the different workshops and other learning sessions I design with Avi and other teachers and consultants. And I will continue to facilitate and participate in a variety of communities of practice related to learning environments (individualized and not), technology, and, of course, our new programs.

Here is one of my action plan presentations from last week, if you are interested in a few more details.

 

**And now the fun stuff – new resources!**
This is a selection of the new resources you can find on PD Mosaic. They include work by and for the teachers, consultants, and administrators we work with. Be sure to check out the main site to see if there is anything you haven’t seen yet! And please let me know if there is a resource you would like to develop with me!
PD Mosaic

Knowing the Program on PD Mosaic

New PD Mosaic tile with a video by Shanna Loach, ETSB.

Change in Program, Change in Practice on PDMosaic

A collection of PD Mosaic tiles about how our practice is changing as a result of new progams. With videos by and about teachers in Quebec.

Transforming mathematical thinking PD Mosaic tile

A series of videos by Ayodele Harrison on transforming mathematical thinking through engaging conversation.

UDL and flexible learning on PD Mosaic

A collection of tiles on UDL and flexible learning in the classroom – including videos and resources from Quebec Adult Ed classrooms. For teachers and administrators.