When Your PLN Fails You (and what you can do about it)

I would love to say that my personal learning network – those that follow, friend, and connect with me in order to share ideas and support one another in our respective inquiries – are always there with help when I need it. The idea that a PLN is like the Bat Signal, where all I have to do is light the projection lamp and all my problems will be solved, is a noble one. It would be great if what is imagined with this concept were reality.

Except it isn’t.

photo credit: nhussein via photopin cc

Case in point: I sent out this tweet recently to my 5500+ followers:

If you had to select one article to do a close reading of with staff studying informational text, what would it be? #engchat#edchat

— Matt Renwick (@ReadByExample) October 15, 2014

Want to guess how many retweets, favorites, and responses I received? If you guessed “zero”, you would be correct.

Was it my fault? Maybe the question was too specific, or not specific enough. I used hashtags in hopes to narrow down the inquiry to those most likely and qualified to answer it. Certainly, I could have considered using different hashtags, such as #nerdybookclub or #educoach. Alas, the 140 character limit of Twitter forces you to be picky.

Maybe it was my PLN’s fault, or the whole idea of a personal learning network in general. We are sold on the idea that our PLN is 24/7 professional development, where learning is just a fingertip away. But how often is the message conveyed about the importance of being an active participant in other educators’ PLNs? Not often enough, apparently.

Speaking for myself, I could always do a better job. Many questions enter my feed, and I pass on the majority of them. Too busy, don’t have the answers, someone else will respond…I have evoked all of those reasons. So if most of us have that same mentality, what are some strategies we can use to better take advantage of our PLNs? Here are three suggestions.

Include specific people in your posts

This isn’t a guarantee that you will get a response to your inquiry, but you certainly increase your odds. By including certain individuals in your tweet or post, you put it on them to respond. The disadvantage is that everyone else who sees your post might be even less likely to respond because they think that the person(s) referenced will respond on their behalf.

Engage in Twitter chats

I would agree with others that participating in a chat on Twitter does not lead to profound discoveries. That is not the intention of these events, in my opinion. The purpose of a Twitter chat is to talk with others, engage in a topic of interest and knowledge, and discover potential new members for your PLN. Which leads into…

Develop communities of practice

These learning groups are somewhat different than PLNs, in that it is usually smaller and more focused on a specific topic. For example, I am involved with the All Things PLC (#atplc) group on Voxer and Google+. We have regular conversations about professional learning communities and related educational topics. If I have a question, I know that the people in these communities of practice will be more apt to respond with questions and advice. Likewise, I feel more obligated to respond to their own inquires. I am not just one of their followers; I am an essential member of this specific learning community.

What is your experience with reaching out to your PLN? Are you finding them to be helpful, indifferent, or somewhere in between? Please share in the comments.

Five Steps For Schools to Become More Connected

Lani Ritter Hall, co-author of The Connected Educator (Solution Tree, 2011), responded to my previous post about blending technology into professional learning communities:

I’ll be interested in others’ comments here on their favorite blend and hope that you might be a bit more explicit in the blend you see working best for you and your faculty–

Here is my response, much too large for the comments’ section:

In my school, I have loosely observed five steps toward becoming more collectively connected. Within each step, I share the primary tool we have “blended” into our important work.

#1 – Create a Forum for Collaboration

Our tool of choice is Google. We use Sites to house all of our important work. Drive is our tool of choice for creating our online documents, such as collaborative units of study (docs) and digital data walls (spreadsheets). Google+ has been a cool tool to share resources with team members between times when we physically meet as learning communities.

#2 – Document our Learning

For this we have been using Evernote. Teachers and students are curating their work in digital portfolios. The audio function allows even the youngest writers to share their ideas using multiple formats. As a principal, I am also starting to use Evernote for instructional walkthroughs and for organizing information from a staff training to share with everyone later.

#3 – Connect Beyond the Schoolhouse

Twitter has been a tool more of my staff are using, in addition to Pinterest and Facebook. Several of the ideas and strategies I see in our classrooms come from other teachers and thinkers via these social media tools. This leads to…

#4 – Increase our Collective Intelligence

We have been able to bring in some very knowledgeable people into our school via Skype – yourself included! Students and/or staff have had the opportunity to speak with scientists, instructional experts, and other classrooms through Skype.

#5 – Become an Expert for Others

As we have gained deeper understandings of what it means to be connected, I have encouraged my staff to share their innovative practices with others. YouTube seems to be an excellent way to create tutorials and post our work on classrooms blogs and webpages.

Becoming more connected is a constant process of learning, sharing, dialoging, reflecting, and then relearning. That is why I like the blended approach. It reinforces the concept of getting connected one step at a time. As we add strategies to our instructional toolbox, we observe what practices become augmented, or possibly even be replaced. These efforts to change how we do business takes time, persistence, lots of encouragement, points for celebration, and time.

Did I mention time? 🙂

Blended Learning Communities

I have investigated Professional Learning Communities since becoming an elementary principal in the fall of 2011. I read the original resource, Professional Learning Communities at Work by Rick DuFour and Robert Eaker (Solution Tree, 1998). This was followed up with attending the Literacy and Leadership Institute by Regie Routman and colleagues in June 2012. I dug more deeply into this framework for collaboration by reading Common Formative Assessment: A Toolkit for Professional Learning Communities at Work by Kim Bailey and Chris Jakicic (Solution Tree, 2012) and Building a Professional Learning Community at Work: A Guide to the First Year by Parry Graham and Bill Ferriter (Solution Tree, 2010). In addition, I investigated the possibilities of online collaboration in The Connected Educator: Learning and Leading in a Digital Age by Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach and Lani Ritter Hall (Solution Tree, 2012). Not to be forgotten are all of the informal conversations I have had on Twitter via the #atplc hashtag, plus the excellent resources I have found at the All Things PLC website.

The one thing I can say for sure at this point is: Facilitating highly effective and efficient learning communities is difficult work. There is much to balance.

• purpose
• goals
• focus
• expertise
• data
• action steps
• results
• reflection

Of all of these elements, I find time to be the most challenging to address. I am willing to bet that many of the authors listed previously might agree. Time is so limited for educators, especially at the elementary level. Whenever we set up a regular time to meet, that means teachers have less time to get everything else done for their classroom of students.

Where I am finding lots of possibilities is blending our online and in person conversations surrounding instruction and learning. Ferriter and Graham suggest many digital tools to try. Nussbaum-Beach and Hall provide a model for what connected learning communities could look like at the school, department, and classroom levels. What I am aiming for is somewhere in the middle. My school is familiar with powerful tools such as Google, Evernote, Twitter, and Skype. However, we want to keep the majority of our conversations face-to-face. 

Ben Wilkoff co-facilitated a webinar with me for Education Week, titled Using Technology to Personalize Learning in Elementary Schools. His part was titled “What is Your Blend?”. The point I remember him making was that learning is best supported when the technologies are infused within instruction, curriculum, and assessment. They are used purposefully, have meaning, and provide real time feedback from an authentic audience. This concept, of blending the right digital tools within the learning environment we are already engaged in, rings loudly with me. I see a direct application to how collaborative teams can operate.

So what is your blend? What digital tools have you leveraged in your community of learners? What efficiencies have your discovered?

 

KWHLE: A Different Take on the KWL

I am trying to allow participants in my Connected Educator course to own their learning. Initially, I had set up several pages on our Google Site that would house each teacher’s evidence. The part that I now realize is missing is their professional learning goals for this course.

I was searching the web for a template but couldn’t find one that worked. Instead, I altered the well-known KWL (Know, Want to Know, Learned) by adding more columns: “How Will I Learn?” and “What Evidence Do I Have of My Learning?”. See the graphic organizer below.

What do I think I Know?	What do I Want to Learn?	How will I Learn? (Content + Process)	What Have I Learned So Far?	What Evidence Do I Have of My Learning? (Product – Student and Teacher)

The “H” column is not original thinking by me. I do like it because it helps the learner think about the process they will take to acquire new learning, as well as the content they will access. My potential addition is at the end, with the evidence.

I have learned from studying professional learning communities that it is essential to document whether or not students learned what you tried to teach. The same should apply for our own learning. In this organizer, participants could insert images, links and text related to what they created with their students. This organizer is a Google Doc, so we could also house each participant’s KWHLE on a page on the Google Site as a link. That way we can watch each other’s growth and collaborate in real time.

What are your thoughts? Does something like this already exist? What would you add, delete or revise? Feedback is always appreciated on this blog.

Reflections After Introducing Writing ePortfolios to Staff

(This is a communication I sent to my faculty this afternoon. Last night they were all trained on how to use iPads to develop writing ePortfolios.)

Staff,

Thanks again for your willingness to take a step forward in integrating the iPad and Dropbox technology into your instruction and assessment. Just like the students, we need to extend ourselves sometimes and feel some “uncomfortableness” to become better at our profession.

Vertical teams for writing start tomorrow. Please communicate with your team where you will be meeting at 8 A.M before tomorrow arrives. If you can communicate these locations I will post them. The team assignments can be found on our Howe Teacher Site: https://sites.google.com/a/wrps.net/howe-elementary-bulldogs/pd/contact

What will you do tomorrow and at future vertical team collaborations? Our goal for all of our collaboration time is to improve student learning. Here are some possibilities:

– Develop norms, like you did as grade level teams.
– Discuss best practices in writing instruction.
– Use the ePortfolios, take one sample from each grade level, and compare across the building K-5 to analyze levels of academic expectations.
– Support each other in learning these new technologies.
– Celebrate your successes.
– Watch Regie videos and discuss samples/examples of exemplary student writing found at http://www.regieroutman.com.
– Use the writing rubric resource books and develop common assessments to share with the rest of building.

I am very proud of everyone for continuing to open your doors to your colleagues. Revealing our needs and identifying where we could improve our instruction collectively is the best way to increasing student achievement and learning. Remember: “Good schools are collections of good classrooms” (Richard Allington). This definitely describes us. We all do excellent things in our classrooms. You are the greatest learning resource for your colleagues.

-Matt