Play, Passion and Purpose

I am wrapping up Creating Innovators: The Making of Young People Who Will Change the World, By Tony Wagner. What a great read! Play, Passion and Purpose was referenced throughout the book.  Wagner found that all the young innovators he interviewed were allowed to develop the three P's.  What I found alarming is that almost half of them could not name a single teacher who had been truly helpful to them.

PLAY 

"Research shows that human beings are born with an innate desire to explore, experiment and imagine new possibilities - in a word, to Innovate." - Tony Wagner

Wagner goes further with stating the importance of creating opportunities for unstructured play.  As parents we tend to over parent when our students are playing.  That is where the creativity begins at an early age.  Allowing children to experiment and play away from TV and other devices is important for their development .  I personally am worried that we will continue to squeeze the creative juices out of students with the current state of standardization of schools.  Creative and innovative kids are disruptive in school they typically struggle due to all the rules.  I don't blame teachers, we have to follow a specific set of standards.  It is what it is, but how can we empower and grow innovators in our current state of affairs?

PASSION 

Passion is the intrinsic motivation in all of us.  Parents kill the right passion in kids.  I find myself doing this already.  I was involved extensively in athletics and my hope early on was that my children would have the same passion that I have for athletics.  My daughter is five years old and she couldn't be less interested in teeball and soccer.  I understand that I can't force her to like something, she must have passion or intrinsic motivation to do something.  It is our job as parents and educators to unlock that passion.  How do we unlock and allow for passion to develop in students?

PURPOSE 

"I observe that young innovators almost invariably develop passion to learn or do something as adolescents, but their passions evolve through learning and exploration into something far deeper, more sustainable, and trustworthy - Purpose." - Tony Wagner  

"These young people played a great deal - but their play was frequently far less structured than most children's, and they had opportunities to explore, experiment, and discover through trial and error - to take risks and to fall down." - Tony Wagner 

The other day I was in a school and part of their mission statement was, "Failure is not and option."  How are we to encourage risk taking if we say that failure is no longer an option.  This thinking is a killer of creativity and innovation.

This book has been a great read, and something that all educators should take a look at. More importantly parents need to read it.  Most schools are locked into accountability and do not take the time to encourage Play, Passion, and Purpose.  It may be up to you to give your children those much needed experiences.

How do we develop innovators and encourage creativity for students that are less fortunate???

EDcamp ND

On June 11th, Magic City Campus located in Minot, ND will host the first annual Edcamp in North Dakota.  Currently there are around 50-60 people planning to attend.  It will be an exciting day and we are looking forward to it.  If you unfamiliar with what an edcamp is please view the video below.  It will be a great of participant driven professional development!

Lessons learned from year one in PLC's

In a few weeks we will wrap up the 2011-2012 school year.  I have been thinking and reflecting quite a bit about how we can improve our PLC's, as well as the lessons learned after year one of full implementation.  I must say from a school climate stand point I feel that it has done wonders in increasing the communication among staff.  There are many more professional conversations occurring now.  I feel that we are on the same page, and focused for the most part on the same goals.

Some lessons learned after year one:

1. Clarification is so important in any change initiative.  I found that I had to reiterate several times as to what we should be doing and what it should look like.  We spun our wheels for a while, and I appreciate my teachers willingness to work through a very messy process.  Even after a year, I still find myself clarifying what it is we want to accomplish.  This will continue as we move to each different stage.  As administrators we must take an active role.  
2. Monitoring is equally important from me, teachers must know that I have bought into the change initiative too.  If we just throw 4-5 people in a room with no goals or direction and expect them to collaborate, we won't accomplish much.  There is also a point where you could over monitor.  I needed to find that happy medium, and give them autonomy to put their own spin on it.  
3. Many people talk about celebrating success, with year one there wasn't much data to back up what we were doing.  We devoted time at staff meetings to talk about what we were doing in our PLC's.  They shared documents, and discussed at length.  You could feel a sense of pride develop over time with the work they were creating.  I thought this was beneficial for all, it allowed them to compare and give feedback to each team.  This was our way of celebrating.
4. Most PLC teams are highly effective at this point.  I found that I had to focus time on some of the groups that were more reluctant.  Sometimes we need to be the guide to our groups to make them effective.  

Vision for next year:

Quite a few groups have developed all Powerstandards that are fully transitioned to the Common Core.  Our next step is to take a deeper look at our assessment of those standards and begin developing formative assessments that link to our intervention times.  I look forward to watching and taking part in our continued growth as a PLC.  

Formative Assessment Ideas

We have been dabbling as a school on what our common formative assessments may look like.  I threw together a possible layout of what it could look like down the road. I used Lucidcharts to create chart.  Its not groundbreaking, but I thought it could easily be tied to our RTI program.  An argument one may have is that formative assessment needs to happen on a quicker basis.  My thoughts on this relate to a recent post on standards based grading.  I anticipate these assessments would happen on a weekly basis to check for 4-5 of the major concepts teachers choose as part of their power benchmarks.

Initial ideas of how it would work:

1. Give all students the quick assessment - check for understanding.
2. Students that are not proficient will be placed in our ELA/Math intervention rooms.
3. Small group setting - focused on mastery development of the benchmark assessment.
4. This will allow us to diagnose the learning breakdown faster.
5. Students take a similar assessment to "test out."

Below I posted some recent Tweets from some users in response to my question related to formative assessments.  I was impressed with some responses.

We need to focus on formative assessments not summative assessments as means to improve student performance!

How are you implementing common formative assessments?