My PLN Info Diet

As I took the time to explore my professional learning network (PLN) info diet, I found that the resources that it consisted of was mainly that of like-minded educators that value innovation and the use of technology in the classroom. It also includes very creative educators that create resources and lessons that make the classroom an engaging place to learn. The Twitter account that I use for my classroom and to network with other teachers in my school district was definitely a great example of an affinity space that I had created. An affinity space is the “bubble” that people create to reflect their own interests and ideas often, intentionally or unintentionally, excluding views that differ from their own.

When examining my Twitter account, which is one of my most used PLN spaces, I found that I had been following very few educators outside of my school district and mostly educators in the grade levels that I have taught. I work in an incredible school district surrounded by talented educators so my Twitter feed has always been a source of great inspiration and it definitely has helped me to develop a strong foundation in the areas that are important to my district including curriculum development,  building a culture of thinking, and encouraging a growth mindset in the classroom. While the focused PLN I had before this week was great and had helped me to grow as an educator, after learning about affinity spaces and filter bubbles (Pariser, 2011) I can see that I may have fallen into this networking bubble that constantly confirms the work I do rather than push or challenge my thinking.

After realizing that I was limiting my PLN and my own self-directed professional development, I knew that I would have to mage some changes. I focused on three areas to expand my network: teachers in other districts, teachers in different grade levels, and education research groups.  The addition of teachers in other districts allows me to see what is going on around the state and country that could be used to enhance the work I am already doing and give me new and interesting ideas that could work in my classroom. Adding a number of teachers from other grade levels to my network, I am now able to see more examples of where the students came from and where they will go after they leave my classroom. I am also able to adapt work that other teachers create to fit my students’ needs and my curriculum. Beyond Twitter accounts run by individual teachers,  I also added many different connections on Twitter that highlight new trends in education and what other teachers are doing in their classrooms. These accounts include groups focused on using technology in the classroom, governmental agencies, news outlets, and educators that work outside of the classroom.This addition will help to keep me up to date on new trends and developments in the education world.

In order to find many of the new resources that I have added to my PLN, I created a Tagboard to follow tweets that include #edtech. Not only did this help me to find more resources to add to my PLN, but I also discovered that Tagboard can be a very convenient way to follow a topic of interest on Twitter! I will definitely be using this platform when looking into various hashtags! To get a peek into the #edtech Twitter network, check out my tagboard below – click the photo to visit the actual tagboard!

Pariser, Eli. “Beware online “filter bubbles” | Eli Pariser.” YouTube, uploaded by TED, 2 May 2011, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8ofWFx525s.

Failure in the Classroom- Big Questions

This week, my partner and I narrowed down our exploration into using failure in the classroom. We started from a list of over 40 questions that explored the many facets of this wicked problem. We wanted to make sure our questions addressed some of the most important facets of the problem. The facets we focused in on are the stakeholders in our school communities, the culture in classrooms, and feedback given to students. We decided  to focus on these ‘big three’ facets because they were frequently commented on in the resources that we used for our research.

Our 5 big questions are:

1. Why can a growth mindset culture help stakeholders accept failure as growth?
2. Why will changing the feedback process for teachers help students use their failures to further their learning? 
3. How do we know if we have learned something? 
4. Why does feedback usually come in the form of a grade?
5. Why will being prepared to accept failures be a positive part of the learning process?

We also had the opportunity to survey our professional learning networks to gather information about other stakeholders’ perspectives  on this topic. From this survey, we were able to get a glimpse into how other teachers approach failure in the classroom. We can see from the responses that the responders believe that failure is valuable, but that students are unprepared to handle failure in a positive way. This finding shows us that this problem we are exploring is truly wicked. I have included an infographic below that summarizes our survey findings along with our big questions.

 

Exploring Failure as a Learning Mode

What is success? What is failure? How can failure move our students forward rather than hold them back? These are some of the questions that we are exploring in our Wicked Problem project in CEP 812. A wicked problem is so complex and multi-faceted that it is constantly evolving and changing making finding ‘correct answers’ seemingly impossible. Instead, as we approach wicked problems, we are looking for the “best bad answer”.

The wicked problem we are currently investigating revolves around failure as a learning mode. We have grown into a society that fears failure and will go to great lengths to shield children from any type of setback. One of the most common remarks about “today’s kids” is that they are too soft and that “everybody gets a medal” whether they won a game or not. Whether one agrees with this way or thinking or not, we do owe it to ourselves to step back and think about whether or not these ideas do have some basis in truth and/or have an impact on our students’ future successes. Why are we so afraid of failure? Is it such a bad thing to lose a game or get the wrong answer? What can we learn from these times of disappointment? Are we holding our students back by sugar-coating their failures? Instead, should we work to shift our current mindset from a place where failure is the endpoint to a mindset that sees failure as a speed bump or an opportunity to shift course.

As we investigate this wicked problem, we need to research how educators, parents, and students can use failures to their advantage. We are exploring how we could embrace failures as an important part of the  learning process. In order to understand this problem, we need to hear from community members to understand how the concepts of ‘success’ and ‘failure’ are viewed in the school community. We also need to understand how educators currently address failures in their classroom.

Click HERE to take our anonymous survey!