Laptop Squad

How is your high school MLTI Leadership Team functioning? Oxford Hills Comprehensive High School's Laptop Squad is alive and well. According to social studies teacher, Richard Byrne, the "squad" meets once a week and also offers Tech Tuesday in room A110 from 2:15 to 3:15 to help people familiarize themselves with the software installed on the MLTI MacBooks and web applications. This week there will be an introduction to Keynote. Richard has created a blog called Free Technology for Teachers to further assist in the collaboration.


What is happening in other Maine high schools?

Professional Learning Communities
Capacity Building in Maine

Getting Started with Monday Too! at Telstar

"If my life was a song, it would be ____________because ______________."

Why are we here? What do we know? What would we like to get out of this?

Getting Started Agenda
Western Maine eMINTS

Capacity Building: People & Conversations

"We're talking about a change in the culture of schools and a change in the culture of teaching. We know that when we think about change we have to get ownership, participation, and a sense of meaning on the part of the vast majority of teachers. You can't get ownership through technical means; you have to get it through interaction, through developing people, through attention to what students are learning."
~ Michael Fullan

We have to be careful with buzzwords. Thrown around without thought, they become perversions of their original meanings. "Professional Learning Communities" and "Capacity Building" are two such instances with which I am concerned. We have to be very careful that they have meat to them and are not merely empty structures driven by the status quo. More busy-work for teachers without intellectual freedom and openness to new ideas will not suffice. In my mind, the ability to listen and put ourselves in the shoes of others without being defensive is the key. We don't have to like what we hear, but everyone must be given a fair hearing. Only by having true conversations can we create cultures that are open to new possibilities.

To this end, I would like to suggest the ideas of Meg Wheatley, which I just came across this afternoon. Check out the reviews of her book, Leadership and the New Science: Discovering Order in a Chaotic World Revised , for an outline of her ideas.

A couple other books by Wheatley:

A Simpler Way

Turning to One Another: Simple Conversations to Restore Hope to the Future

Thoughts?

Working Together

Maine teachers certainly know that for the past few years NCLB has brought us an emphasis on assessment. This has meant an inordinate amount of teacher time focused on testing and creating ways of testing students. While accountability and testing have their place, in most cases there has been very little time and energy left to spend on looking for ways of actually improving instruction.

Some of the questions are: How do we better engage students in the excitement of learning? What models of instruction are out there that might make a difference. What do other educators in the State have to offer us? How might technology help us with teaching the skills that are necessary in the 21st Century?

Finding answers to these questions and others requires time to explore as teaching communities. The buzzwords that are being used are PLCs (Professional Learning Communities) and Capacity Building.

For additional information in understanding these ideas, find the following links in the resource list:

Professional Learning Communities http://region6.mainelearns.org/proflearncommunities.html

Capacity Building and Michael Fullan http://region6.mainelearns.org/fullan.html

What do you think?