I had an incredible experience working with Waterloo Regional District School Board (WRDSB) at #CATCCamp14 this past summer. I was with them for two days, and when I asked them what they wanted me to do, they asked me to open with a keynote and told me the rest would be determined when I arrived. Obviously I didn’t want to be unprepared, so I was a little uncomfortable with the format at first as I had no idea what they would need from me. When I arrived though and participated, I absolutely loved the model.
Here is how it went (from my view)…
Groups were created in advance based on things that teachers were interested in and basically there would be time given to explore and build things for the few days that people were there. With that being said, if you wanted to try something else, you could switch groups easily, similar to the EdCamp notion of “voting with your feet”. Each group would have facilitators that wouldn’t necessarily teach you, but would often learn alongside of you. Although the learning was pretty informal, teachers were staying in rooms working on things until long past 9pm because they appreciated the importance of just having time.
The other aspect of the camp that I absolutely loved was that they would have meetings after every meal and they would just get feedback and thoughts from participants on what their needs were and what they were interested in learning about. WIth the release of Google Classroom, they had an impromptu group that explored the platform. Or they had time to explore how to create newsletters with video. Or explore social media. None of those sessions were planned, but just happened in this basic “just-in-time” learning model. It was an incredible learning experience.
In my keynote, I talked to people about the model and challenged not to only take the stuff they learned from their time there, but to also explore how they could do similar models to the “camp” with their students. There are many engaging and new (to some) models of professional learning such as “TeachMeet” and “EdCamp”, or even Ted Talks, and I am wondering not only about the learning that happens at these events and how it makes an impact on students, but also the models themselves. There are things such as “Genius Hour” and “Innovation Day” that are starting to trickle into classrooms, but we need to provide some of these alternative options for our students, much more often.
I have started to see some teachers role out “EdCamp” for their students” and I would love to hear more about those experiences. I would also love to see more opportunities for students to be the “teachers” in these events, and think it would be extremely powerful if teachers took part to learn in student delivered sessions. Can you imagine the community that type of activity could build?
We still have to teach a curriculum and work within a system that politically could take a long time to change. But within the system, we need to find innovative ways that we can implement these models into learning for our students. If it works for us, why wouldn’t it work for them?