Teacher Only Day - The WHY?

Last Friday was TOD at school, looking further into our ideas around Modern Learning and what it could be like at our school.
We spent the first part of the day grappling with the WHY. Teachers have been trialling things, visiting schools and doing some professional readings, but we wanted to start to explore the WHY today. Simon Sinek's 'Golden Circle' gives us a model for powerful change.  A consistent message from uLearn was to develop the WHY with staff, students and community so this was a first step.

Mark Osborne's video on 'Education 3.0' provided us with a provocation to think about 'what could learning look like for us at DPS' if we were to make change? WHY do we need to consider making changes in the ways that we teach, and organise learning for our students. The discussion was excellent, and is forming the basis of some statements about what we believe is important for teaching/learning.

Following this we started to describe a 'graduate profile'...what could a learner look like if we built our school around these shared beliefs? Again, excellent discussion about creating assessment capable, connected learners, who have a high degree of student agency. We then 'flipped' this discussion...in order to meet the needs of this learner, what would a teacher have to be doing?

The first session flew by, much more time could have been spent describing both the teacher and the learner, but we had to move on. If I was running this part of the day again I think it would have been great to Skype in a teacher from a MLE, or even better some students. Let's bring some reality to all the discussion and hear from people currently operating in a new way.

More reflections on the day to come.