ConnecTED or The ConnecTED Project?

It is nearly, and has not yet begun. (We are nearly finished designing, but we haven’t taught a lesson yet… bring on 2013)

This term the ConnecTED learning team has been given time to design the project for 2013. This is what I have learnt:

• Things that are important, demand an authentic approach.
• Authenticity takes time.
• If you want more than a superficial checklist of terms and buzzwords, you must have a team of people committed to each other, and to the idea.
• The idea must have a set of core values statements. These value statements must be foregrounded in all discussions and decisions. The team must have the courage to ask “Does that develop the core values?”.
• It is not possible to agree on everything.
• Disagreeing, yet committing fully to the project is not compromise, it is dialogue. Compromise is settling for a weakened alternative to excellence. Dialogue is committing fully to one of the possible actions, giving it every chance to succeed, but being open to adapting rapidly if it becomes necessary.
• Explicit thinking skills are essential. Critical. Not-Negotiable. Passionate, talented people tend to have a ‘style’, and style matters. But if people work to ‘style’ the friction created by working to ‘natural thinking styles’ creates routines, and routines become ruts. A rut is never a good thing. Explicit thinking skills, routines, habits, techniques, frameworks, break routines and ruts. Skills based frameworks for working together are a manifestation of the idea “anyone can do this, willingness it the only prerequisite”.
• Human beings are naturally resistant to change, even when our stated objective is to create change.
• Design is fun, energising, exciting, important and demands the participants honour the process, rather than simply state outcomes/objectives/products and move on.
• Design is tiring, because it requires a mindset of openness, curious, and dissatisfaction with easy answers.
• Design loves simple answers, and thrives through core questions and statements that grow from the core values.

What does this look like?

We have a series of tasks and activities that will track our Year 7’s through three phases of learning as assessment.

Phase One: Weeks 1-3

• Orientation and learning to learn activities.
• Workshops designed to build expectations, routines, habits and address the essential question “How am I being asked to learn?” Specifically addressing the elements of a guided inquiry approach, including discovery, research and public publication of projects, in addition to core skills related to technology, team work, problem solving.
• Welfare and support networks are identified and accessed.
• Students will be asked to produce objects, digital and analogue, that  demonstrate their understandings of how they are part of the ConnecTED learning community. They will also be asked to prepare this for current and future audiences that may have questions about how the ConnecTED project works.
• Immersing students in collegial, negotiated team-focussed learning, this phase is focussed on developing corporate understanding and skills in being a community of learners. Learning HOW to learn together.

Phase 2 – Discovery Phase

• The ConnecTED Project team has designed a series of 20 activities. We have called these ‘Stepping Stones’. Appropriating the metaphor of journey, or travel, through a series of activities to achieve knowledge and skill mastery.
• These stepping stones provide the opportunity for the teacher facilitators to observe and develop questions specific to each student. These observations will inform us as to how the student-directed phases of learning will/should/might need to look.
• The discovery phase provides more-content-structured activities to facilitate a smaller ‘bunny-hop’ in skills and expectations for students.
• Additionally, the discovery phase provides information and skills that are central to how the student will answer the Driving Question in Phase 3 of the Project.
• There is limited choice written into the stepping stones activities, but the tasks sit within a commitment to inquiry. Students will be empowered to ask ‘Can I complete this in a different manner?’ or ‘Can I ask a different question here?’. Students will self-differentiate, or differentiate the tasks through conferencing with the teacher facilitator.
• Each phase is a connection of learning outcomes across the RE, History and English syllabus.
• The ConnecTED Project Team has created simple tasks that guide students through this information and skill mastery phase.

Phase 3 – Guided Inquiry

• The Driving Question is “How would I like to be welcomed?”
• Students will be given the choice to work individually, or as a group.
• The product needs to address a specific community, past, present or future.
• The product needs to offer support to an individual who is new to the chosen community, exploring how they will be welcomed into that community.
• The audience is the community the product is being designed for.
• The public publication of the product will involve an invitation to an exhibition late in Term 1.

Which leaves us with:

What is the name of the project? What is the name of the space?

We workshopped ideas and quite like ConnecTED, allowing for it to be called TED, or ConnecTED. In consulting with part of my twittersphere support network, I am also liking the name “The ConnecTED Project” or “The TED Project” which would allow for “TED Project 07”, appropriating number/naming conventions used on Gaming titles or Movie Sequels, rather than “Year 7 TED”. It also opens the door to TED being a framing idea for innovation at our school, and the future projects being “TED Project 08” or “The TED HSC Project”.

The space a visual and design feast. It is visceral. Through furniture and other design elements it is a flexible, dynamic learning space. Rewarding students for engaged learning behaviours. It facilitates the waterhole, campfire and cave, learning spaces.

• Waterhole = everybody focussed on a single gravitational point. Essential for some framing for learning, but no one spends the whole day at the waterhole.
• Campfire = smaller group, center of gravity is the group, not a person, and it shifts as the group undertakes tasks, or learning activities parallel  in correlation  or in dependence on each other.
• Cave = Separate individual space for working on a task alone.

We don’t have a name for the space yet, we have had suggestions, but they are more descriptive of what the space looks like, rather than the kind of learning community that will work within the space. So ideas about a name for the space are invited.

Questions:

Name:

• ConnecTED?
• TED?
• The TED Project?
• The ConnecTED Project?
• ConnecTED 07?
• The TED Project 07?
• The ConnecTED Project 07?
• Other?

(Edit: Project is called ConnecTED, or TED. Props to @gregmiller68 for leadership in this. AND go team 🙂

Technology for collaboration

Exlore on your own

Discover with others

Approach:

• What systems, frameworks, tools, challenges can you suggest for us as a learning team as we meet regularly in 2013 to implement the project?
• The approach is student centred, demands technology, foregrounds 21st century skills and student choice/autonomy. What questions would you ask to ensure those values are the focus, and remain so?

  Edit: These are the questions/values that have been central to our design process, as per @gregmiller68
  Essentially, student centred learning:
  · provides students with greater autonomy and choice of subject matter and pace of study;
  · involves students in more decision‐making processes;
  · requires extensive use of digital technologies; and,
  · results in memorable experiences where students ‘learn by doing’ with relevance to the real world.

  The above should then translate into core questions you ask yourself and others when trying to measure the worth and value of a learning activity. Questions such as:
  – Does this activity provide greater choice of subject matter?
  – Does this activity provide a choice of the pace of their study?
  – How are you (the teacher) involving students in more decision‐making processes?
  – Have you pursued the extensive use of digital technologies for this task?
  – Will this be a ‘memorable experience’ for the students?