Trying on a New Kind of Professional Development

Enumclaw School District's Theory of Action:

If we are relentless in our pursuit of creating schools that engage students in learning that is authentic, deep, irresistible, and exciting than we will succeed in preparing all students for success in the innovation era and success in life.

Five days ago we launched our secondary instructional cadre initiative.  This learning model has been designed in partnership with the Enumclaw School District and Jeff Utecht.  The intent of the initiative is to help us move our district Theory of Action forward. by providing a group of teachers incentive, opportunity and dedicated time to learn more about teaching and learning in a blended learning environment.  The only qualification necessary to join this cadre was a willingness to learn and an open mind.  We hope what had been designed will nurture a culture of innovation and eventually create multiple opportunities for others to observe examples of our theory in action.

We will all participate in face-to-face learning and seven week online learning modules throughout the year.  And a requirement of this learning is that we create a blog and share and reflect on our learning publicly with one another. At the end of day one our cadre successfully set up our blogs, our own Feedly accounts and used a protocol called, The 4 Shifts, to help us begin to examine deep learning.  The protocol asked us to think about four key areas: thinking and learning, authentic work, student agency & personalization, and technology infusion.

What a privilege it was to watch these 16 teachers begin to think, plan and nudge one another in their thinking about teaching and learning.  I left at the end of day one with energy, excitement and inspiration.  I cannot wait to see what we learn from this adventure.