The Future Starts Now

When looking to implement change in my classroom, I often think big.  I spend time with great ideas that I will put into place when I have the time to sit down and plan them out. Too often, these great ideas become a low priority when faced with the day to day management of my workflow. So the change I’m looking to implement doesn’t get addressed until I have the time to plan.  That means during summer vacation. It’s a problem that the change I’m looking to make doesn’t happen until I have time to address it because it feels too big.

With the help of Kate Sommerville from the Institute of Personalized Learning, I’m going through the process of mapping a classroom constellation that brings personalized learning to life in my classroom. I have been on my PL journey for several years, but this process has …. (explain how it has helped structure, support, grow your practice??).

One of the key steps in the process is creating an action plan for immediate implementation. A plan one can start preparing for as soon as tomorrow with the hope of implementing in a few weeks. I love this idea as it fights my temptation to hold off on implementation until I’m comfortable. We often ask our students to partake in activities are lessons they are not comfortable with. Knowing that, I too have to be willing to take a risk and fail forward knowing the work I am doing is tough, but so rewarding. I’ve discussed other parts of the constellation process in previous posts. I’ve discussed designing my vision (the why) and choosing personalized learning elements to implement (the what). The process forced me to consider the “why” and the “what” before focusing on the actual steps I would take. The  idea of moving from your “why” to your “what” before planning action steps is not only applicable to the constellation planning process, it is what any meaningful, intentional implementation model should be centered around. I think this is a really powerful idea-  as educators in a building, we may have the same vision of what we are looking to accomplish, but we need to be given the space to find our own path.  This customized learning path applies to our students as well. This process is really where I see the connection between personalized learning in the classroom and personalized PD for educators.

When going through the process of planning the how, we looked through 2 different lenses: big picture and detailed planning. The big picture lens allowed me to sketch a narrative of how all the elements I was hoping to bring to my classroom would interplay. It’s often so easy for me to jump to the details piece that I lose sight of the learning story. That’s why I am a terrible speaker.  Too often, I focus on the detailed steps and rattle them off without thinking about the flow of the story I’m telling. The same thing is true for lessons/activities/processes in a unit of instruction.  I need to spend more time seeing the connections between the pieces before I get lost in the details. This narrative construction helps with that.

Once the overall narrative was set, I was able to work on the details that I love.  The fine lens for planning requires not simply thinking about the delivery of instruction but the preparation. It forced me to attach dates to when I would complete these preparation tasks before thinking about the delivery of instruction. Instead of putting together a lesson plan that assumes materials have been created, I planned the creation of these materials. In addition, I was required to create a timeline not simply for delivery of the instruction, but the creation of materials and response to instruction.  If we expect to have classrooms that are student centered and respond to formative assessment, we cannot expect all of our planning and preparation of materials to be completed before instruction has begun. Responsive instruction requires that we set aside time to revise our plan and implement new resources.  These planned resources should not only be a response to remediate but to extend learning beyond what we predicted performance would be. Building that into the action plan is key.  It forces me to be prepared to follow the learning story my students are telling me rather than the one I wrote for them.

I really need that timeline piece since it pushes me to do this now. It relieves some anxiety because I can see how I will be able to find time to prepare and implement new practices. A unique part of the planning process is that I was forced to constantly go back and think about how each task connected to the elements I wanted to implement in my classroom. It forced me to connect my tasks back to what I wanted to do in the classroom.  It forced me to make all of my tasks purposeful. It also made me realize that the personalized learning elements don’t live in isolation, they work together in task creation and implementation. Finally, Kate made me think about what will it look like when the task is done. How will I know I’ve made progress.

In the process, I was connecting tasks to elements and getting a better sense that there is no “single right way” to implement personalized learning elements into the classroom. In addition, adding the incremental steps for the process makes the implementation manageable. The timeline keeps me on target.  We have to remember that the change we are looking for is driven by the learners we have in our classrooms now. So this change can’t wait to be planned over the summer in time for next year’s learners. If it’s a change that I believe needs to be implemented, the future needs to start now.