To say that CSLE+COVA was totally new to me at the beginning of the DLL/ADL program is a total understatement. When I started 5305 with Dr. Harapnuik in August 2020, he simply told us to create an innovation project that uses technology to support and supplement learning. No real guidelines at all. This was so very difficult for me to wrap my head around. What does this mean? What does it look like? What do I do to even start? Honestly, I felt that the first class just threw us straight into the fire. I started looking at examples from previous groups, but nothing really worked for my high school math position. I am very much a “follow the directions and you’ll get good grades” kind of girl. Now I was having to make my own choices, and use my own voice to try and create an authentic project.
Needless to say, my first five weeks of graduate school were extremely stressful coupled with beginning a new school year teaching in such weird circumstances as we had due to Covid. We’re talking so stressful that I lost hair over the class and had a bald spot. I had to learn quickly that everything I came up with was just from me and doing lots of research to try and find something dealing with technology that could be incorporated into my Algebra classes. I had to learn how to learn for myself without all the information being given straight to me. As I kept going through the classes in the program, I started to feel more comfortable with how things are done. I am so thankful that one of the first classes had us learn about the growth mindset. I had heard about it prior to the class, but reading Dweck’s (2016) book was a game changer. It gave me the perspective that if I didn’t know what to do, it was more that I didn’t know what to do “yet,”
In the DLL/ADL program, I have learned how to use my voice to try and make changes. My innovation project is about using a flipped classroom for my Algebra 1 classes. I really do intend to try and apply it at my school, but I’m struggling to get going. There is a lot of work to do in creating a flipped classroom at the beginning, and I don’t have the time for creating videos and finding activities to use with all of my graduate work and teaching work rolled together. My assistant principal is really interested in my plan after she read my article that I plan to try and publish. Once I’m done with my degree, I want to use some of my time to look back at plans that I made during the course on leading organizational change. I want to gather teachers who know that the status quo of teaching and learning is a little broken, and see if I can lead a group to find a way to make the changes that can make our school more engaging and authentic for our students. I want my students to be given an opportunity to learn for themselves like I have in this program. I have seen how doing the work for yourself to learn something makes it so that you know the material better. We haven’t had all the information given to us, so we’ve had to make the learning our own personal goal in order to survive. I know the struggles that I have dealt with over the past year or more from learning from a significant learning environment instead of just being given the information. My students are even more dependent on teachers than even I was, so teaching them about the growth mindset will be extremely important as we try to transition them into taking ownership of their learning.
Reference
Dweck, C. (2016). Mindset: The new psychology of success [Kindle]. Random House, New York.
Harapnuik, D. (2017) CSLE+COVA. Retrieved from http://www.harapnuik.org/?page_id=6988
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