Robert+Coven's+NLI11+Teacher+Leadership+Plan

The initial issue in creating a Teacher Leadership Plan is assessing both the audience and the goal I would like to reach. In this case, I’ve chosen my colleagues at Cary Academy as my intended audience. The school commits 22 days per year to in-house professional development. These work days are grouped into five-day work weeks, four times a year. A peer-to-peer presentation is well suited, as the main objective of this time is class preparation and professional development. Furthermore, technology is an important aspect of the school’s mission; so professional development focused on the appropriate use of technology is in perfect alignment.

For this particular presentation, my goal is to focus on how new technologies can be used to reinforce older, universal skills. [I plan to address this goal, further, in my closing reflection.] As a means to conveying this message, I will make use of the Project-Based-Inquiry method of instruction. Doing so will provide the additional benefit of introducing PBI as a useful pedagogy for my colleague’s classrooms.

We usually hold our professional development sessions in an amphitheater-style lecture hall. This is not conducive to the kind of interactive groupings that are essential to a PBI. Therefore, after breaking the staff into groups, we would make use of classrooms as our meeting spaces. The staff would be broken into PBI triads. For purposes of this introductory exercise, each group would have one Upper School teacher, one Middle School teacher, and one member of the administrative team or non-teaching staff. When departments are using the PBI method to develop content and discipline-based curriculum, it will be important for the triads to be drawn from within single disciplines.

The introductory lesson, based on the project Jason Bolchalk and I did for this year’s NLI, would take approximately three hours. The first hour would be a hybrid didactic/interactive session, which could be held in the lecture hall; the staff would be grouped by discipline or administrative role. I would begin by introducing the essential question: How can we expose digital natives to the notion that universal skills remain the means of education in a world crowded by ever changing technologies? After that, I would have the discipline-based groups develop definitions of the universal skills that are involved in searching for relevant text and annotating textual materials. This portion should take approximately 30 minutes. For the second half hour, I would introduce Voicethread and Dabbleboard (or Crocodoc), the Web 2.0 technologies the staff would use to complete their PBIs.

For the second phase, the staff would break into their mixed triads, and move to their meeting rooms. Once there, they would begin a modified version of the process outlined in our NLI PBI. Given a topic to research, e.g. the Declaration of Independence, participants will:
 * 1) conduct a search for an appropriate print source and then conduct a second search for relevant material within that source.
 * 2) annotate the print material they have found.
 * 3) digitize (scan) the annotation they have created.
 * 4) conduct a search for an appropriate digital source and relevant material from that source.
 * 5) annotate the selected material using the Dabbleboard web tool.
 * 6) create a Voicethread illustrating the process they used to search and annotate their analog and digital materials.

Upon completion of this process (approximately 90 minutes), participants will return to the lecture hall for a final discussion (approximately 30 minutes). For a culminating exercise, the participants will engage in a discussion regarding the similarities and differences, in searching and annotating, between print and digital media--comparing the groups’ earlier definitions to the results of their experiences. In addition, the participants will also engage in a discussion about the PBI, and the ways in which the participants might make use of this technique for further professional development and in the classroom.