N K C S C H O O L S

NKCS Professional Learning Incubator 1

Professional Learning Incubator

A Culture of CollaborationProviding opportunities to “soften” the walls of our classrooms as we continue to grow into the 21st Century

The North Kansas City School District is vast with respect to both geographical area and total number of faculty. In order to turn challenges into assets, some form of collaborative sandbox for instructional alignment & innovation is needed. The Ning platform is rich with opportunity for the sort of local customization we need to assist staff in building relationships with colleagues and coming together around instructional issues and challenges. These actions directly impact professional growth, and ultimately, student performance and empowerment.

Removing Barriers

Teaching today is an increasingly sophisticated endeavor. More and more is expected from our staff as we seek to provide the best for our children. The ceiling we increasingly push against is time. The

simple fact remains that our days will never number in excess of 24 hours. In light of this, we must seek to maximize our time in planning, highlighting and sharing our bright spots and next practices.

Leaders at all levels know we can never afford to schedule enough face to face time for professional learning. The logistics aren’t there, and funds are limited. Given this fact, we are led toward making

the most effective use of the time we have. The question becomes... how do we give teachers more feedback from peers, Administrators, Instructional Coordinators, Teaching & Learning Coaches, SALTs, etc.? How do we do this in a way that honors the time of all of the professionals involved, and yet do so in a way that credits the ways in which we increasingly interact in a digital world?

We feel that an online incubator for professional learning will allow us to better connect research to planning and planning to practice. Ultimately, this culture of collaboration will help to spread the best of our work beyond the walls of our individual classrooms and in a way that allows us to interact when and where we work best.

Getting There

Startup for this is simple. The roadmap to implementation is easily articulated. Soon we can share practices, troubleshoot for alignment, coach one another, document the powerful work of our PLTs, and continue the engagement with our consultants.

Together we can all become more effective in meeting the needs of our children for today and into the future.

A place where ideas and innovations find growth, development, and instructional alignment.

Immersion in Digital CultureThe social web is currently a part of the lives of all children... and most adults. This approach will purposefully immerse adult learners in modern, online 2-way tools explicitly shifted toward learning.

Sharing Instructional PracticesShining light on bright spots across our organization. Providing opportunities to troubleshoot.

Making PLT Work TransparentGrade-level teams across the district. Content level teams. Cross functional teams. Multidisciplinary approaches. Support for Encore programs. Empowering collaboration & accountability Thursday to Thursday.

Extending Professional Learning

Capturing the rich work of and with our paid consultants. Extending these relationships forward.

Curriculum CollaborationHelping our curriculum come to life and find alignment with both solid instructional practice and common, targeted assessment districtwide. Curriculum becomes a living, breathing entity.

Opportunities to CoachWith teachers reflecting throughout a common network, our many support teams gain another venue for just-in-time coaching.

A multifaceted approach to adult learning... ...that incubates and reinforces best practices

Face to face sharing is the best form of synchronous collaboration. Yet,

asynchronous learning can easily evolve beyond the physical constraints

of time and place.

N K C S C H O O L S

NKCS Professional Learning Incubator 2

“The true value of a network is less about information and more about community. The information superhighway is more than a shortcut to every book in the Library of Congress. It is creating a new, global social fabric.”~Being Digital, by Nicholas Negroponte, 1995 (p.183)

“We don’t think of social as a destination. We think of social as a dimension.”~Ari Balogh, Yahoo CTO

“Connecting people to people. Over and over again, that’s what lasts online. Folks thought it was about technology, and It’s not.”~Seth Godin

“The more skilled a person is on a dimension, like academia, art, music, the more important they consider that activity to be.”~Pelham (1991)

“The old, hardwired ‘plan & push’ mentality is rapidly giving way to a new dynamic ‘engage & cocreate’ economy.” ~Don Tapscott & Anthony D. Williams in Wikinomics (p. 31)

The value in media is no longer in sources but in flows; when we pool our cognitive surplus, it creates value that doesn’t exist when we operate in isolation.”~Clay Shirky

“What the web has done is it has just kicked the ever-loving crap out of the cost of organizing people.”~Cory Doctorow

“Showing someone a picture of a slow animal causes them to walk more slowly. The presentation of fast animals has the opposite effect.”~Aarts and Dijksterhuis (2000)