It is now a month after BLC08 and a recent comment has stirred up some thoughts that sent me back to a blog draft I wrote months ago. On Defragging my brain after BLC08, Angela Kerns mentioned that of my nine ‘take-aways’, #3 and #4 resonated with her:

3. Face-to-face meetings with your network are powerful… very powerful.

4. More learning happens in the halways and at meals/socials than in sessions. Create opportunities for Learning   Conversations.

What is most amazing about BLC08 is that these two points are still resonating with me. Liz B. Davis, Lisa Thumann, and Laura Deisley adopted Dave Sands and I, and took us under their wings. Many of the discussions we had were of a quality that left me wishing that I had recorded them! Thanks to these ladies, I connected with many people that were in my network, but had never met, and I also met amazing people who are now part of my network.

But these learning conversations didn’t happen in the presentations at the conference. It was the conversations we had outside of the sessions that were really incredible.

Liz lived very near our hotel and so a car ride, or a chat walking her home would become an in depth conversation about strategies to promote technology integration or a debate about comfort levels with having students as social networking friends. (O.K., I’ll admit an embarrassing story here just for a laugh… as Dave and I walked Liz home on the second night, I walked into a pole while texting my wife… the rim of my baseball cap saved me from potential head trauma. Mental note: don’t walk and text in the dark!)

The conversations were not all heavy, Lisa and I razzed each other on the issue of ‘to Plurk or not to Plurk’, and Joyce Valenza always made sure everyone was having fun even when sharing our thoughts on education. But it seemed that very often the conversations, whether light, frivolous or funny, always went back to education.

Even at the dinner cruise social, (that Dave, Donna DesRoches and I almost missed after an ‘Amazing Race’ style route), it seemed that the learning continued:

On the boat: Clarence Fisher wanted to know the name of a fort we cruised by, but no-one could help him until Alice Barr handed over her iphone. Clarence used this experience in his presentation the following day to exemplify how information is abundant now and we need to go beyond rote memorization in what we teach.

On the bus ride back to the hotel: I had an in-depth conversation with Pegggy Sheehy about avatar gender. I never considered that I would ever choose a female avatar for myself until this conversation… biases I didn’t even know I had were challenged!

At the hotel restaurant: Darren Kuropatwa, Laura and I took a little idea I had about a Twitter version of 366 Photos and developed it into what would be a great project. Hopefully we will expand on it in the fall and maybe launch for the month of February.

Everywhere we turned we were having learning conversations. This seems to happen when you surround yourself with amazing people… people who are catalysts and agents of change.

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With each person I mentioned above, I linked to their blogs. Each of those blogs are in their own way agents of change… they are inspired by teachers and learners wanting more out of ‘institutional’ education. They are not the works of dreamers dreaming, but rather the work of catalysts reflecting, experimenting, learning, questioning, designing, succeeding and failing, and yes dreaming too.

What makes this so meaningful though, is the connections we make to each other, and the learning we gain from linking, meeting, and creating opportunities for learning conversations to happen.

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Are you an agent of change? Are you a catalyst that makes things happen? Do you create opportunities for collaboration? Do you initiate and inspire learning conversations? 

Keeping education meaningful and relevant is an ongoing process of evolution or emergence. The process requires us to learn and to change too.  We need to evolve. We need to learn, encourage learning, and allow learning to emerge.

In Science change occurs through hybridization or mutation… ideas go through this too. Institutional education doesn’t do this on its’ own.

In Science catalysts are often used in tandem. Different agents combine to make a chemical reaction happen faster. Catalysts of change work well together too. We learn from each other and interact more meaningfully from the learning of others. Often we need feedback loops to help us make sure we are making the right things happen… after all, change can be both for the better or the worse.

But if there is one thing I can be certain of, change needs to happen. Students today are interacting and engaging with the world in ways that would have seemed like science fiction to us.

If we are not agents of change then we are agents of boredom and mediocrity, the keepers of the status quo…. static… in stasis. 

Create opportunities for Learning Conversations. 

Be a catalyst that inspires learning.

Be an agent of change! 

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Photo of Change Agents, after the BLC08 boat cruise
by Joyce Valenza on flickr

I have not used PowerPoint very many times in my life. However, I have sat through, and sometimes suffered through, many as part of an audience. So I felt a little intimidated when Nicoletta, one of my Vice Principals in my new school, asked me to create a PowerPoint presentation to introduce the new Graduation Transitions program that I am responsible for implementing. The first presentation would be happening on the first day of school, delivered to almost 80 staff members, most of whom I had not met yet. The next two would be to the Grade 11′s and Grade 12′s respectively in their Assemblies four days later. ‘Great’, I thought, ‘I get to bore the entire staff and half of the school’s students with a PowerPoint presentation in my first week, what a great first impression!’
Fortunately, I have been thinking a lot about good presentations lately. I’ve previously written a short post linking to a great presentation, and I found another valuable resource, a post by Joyce Valenza.
Well, feedback on my presentations has been overwhelmingly good, “The best presentation to staff I’ve seen since coming here,” -this was from a staff member I bumped into in the photocopy room, and “I loved your presentation,” -from a grade 11 student who held a door open for me. I’ve actually been a little uncomfortable with the compliments. The fact is that I am delivering a good message about a bad situation.

A Little History
The original Graduation Portfolio, like Graduation Transitions is a good idea. The problem with the Portfolio was that the Provincial Government implemented it but did not provide sufficient financial or resource support to make it effective and more importantly, meaningful. On the one end of the spectrum, teachers in our district worked very hard to make the Portfolio program work, and just before the final mandatory presentations, the Provincial Government backed down and made Portfolio optional. On the other end of the spectrum our district Student Leadership Council (SLC) initiated a district-wide ‘vote’ that quite intentionally was biased towards getting rid of the Portfolio. I could write several long-winded posts about both perspectives but in the end what really matters is that the Portfolio program is gone now, and any new program is going to be faced with skepticism, doubt and ill feelings from many students and teachers alike! So now the challenge is to make the new, easier (mandatory) program work, rather than throwing our hands in the air and thinking, “When are they going to pull the plug on this one?”
The fact is, I believe Graduation Transitions is here to stay. This program has been weeded down to having every student in the Province show evidence that they have considered important aspects around their health, community/work experience and their careers. I don’t think that these minimum expectations of a BC grad will be going anywhere soon.

About the Presentation
In the end, I think that I did a pretty good job delivering four important messages.
The messages were:
· What does the new program look like
· This is easier than the previous Graduation Portfolio program
· The intent behind the current program is good
· The program may be mandatory, but ‘we’ decide whether to make it a chore or a positive, meaningful experience.

I used a fair bit of comics/humour in the slides, but very little humour in my delivery. I did read a quote off of my slides, but did not really read from my slides beyond that. For the teachers, I used a couple comics at the end to make the point that we can make this much better for the students if we buy into it, and make the most of it. And for the students, I used a series of images to represent the fact that Grad Transitions is the new and much improved version of the Graduation Portfolio that they did not want or like. This was a great slide that was used very early on in my presentation, (the second slide). I wish I could show it here, but I used a few copyrighted images, and although I did not have an issue using them in my presentation, I would not feel comfortable printing them here on a personal blog, without permission. The slide went like this:
An image of an old black & white boxy picture-tube TV with the title “Graduation Portfolio” then an image of a modern flat screen TV with the title “Grad Transitions”. This continued with three more images to impress the point.