As mentioned in my previous post on how to promote student agency…in my school district we adopted the five learning beliefs from Education Reimagined to help drive our district vision: competency-based; personalized, relevant & contextualized; learner agency; socially embedded; open-walled.
This year, one of the main ways in which we are tackling these learning beliefs is through are innovation initiative, #YourSalisbury (formerly, Innovate Salisbury). The #YourSalisbury team consists of 15 teachers (3-4 from each of our four schools) and all of the district’s administrators. Throughout the year we meet for three all-day whole group sessions. After each of the first two, each school’s team follows up with their own full day of learning and planning at the building level. This entire initiative/framework was originally conceived of by my Superintendent, Randy Ziegenfuss, and Assistant Superintendent, Lynn Fuini-Hetten, and this is our third year of implementation.
About a week ago we held our first all-day session. In the afternoon I facilitated a one-hour activity with the goal of having participants uncover the various ways in which project based learning (PBL) provides us with a more concrete approach to realizing the learning beliefs in our learning spaces. In other words, PBL is our means; the learning beliefs are our end.
Here’s the activity, verbatim (and a printable version can be found here).
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