I recently picked up John Hattie's 10 Mindframes for Visible Learning. It is the book chosen for two book studies I will be participating in this fall, so I dove right in. As I began, I reflected on my impact. As the primary groups I support are school media coordinators and instructional technology facilitators, I thought of them as my students. In reality, these are my co-creators of content, my collaborators - our relationship is symbiotic. Chapter 1 of this book came along at just the right time! Beware of educators with solutions - if these solutions do not remediate the needs of the students. One of the topics we routinely discuss is advocacy. The groups that I serve do not have dedicated budgets. In some schools, they are evaluated as classroom teachers - their evaluation instrument is detailed and the items often can't be measured through watching them teach a class. We spent a good part of last school year sharing ways to make what they do, visible...especially how what they do impacts student learning. We kicked off the year with a reminder of that. It becomes easy to get caught up in the "woe, is me" mindset, but that is not advocacy - that is complaining AND it shows that your focus is you and not the students. As we get started in a new school year, our goal is to make sure that our focus is on student learning.
One more question - how will we know? How will this impact be visible? What data, it may not be a test score, will show the impact? Our learners are more than test scores. We need to remember that when we evaluate our impact on learning.
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AuthorJeannie Timken Archives
March 2023
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