We all have a story to tell

After watching the TED talk, I have more of an understanding of why it is so important to tell your story. I never really thought about how my stories or “ideas” will die inside of me because I do not tell them. I must do a better job as an educator to tell my story so I can help grow and make a bigger impact in education.

A good story must have a clear vision and plan of what it is you are trying to change or develop. You must get all stakeholders excited about the vision and give them reasons why it is important. If you can get them excited and feel like they are part of the movement then they will take up ownership on pushing the vision further down the road as the movement on change starts. It must take all stakeholders for the vision to grow. The true owner and hero of the story is the people. The audience or the people you are telling the story to are the true hero’s. It will be up to them to take the vision and the plan you deliver and spread it to the world. It is your job to excite them and have a clear path while laying out the reason for the plan.

My vision is using flipped classroom approach to help bridge the gap in learning from different groups along with allowing more class time to develop more engaging activities that will promote higher level thinking skills. I started thinking about ways to get more real world situations into the classroom, deeper discussions, and higher level activities such as stations, labs, projects, and hands on activities as I looked over our school data from previous graduate courses. Our students did a good job of passing the state exams, but we lack in developing the higher level thinking skills to meet mastery level of the exams. My vision started by thinking of ways to utilize technology resources and devices to help get the basic content across through more of a flip classroom approach while freeing up class time to develop the higher level thinking skills. I wanted to piece all of this together with having student’s keep e-portfolios so they can manage their progress and take more ownership in their education through a vision of self-change and growth along their lifelong learning journey. All of which is developing more of a growth mindset. It is such an awesome feeling to see all the pieces come together that we have been talking about in the various graduate courses over the past several months.

I have been able to take ideas that were helpful in the readings to create my vision and plan. I have also been able to take note of some of the things that did not work especially well. I feel the LA IPAD debacle was one of the most important learning experiences, because it taught me how to have a vision and develop a plan. Some teachers struggle with integrating technology into the classroom because they do not have a clear vision or plan. This was the first thing I had to come up with in my innovation plan.