Professional

Learning in the FTLA

Something Related to Fear

There are times when you can
ask questions or challenge
ideas, but if youve got a
teacher that doesnt like that or
the kids in the class make fun
of people who do that, its bad.
I think most of us learn that its
best to just keep your head
down, your mouth shut, and
your grades high.

Community
Professional Development isnt
about growing ourselves, its
about growing each other.

Empathy
Cultivating a humancentered approach
Bringing diverse
people together for
collaboration
Focusing on whats
meaningful to people
Engendering hope
Embracing possibility

Consensus among employers is that innovation,

critical thinking, and a broad skill set are important
for taking on complex challenges in the workplace.
Strongly agree with this statement about employees/future hires

Somewhat agree

Our company puts a priority on hiring people with the intellectual and interpersonal skills that will help them contribute to innovation in the workplace
57%

95%

Candidates demonstrated capacity to think critically, communicate clearly, &

solve complex problems is more important than their undergraduate major
93%
Our company is asking employees to take on more responsibilities and to use
a broader set of skills than in the past
59%

52%

93%

Innovation is essential to our company/organizations continued success

The challenges employees face within
51% our company are more complex
today than they were in the past
50%
5

92%

91%

The Student/Educator
Mirror
Motivators

Research

Autonomy

Set a clear end goal

Goal directed, authentic

value

Identify your authentic value

Mastery

Set intermediate goals

Success breeds capacity

Celebrate accomplishments

Purpose

Get involved outside the

classroom

Make it fun and interesting

to come to school

Make connections with the world

Shift Happens 2014 Remix

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PcZg51Il9no )

Learning as Connectivity
To learn is to practice and reflect
Capacity to know more is more
critical than what is known
Connections, not content, are
the beginning point of the
learning process
Learning is a network forming
process

Ideas from the Field Part I: Howard Jenkins,

Confronting the Challenges of Participatory
Culture
How its done:
1. With relatively low barriers to artistic expression
and civic participation
2. With strong support for creating and sharing
ones creations with others
3. With some type of informal mentorship whereby
what is known by the most experienced is passed
along to novices
4. Where members believe their contributions
matter
5. Where members feel some degree of social
connections with one another (at the least they

Ideas from the field Part II: Etienne Wenger,

Communities of Practice
Reification and Participation as a binary in learning:

Participation combines doing, talking, thinking, feeling and

belonging. It involves our whole person, including our bodies,
minds, emotions, and social relations (56)

Reification: Any community of practice produces

abstractions, tools, symbols, stories, terms, and concepts that
reify something of that practice in a congealed form (59).

These Are Problems of

Practice
A general consensus has grown that
professional learning benefits from a
community of practice/inquiry approach,
as it then becomes embedded in the day
to day work of the practitioner and at the
same time provides the practitioner with
a networked community with which to
share best practices and to reflect more
deeply on how learning happens within its
situated context (Cochran-Smith & Lytle,
1999; Borko, 2004; Au, Raphael, &

Habits of Mind
Individuals with a growth mindset, Carol
Dwecks research demonstrates,
believe that a persons true potential
is unknown (and unknowable); that its
impossible to foresee what can be
accomplished with years of passion,
toil, and training.

Metacognitive
Conversation

Share Responsibility for

Rehumanizing Education
Forming a safety net of caring
participants is essential: one
that values problem-solving,
dialog, consensus building,
and understands that
dissonance creates
opportunity.
Next comes having these
participants provide highly
visible, safe spaces for
personal support for learning

Networks Work
To reignite creativity, innovation, and
learning, as Brown suggests, we must
rehumanize education and work. This
means understanding how scarcity is
affecting the way we lead and work and
learning how to build empathetic
networks that foster community.
This is why we built FTLA, and this is
why we begin from the premise that
student success lives here.

Empathy=Each One Bring One,

Each One Teach One
A leader is anyone who holds
her- or himself accountable for
finding potential in people and
processes.
Professional Development isnt
about growing ourselves, its
about growing each other.

Remember How We Forgot

(https
://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NBVJuA0jr6Y&feature=
player_embedded)

Lets Be Open and Vulnerable, Lets Burn

with Creativity, Lets Make Student
Success Live Here, Now