Faculty Meeting Recipe: Tony Wagner TEDx + Modified Protocol + Gdoc

Implemented this week at a faculty meeting

Step 1- Play, passion, purpose: Tony Wagner at TEDxNYED

Step 2- Ask educators to keep in mind when watching video our school's Core Value of- Creativity and Innovation: Embrace flexibility and individuality when explaining and demonstrating knowledge and skills.
Step 3- Implement "Save the Last Word for Me" Protocol from http://www.nsrfharmony.org/system/files/protocols/save_last_word_0.pdf (although usually a text based protocol, we adapted for video)
Step 4- At conclusion of protocol in its entirety, ask for groups to report via Google doc any collective key take aways or ideas that resonated with the entire group.

Results:
Key Take Aways
Put something here that your group agreed on, had in common, found important or interesting.

• We all felt that we need a culture where students are OK with taking a risk and failure.  You have to wonder “what lies beneath” from so many students who are afraid of failure or of taking a risk in a classroom.  
• If we want to be innovative, how can we also follow the flow of CCSS and the required elements of curriculum?  The two concepts are very disjointed.  The idea of a year of  beta is great, but we don’t feel like it is a reality.
• Group work is not “division of labor”.  What does real “collaboration” mean?
• The World of Innovation is interdisciplinary!
• Making mistakes is ok...take risks together with your students...we feel lucky that our administration encourages risk taking and experimentation.
• How do we teach kids to not be afraid and to take risks and be wrong.   It’s OK to be wrong, because 9 times out of 10, you learn from it.
• Sparking intrinsic motivation.
• Outliers are already outliers so they take risks and produce risk takers.  Students are fearful to take risks in this paradigm. 

There are tremendous ideas/feedback/conflicts here for me as a principal to reflect on, especially when looking through the lens, and trying to lead with all of the schools core values.  Personally, I am once again met with the conflict/pressure of what a "traditional" school is supposed to do and look like versus what it should and needs to look like to impact learning. (Then again what did I expect I was going to get given the premise of the video.)

Potential Next Steps:

• Engage students in the process and see what the results are.
• Engage parents in the process and see what the results are.
• Follow up re: Key take aways- see how close people feel our reality is to this versus how close should we be (and ask what is helping or inhibiting us?)

Potential Modification

• Use as a measuring stick to gauge how well you know your school/culture- Write down ahead of time what your take aways are. Write down ahead of time what you believe your faculty's take aways would be. Implement. Compare. 

What will you get when you "make" this recipe?

Thank you for taking the time to read this post. Please let me know if you have any ideas on how to improve, change, other ideas for next steps, or other ideas for modification.