Encouraging Documenting Learning and Professional Teacher Branding to Contribute to School Branding
The personal professional branding of an educator can easily be confused with bragging and the efforts of one person to put himself or herself in the limelight. This is not the case when sharing and amplifying are the norm in an educational institution. As Muhammad Ali put it so well, “It’s not bragging, if you can back it up” (see Image 12.8).
Many in the educational profession consider sharing to be a moral imperative (Sharski, 2013). Teachers’ and administrators’ professional documentation purposefully contribute to the collective school’s or district’s brand. Sheninger and Rubin (2017) make it clear when they ask schools to, “Look at your teachers as brand ambassadors” (p. 27). They add that the branding of a school or district cannot, “Rest on the shoulders of one person. It is a distributed, collaborative, service-oriented school improvement effort” (p. 34)
Teachers’ branding via the use of artifacts tells the stories of who they are as learners and what they are exploring and applying in their learning environments. The visible telling of their stories promotes the development of skills that aid in defining, valuing, monitoring, and managing their digital identities (brand), which in turn enables them to better foster these skills in their students. Students, teachers, and administrators collectively contribute to a school’s brand. And, if applicable, when joined with one or more other schools in a district, the collective brands lead to conveying a district’s brand.
Image 12.8
Summing Up
Schools and districts are experiencing cultural shifts that ask educators, administrators, and learning communities to re-evaluate and re-think traditional notions of brands and branding. Branding for educational institutions is relatively new. Stakeholders may be hesitant to take risks in transparently sharing a school’s or district’s learning journeys. Starting to think about an institution’s identity in the face of a “business as unusual” culture is important, given the accelerated leading and managing changes occurring in the world (Pritchett & Pound, 2014).
Educators with a strong personal brand become aggregators of their school’s or district’s brand. These teachers and administrators constantly evaluate who they are as professionals and make their cognitive and metacognitive thinking visible by sharing and using social media platforms. For example:
When a teacher documents by capturing strategic moments while presenting at a local, national, or international conference, he or she is branding the school and/or district.
When teachers are actively engaged in professional learning by blogging, they are contributing to the brand of their school and/or district.
When two or more teachers from a school attend conferences and consistently share and amplify their learning while using social media platforms, the school automatically and over time is being branded as an environment that supports ongoing learning for both its students and its teachers.
Therefore, administrators need to re-think the following:
Granting permission for teachers (and themselves) to attend and present at conferences
Providing adequate time for their teachers to learn digital networking skills and now literacies and applying them authentically in classrooms and professional learning environments
Encouraging, supporting, and celebrating the efforts of teachers who are willing to be risk-takers and transparent learners in local and global communities
Teachers and administrators need to understand that they play a significant role as members in a collective community of learners. They also need to realize that they have a responsibility to go beyond just being consumers to being producers who create quality contributions that continually add to the learning and teaching stories that define their professional brands, as well as the collective school’s or district’s brand.
For educators and institutions creating and maintaining a branding identity can express, facilitate, and encourage the openness of their learning process. It is a strategic choice to move beyond documenting OF learning to sharing and amplifying documenting FOR and AS learning artifacts that represent learning journeys over time. By advocating and providing a visible and audible voice of a school’s or district’s learning stories as institutional memory, it conveys a commitment to lifelong learning.
Possibly for your school or district, it is a you don’t know what you don’t know until you try it situation. Sharing learning as an individual teacher, school, or district will bring amplified documenting learning opportunities for oneself, students, and administrators. The action of branding involves and embeds building meaningful relationships and connections within and outside the walls of a classroom, school campus, and district offices.
Going Beyond
To amplify your reading beyond this book’s pages, we have created discussion questions and prompts for this chapter, which are located at www.documenting4learning.com. To extend your thinking, reactions, and responses, you can connect with other readers by leaving comments on individual chapter’s discussion posts on our documenting4learning blog.
We also invite you to contribute and share your artifacts in other social media spaces to connect with and learn from other readers around the world using the #documenting4learning hashtag on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram; or by mentioning @documenting4learning on Facebook and Instagram, and @doc4learning on Twitter.
13 Documenting Learning Moving Forward
Actions have consequences.
—Tom Cotton
Cotton’s phrase often evokes negative connotations, when in reality, there are often positive consequences to one’s actions. When someone decides to eat healthier and starts exercising, the consequences are a stronger body, a clearer mind, and a better ability to focus on complex tasks.
Choice making in conjunction with considering consequences is not foreign to educational environments. Decision making followed by deliberate actions happen often concerning curriculum, instruction, assessments, learning environments, and community relations.
What to cut? What to keep? What to upgrade?
When making decisions about documenting OF, FOR, and AS learning opportunities in a classroom, school, or district, consider why the documenting learning framework is a necessary and worthwhile action for moving forward.
Jacobs (2010) shares in Curriculum21
We need to overhaul, update, and inject life into our curriculum and dramatically alter the format of what schools look like to match the times we live in. Our responsibility is to prepare the learners in our care for their world and their future.
She reminds educators of two positive consequences that result from modernizing learning and teaching:
When students are engaged in the types of products and performances that are ongoing in the larger contemporary world, they are more motivated to respond to those forms and to create them as well. The deliberate and formal work of identifying new options and working to target replacements is a sensible place for a faculty to begin.
To move toward or expand a contemporary learning environment that targets replacements and mirrors the real world that students and educators experience outside of school time, Jacobs poses three straightforward questions that need to be asked, explored, and actionably answered:
What do we cut? What do we keep? What do we create?
In reality, these separate questions intermingle. For example, when something is cut, it makes room to create. Likewise, when something is kept, it may be tweaked, which means creating is taking place. Jacobs often refers to the action of creating as upgrading. For example, while sharing a modernizing-learning experience she had with a school, she mentions
Given how overwhelming it might seem to change an entrenched curriculum, we needed a reasonable place to commence upgrading. . . . As a lifelong student of curriculum, I am aware that curriculum has three basic elements: content, skills, and assessment. Each element needs to be revised for timeliness and alig
ned for coherence. . . . I suggested that we start small, we start focused, and we start with assessments.
While there are myriad learning and teaching replacement practices that can be considered through Jacobs’s three questions, from a documenting perspective and this concluding chapter’s purpose
What to cut focuses on mindsets.
What to keep focuses on learning requirements.
What to create focuses on viewing assessments through an upgrading lens.
What to Cut?
To foster and nurture the documentation phases and learningflow routine steps, four mindsets need to be cut (see Image 13.1):
Documenting learning is too time consuming.
I do not have any learning worth sharing or amplifying.
We cannot document learning using the entire learningflow routine because of policy.
Documenting is about taking pictures or using technology.
Documenting learning is too time consuming.
No one ever has enough time. That is the reality of living in a fast-paced world, both inside and outside of the school day. Because learning something new takes time, effort, and causes moments of disequilibrium and disruption, learning and teaching practices are often based on tradition—we have always done it this way. This mindset—“Why change, if it is working?”—leads to complacency and a sense of irrelevance for students. The reality is that it may only appear to be working on the surface. If you ask or survey students, they will often reveal that they are disengaged and not finding purpose or connections in their learning.
Image 13.1
Finding the time to engage in meaningful learning opportunities must be a priority. Providing authentic experiences where students and teachers mingle with and learn from people in the local and global community of learners and experts needs to slowly and steadily become just the way we do things. Participating in documenting OF, FOR, and AS learning opportunities strategically aids in cutting dated content and pedagogy.
The reality is that the documenting learning process will be time consuming at the onset. When thinking about the documentation phases’ components and the learningflow routine steps, they involve acquiring a new set of skills, which when first put into practice takes time, just like learning to ride a bike or play a complex game. Klosowki (2013) notes that when people learn new skill sets
The more adept you become at a skill, the less work your brain has to do. Over time, a skill becomes automatic and you don’t need to think about what you’re doing. This is because your brain is actually strengthening itself over time as you learn that skill. . . . As those connections get stronger, the less we have to think about what we’re doing, which means we can get better at other facets of a set of skills.
The good news is that it does not take too long for the documenting process skills to become effortless when practiced regularly.
Engaging in documenting opportunities does not mean all or nothing. The most important four words to remember are, not all at once. It is about taking one step at a time and allowing time to reflect on the struggles and successes of implementing and experimenting with a cohort (in person or virtually) who is involved the same or similar documenting opportunity in their learning environments. Hale and Fisher (2013) note, “Slow-and-steady transformations, in which teachers (and students) work collaboratively to make strategic and specific modifications to current curricular elements, lead to modern, meaningful, and engaging experiences” (p. 3).
I do not have any learning worth sharing or amplifying.
A producer-consumer culture, which is foundational for a documenting environment to thrive, is built on sharing and amplifying. This culture is the norm for many students (and adults) when not in school. Connecting with others is ubiquitous in their everyday lives. Updating one’s status on Facebook, adding a book review on Amazon or reviewing a product purchased online, sharing photographs on Instagram, posting videos on Snapchat and YouTube, sending out #hashtag tweets, and tagging photos are just a few ways active online participants choose to connect with peers to express their moments, milestones, and memories.
Educational systems need to acknowledge this reality and create or enhance the sharing and amplifying taking place from within a classroom, school, or district. Doing so takes advantage of behaviors and mindsets that students naturally embrace. Likewise, they relate better to their academic environments when they observe their teachers and administrators sharing and amplifying as well.
Learning is social now more than ever. Educationally speaking, teachers and administrators are establishing and growing their professional learning networks (PLN) to leverage their students’ and their own authentic learning experiences. Networking is built on a concept of sharing. As previously mentioned, the Internet was developed so people could connect in purposeful and meaningful ways.
Networking is defined as the exchange of information or services among individuals, groups, or institutions. The key word is among, which indicates three or more, not one or two. In order for multiple digital exchanges to take place concerning a topic, idea, or event someone has to step up to the plate (device) and begin the sharing. Others then take, give, add, and re-share to amplify to their own networks. Godin (2017a) reminds global citizens:
You go first. That’s the key insight of the peer-to-peer connection economy. Anyone can reach out, anyone can lead, anyone can pick someone else. But if you wait for anyone, it’s unlikely to happen. It begins with you.
The importance of building a network and reaching out to one’s PLN members to interact with his or her learners cannot be overlooked. If creating and building a social media network is out of an educator’s comfort zone, he or she should ask someone who is comfortable with the desired social media platform to serve as a mentor or coach, or search among the many self-guiding tutorials available online.
For educators who have never explored social media platforms and interactions in a personal or professional context often believe they have nothing worthwhile to say or share. Dave Burgess (2016) addresses why a nothing-worth-sharing belief needs to be cut from a teacher’s or administrator’s mindset:
The first is the belief that their ideas are either not worthy of sharing or not unique enough to warrant adding into the conversation. This is a false belief! You have amazing ideas and experiences that are unique to you and your path as an educator. And what you have to add to the conversation may be exactly what someone needs to hear. Share everything! The things that were successful as well as all the stuff that didn’t work! You may help others . . . or save them from making the mistakes you’ve made. I constantly hear teachers say, “I’m sure everyone does this.” No! They don’t! Even if your idea is not new, you have probably put a personalized spin on it. Others can build on your idea to create something powerful for themselves. Furthermore, if you share something in a chat that others already know or do, that doesn’t annoy people; it validates their practices and experiences. By talking about an idea they’re trying to implement, you reinforce their belief in the soundness of the practice. You’ll also encourage those who may be under fire for trying something innovative. Hearing your experiences raises their confidence and enables them to continue to fight the good fight.
We cannot document using the entire learningflow routine.
Many educators participating in our documenting learning workshops are enthusiastic about the new possibilities that the documenting learning process provides, but then thoughts of school or district policy creeps into their minds, and they become paralyzed concerning implementation when they return to their schools. Unfortunately, this causes many participants to instantly snap back to a fixed mindset during the workshops. Here are a few comments that are often overheard:
What a fantastic way to foster authentic feedback and global connections, but this won’t work in my school. We have password-protected student portfolios that only the teacher, student, and parents have access to reading.
I am so excited abo
ut having my students document their learning with annotexted images and videos, but we just don’t have enough devices available for a full classroom of students. And there is a strict no-cell-phone policy in our district, even though almost every student has one, even kids in upper elementary.
I would love to use blogs and Twitter posts as documentation artifacts for my professional learning portfolio, but it would not count toward credits or points I need for re-certification in my district because it is not on the pre-approved list.
When policies are put into place, they are often appropriate. Other times, they are not. They are knee-jerk reactions to situations, incidents, or believing urban legends that cause the policies to be created and initiated. Just as education adapts, grows, and changes over time; school and district policies need to grow, adapt, and change as well. Educators willing to pioneer new pedagogies through documenting opportunities must be willing to advocate for their students and themselves by questioning outdated policies that do not support the now literacies.
An example of a change over time involves a 180-degree turn in Silvia’s mindset and one of her instructional practices. She remembers over a decade ago when she used to advise students to not share any personal glimpses of themselves online. Why? Potential college counselors and employers could search for them online by name, and they could not be accepted or hired if compromising information was found. Fast forward to the present. Silvia encourages all student and adult learners to share and amplify their learning as much as possible online. Her concern is no longer that college counselors and employers will find evidence of a learner online. On the contrary, her fear is they might not find anything at all.
A Guide to Documenting Learning Page 29
