Professional Learning
Building a Blended Blackstone Valley Prep
Carina Sitkus
Blackstone Valley Prep Mayoral Academy
in Rhode Island
Topics
Educators are the lead learners in schools. If they are to enable powerful, authentic, deep learning among their students, they need to live that kind of learning and professional culture themselves. When everyone is part of that experiential through-line, that’s when next generation learning thrives.
After attending the NGLC Summer Institute for grant awardees, our heads are swimming with words like change management, short cycle innovation and multi-classroom leadership.
After attending the NGLC Summer Institute for grant awardees, our heads are swimming with words like change management, short cycle innovation and multi-classroom leadership.
Truly nothing can be more exciting than going to a conference thinking you might know a thing or two about how to serve (y)our students best—and leaving with the knowledge that you can do infinitely better. Did I say exciting? It is. It’s also terrifying. We realize that so many of the elements of our current success will need to be wholly adapted for the Next Generation world. What will stay constant is our firm belief in the ability of all young people.
This summer institute allowed us to not only continue planning for our Next Generation high school, but also gifted us with the ability to begin thinking creatively about the multiplication of our impact both through technology and smart-thinking about talent deployment (e.g. scheduling and staffing).
It helped us begin speaking the language that Next Generation educators use—complimenting, for instance, project-based learning with the more student-driven design-thinking (shout out to our friends from Idea High School who articulated this so well).
This language allows us to transcend the impossible (yes, it’s possible) and “blow-up” what works ten-fold to maximize teacher impact and reach more students. In& education we say “our kids” to refer to the students we serve. Blended learning allows us to imagine a world where “our kids” means all kids—from California to Rhode Island and back.
Finally, this mentality can help create the type of community that was so evident this past week in San Francisco—a community in which teachers work together because the above is true and all kids deserve a great teacher and a first-class (breakthrough) school.
Thank you to all who shared time/tweets/ideas/feedback with us (@j_santossilva and @carinasitkus) this past week—we learned tons and can’t wait to learn more from your incredible journeys ahead.
We look forward to sharing ours as well on Twitter, facebook, and our blog.
Carina Sitkus
Blackstone Valley Prep Mayoral Academy
Carina Sitkus is the External Affairs Associate at Blackstone Valley Prep Mayoral Academy.
