An Approach to Self-directed, Personalized Professional Learning: An Example of the Edu Canvas

As the demands for more self-directed, personalized learning opportunities are being realized for students, we’ve long been on a quest to  provide the same sort of opportunities for teachers. 

Educators already engage in their own self-directed learning. The problem - they don’t get any credit for it. Instead, most educators can only get recertification hours towards their teaching license through the traditional means of sitting through (what are often) mandated workshops and lectures. Literally dubbed ‘seat hours’ this form of learning is often passive and completely dismisses the enormous amount of energy teachers put in to grow personally and professionally to best meet the needs of their students. 

Covid has highlighted just how much effort teachers exert to adapt to meet the changing demands of the classroom. When faced with challenges, teachers often seek timely, relevant ideas to help ensure their students are getting what they need. Inspiration is coming from a variety of new types of sources. Twitter chats, Voxer book studies, Clubhouse, Edcamps, education blogs, Facebook live events with experts are just a few of the more modern outlets making it easier for teachers to grow and learn from one another.

Our question - how can we ensure we’re helping teachers to get credit from this sort of self-directed learning?

As we’ve worked with teachers, we’ve noticed that one of the reasons teachers are unable to get credit for this sort of informal learning is because there’s no evidence of impact. We therefore wanted to create an organizer to help teachers to showcase the outcomes of their efforts. We believe that self-directed professional learning might do more to improve student outcomes than many traditional professional learning opportunities. Our goal is to help teachers demonstrate how they turn inspiration into projects that benefit their students. 

This led us to create the Educator Canvas - a one page organizer that showcases how teachers are turning ideas into action. This document is made up of a series of boxes - with guiding questions - that take teachers through a sort of modified design process. It’s a way to help them to turn new ideas and inspiration into action while simultaneously showcasing how they are taking new learnings and applying them to their practice. Not only is this personalized professional learning at its finest, it’s a tool to support classroom innovation (and therefore students).  

You might ask - what would this look like in action?

Example: let’s say you were having some behavior issues and you were looking for strategies that might best support your students. You discover a twitter chat on restorative justice that gives you some from fresh ideas. From there, you learn about a book on creating a culture of empathy using restorative justice and you decide to join a voxer book study as you go through the book. You tell your principal what you want to work on and ask if you can design a project around it for recertification hours. They agree. 

Using the Educator Canvas, you apply what you’re learning and begin to craft a project for your own classroom. The Canvas asks to think through the following:

Challenge: What problem are you trying to solve? What new opportunity are you hoping to provide for your students?

Example: How might I apply the principles of restorative justice to my classroom?

Solution: Can you clearly state what your project is and what you hope it will achieve?

Example: I would like to make mindfulness a normal part of our school day so that students learn to manage their emotions. 

Impact: Have you thought through your goals and the impact you hope this project will achieve? Does this project align with your educational philosophy?

Example: If this is successful, students would have learned strategies to deal with emotions like frustration and anger. If all goes well, I would hope to see less behavior issues arise and more open communication. One of my goals as a teacher is to equip students with the skills they’ll need for life. I believe mindfulness to be one such skill. 

Insights: Have you tapped into inspiration that can help you design and implement your project? Have you incorporated student voice?

Example: Taking what I’ve learned from my PLN and the book I’m reading on restorative justice, I plan on trying out some of the mindfulness tools they’ve suggested. Every Monday, I could take 10 minutes before we go to lunch to introduce my students to one new technique. I plan on presenting an overview of the project to them before we begin so they understand why we’re engaging in mindfulness. This would hopefully give my students a chance to give feedback so that I can incorporate their ideas. 

Logistics: Have you planned out your project? Are you organized?

Example: In my lesson planner I’ve listed out which techniques I will incorporate. I have one technique per week for the first eight weeks. As per resources, I have already downloaded or saved the directions needed to run each of these exercises. My next step is to engage my team in this work and see if any others would like to take part in this project. 

Execution: How will ensure follow through?

Example: I’ve set clear deadlines for how long I am going to do this project. If it’s not working in the first eight weeks I’ll know I need to tweak or try something else. It may be difficult to get some of my students to engage in this work so I’m wondering if I might try some sort of incentive or reward for successfully employing these techniques. Our school still has a lot of discipline techniques that I find outdated. I want to do more to bring others (my colleagues) in the conversation about restorative justice and I’m hoping this project will showcase its power. 

That’s it. It’s as simple as that. It’s an organized way for teachers to turn informal learning into something meaningful for students (and hopefully get credit along the way). The Educator Canvas essentially helps teachers to innovate by supporting them as they apply new ideas to improve teaching and learning. It’s a win-win for both teachers and students. Teachers get credit for implementing the ideas they believe hold value for their students, students win because learning gets improved. To us this is self-directed learning at its best. Doesn’t it deserve some credit?