Mission Statement
To impart competence and confidence to learners by invisibly frontloading design and support for meaningful learning experiences, thus setting the ground for facilitated, decentralized, democratic, & impactful inquiry.
To make the value and power of this learning visible to stakeholders by fostering alliances that build student, teacher, system, and community growth through learner agency at all levels.
My Instructional Base
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Agile Teaching & Learning
The agile mindset is an increasingly attractive concept to help define the adaptive posture that more and more observers comprise the base for effectively responding to challenges in the present while building for the future. We are starting to realize that the capacity to respond dynamically has more value than static expertise.
When applies to teaching and learning, agility should be defined within specific personal contexts. My 4 elements distinguish between what I refer to as natural agility and complex agility. Both look instinctive and simple to a casual observer, but natural agility is usually an example of “unconscious competence:” natural talent of which a less experienced teacher may not be fully aware. Complex agility is an aspect of reflective competence where the teacher’s instinctive reactions are deceptively simple, resulting from years of practice, training, and revision. Natural agility creates success in the classroom, but complex agility is required for system-level success.
One of the most important tasks of educators posessing complex agility is instinctively recognizing when students and teachers display natural agility and when they don’t. This is an essential diagnosis because while some people “just get it,” every learner with a skilled guide can find it, learn to accept it, and build on it from there.
Modern Learning Lab 