M+Denney+notes

**Day 1 Reflections:**
This community of practice can be a very powerful thing! What if I thought of what I do in the classroom, not only as an opportunity to guide student learning and develop critical thinkers, but also as part of a larger effort to improve student learning? What would I change (or document differently) if I were thinking about how the challenges and positives could be shared with and improved by others? The difficulty is one of mindset--//my// classroom. Yes, I need to be conscious and conscientious of choices I make that impact the learning of my students. But am I more focused on being a good example of teaching strategies? (As in, am I showing off my ability to be a good student of what I am learning about--teaching?)

**Booth sessions—Reflection**
would be good to have some sort of guiding questions… How easy it is to come up with “action steps” that are general strategies, but that aren’t specific enough to easily do

Doesn’t everything have an interpretation component?

Most posters were high on information, low on either 1. specific strategies 2. or how the specific strategy accomplishes the goal

We had general action steps, but they weren’t very prescriptive. Booth thing is really effective for social learners

Or we discussed specific actions to accomplish our action steps, but wanted to generalize to make the poster a distillation of the process, so others could include other strategies—do students do this? Do they really understand specifics, but they want to make sure they don’t leave stuff out so they just give these really general answers?

And giving me specifics doesn’t necessarily tell me how it will look or work in my classroom. I need to take this information and the discussions and apply it to how I help students learn. (Maybe we shouldn’t be called teachers, we’re learning facilitators—but it’s more than that because we are supporting and scaffolding and modeling and guiding…. Maybe that was what the word teacher is supposed to encompass and it has been simplified in our culture to connote a conveyer of knowledge…)