Working groups provide opportunities for collaboration in between KPCEL meetings. They help us leverage the KPCEL professional learning community to develop our sense of purpose as formative character educators and scholars of human flourishing. Specifically, they foster dense and overlapping networks around shared points of concern and inquiry. Working groups do this by providing opportunities for collaborative learning in between KPCEL meetings. They support essential elements of formative education: living well and learning in community.
The Formative Leadership Education Project at Boston College will support KPCEL working groups by generating space for shared inquiry via canvas course sites, offering human resources and expertise through the facilitation of synchronous meetings (as requested or desired), and managing institutional support for collaborative in-person gatherings of working groups.
As a result of the 2022 KPCEL gathering, our KPCEL partners developed five calls for working group participation. The calls are below. Participation in a working group is encouraged, but not required. Once established each group will deliberate on learning principles, meeting times, and participation plans.
Working Group Calls
A. Service and character formation
NOT CURRENTLY IN SESSION
Problem:
We find ourselves in a day and age where community service is oftentimes commodified and instrumentalized. Motivated by obtaining an impressive “character” record for college applications, youngsters risk being out of touch with the true value of service. Acts of charity often make us feel good, but do little to improve our society; philanthropism is fraught with problems that stem from its colonial roots. Additionally, schools and school administrators may view “service learning” as an add-on or extra-curricular activity, as opposed to integral to the work of character formation.
How meaningful and impactful is “service learning” for the community and our students, and how can it reach potential? This working group is an opportunity to explore fundamental questions around formation through service and how service is connected to social justice, and to generate pathways by which administrators and educators might come to see value in service and practically implement it.
Questions to be addressed:
What does it mean to serve?
Why do we serve?
What does meaningful service look like?
What virtues might be cultivated through and for service?
How can we foster student agency and community agency symbiotically through service?
What ongoing pedagogical work do we need to do before, during and after our students serve?
How can we collectively maximize service learning for all stakeholders?
How can we ensure that service is conducted in a collaborative and culturally-responsive manner?
How might service become integral to education?
Facilitator:
Proposed meeting times for Fall 2022:
B. Pedagogies for character formation
Problem:
The search is on for pedagogies that promote holistic, formative education for human flourishing. Both novice and experienced educators are designing learning environments to advance character and human flourishing, but too often do so in isolation. The result is a lack of collective knowledge about curated methods and practices of formative character education that work. Join us in this community of pedagogical practice.
Questions to be addressed:
How do the practices embodied by experienced formative educators make their way into “research” or become a “best practice?”
How can experienced educators connect with innovative newcomers to advance formative character education?
What can we do to bridge the theory and practice divide in formative character education?
How does the research on virtue, character, formative, holistic, and civic education translate into practice? What does it look like in a K-12 classroom when done well?
What does it mean for pedagogy to work?
What can we learn from one another as we implement and share methods and practices of formative character education?
How can we collect and disseminate shared knowledge about pedagogy design for formative character education while remaining mindful of the diverse contexts that contour our practice?
Facilitator: Jolleen Wagner, jolleen@setonpartners.org
Proposed meeting times for Fall 2022:
C. Assessment for character formation
Problem:
The umbrella of formative education encompasses many dimensions, from specific (e.g. character education) to holistic (e.g. whole-person education). Assessing progress on the various dimensions of advancing formative education is essential, but poses myriad conceptual and operational challenges. Any assessment sheds light on certain aspects and obscures others. This working group - building from the discussion at the initial KPCEL convening - seeks to engage with these challenges iteratively and collaboratively. Initial goals of this working group are to inventory and share resources and to engage with one another to share knowledge (e.g., critical friends, assessment design). We envision creating a Canvas site that includes: (a) an online repository of resources; (b) a discussion board; and (c) a landing page for monthly synchronous meetings. We envision this working group to be flexible in structure, perhaps with smaller groups meeting additionally in order to workshop ideas.
Questions to be addressed:
How can our assessments lead to improvements in our pedagogies and our interventions?
How are different KPCEL members assessing formative education in different contexts and with different stakeholders?
What ethical questions are arising in our assessments?
How do we engage with the peculiarities of assessing formative education?
How do we baseline our understanding of character development, determine gaps and strengths, and assess growth over time?
When we look at academic data we look at achievement and growth. What are affordances / constraints of looking at these same things in character?
How do we control for competing virtues. (“I’m honest, except when…?”) And competing conceptions of virtue? (all contextual)
What is the relationship between formation and community flourishing?
How do we develop assessments for varied contexts? How do we learn from one another but adapt to our context?
Facilitators:
Proposed meeting times for Fall 2022:
D. Whole person education: flourishing across the age continuum
Problem:
As we engage in formative character education, it is important for us to recognize, value, and engage with people as whole beings, leading us to consider “whole-person education.” Although educating the whole person is not a new concept, it is antithetical to some teachers' experiences of fragmentation during their own educational experiences. If we hope to break this cycle, higher education must model new possibilities in teaching and valuing the whole person. This working group will grapple with how the whole person can flourish in higher education spaces, and what outcomes this may have on the educational system as a whole.
Questions to be addressed:
What does it mean to educate the whole person?
How can we engage in whole-person education?
Why is engaging with the whole person an important goal for education?
Facilitator:
Sonya Hayes, shayes22@utk.edu
Ruth Barratt, barratt@msoe.edu
Canvas site, only registered participants will be able to log in.
E. Reflection and Contemplation in Formative Leadership Education
Problem:
The importance of reflection and dialogue is well-established in the literature on adult learning. Jarvis (1987, 2001) defines reflective learning as the practice of planning, monitoring, and reflecting upon experiences. Brookfield (1995, 2000) points to critical reflection as a cardinal function of adult education. Freire (1970), Daloz (1999), Mezirow (2000), and Blum-DeStefano (2018) all stress the importance of dialogue, of collegial conversation, in sparking reflective, transformative learning.
At the same time, there is the risk that reflective writing and dialogue will become just one more “thing to do” on the list of a busy educational leader. And there may be some forms of reflection—or perhaps here the word contemplation suggests an important difference—that require not active dialogue but some degree of solitude, silence, and stillness. The great critic of our modern, instrumentalist culture of overwork, Josef Pieper (1998), reminds us of the Medieval distinction between ratio and intellectus. “Ratio,” Pieper (p. 11) writes “is the power of discursive thought, of searching and researching, abstracting, refining, and concluding [cf. Latin dis-currere, ‘to run to and fro’].” In intellectus, by contrast, the mind engages in a still and receptive “listening-in to the being of things” (Pieper, p. 11).
This working group is an opportunity to explore the nature and role of reflection in leadership education.
Questions to be addressed:
What are the differences between different forms of reflection?
Is reflection-in-action enough or is there a need to “slow down” and “step back”?
How do contemplative practices contribute to our formation?
How do dialogical interaction and inwardness both contribute to self-knowledge? Is contemplation individualistic and isolating? How might contemplative knowing be supported by and supportive of community?
What experiences could inspire leaders to cultivate contemplative forms of knowing? And how do we support leaders to make time for reflective practice?
When is a problem-solving mode the correct response to a difficult situation and when is it an expression of a need for distraction? What do we do when stilling the mind produces not an openness to reality but a flood of regrets and obsessive worries?
Facilitator:
Scott Parsons, scott.parsons@westpoint.edu
Proposed meeting times for Fall 2022:
Works Cited
Brookfield, S. (1995) Becoming a critically reflective teacher. Jossey-Bass.
Brookfield, S. (2000) ‘Transformative learning as ideology critique. in Mezirow, J. (ed), Learning as transformation: Critical perspectives on a theory in progress’, Jossey-Bass, pp. 125-148.
Daloz, L. (1999). Mentor: Guiding the journey of adult learners 2nd edition. Jossey-Bass.
Drago-Severson, E. & Blum-DeSefano, J. (2018) Leading change together: Developing educator capacity within schools and systems. Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.
Freire, P. (1970/2000) Pedagogy of the oppressed 20th anniversary edition. Continuum.
Jarvis, P. (1987) Adult learning in the social context. Croom Helm.
Jarvis, P. (2001) Learning in later life: An introduction for educators and careers. Kogan Page.
Mezirow, J. (2000) ‘Learning to think like an adult: Core concepts of transformation theory’, in Mezirow, J. (ed) Learning as transformation: Critical perspectives on a theory in progress, Jossey-Bass, pp. 3-33.
Pieper, J. (1998). Leisure, the Basis of Culture (G. Malsbary, Trans.). In Leisure: The Basis of Culture (pp. 3-62). St. Augustine's Press. (1948)