Empowering Leader

In the week after I created this destination postcard, I realized that this initiative was one my teaching team could undertake in the course of our daily work, as it is an issue we all would like to address. I wanted my change project to broader and farther-teaching than this.

In a previous UVM course, I pitched the idea that all the teachers in my school should be trained in the methods of ethnographic inquiry, including interviewing, using video and audio recording devices, and editing with digital storytelling tools. The idea was that place-based learning, technology, and interview concepts all have their place in any teacher’s classroom. I built my argument using logic, with the hope that it would be enough to persuade all teachers to agree (though I didn’t actually pitch it at my school). Having read through most of Switch by Chip and Dan Heath, I feel there are a few more strategies I could have used.

More than anything, my initiative is about “rallying the herd”. In 2016, a fellow teacher told me they were taking a summer course on the topic of “ethnography” with the Vermont Folklife Center. I wasn’t sure what ethnography was, but it sounded interesting, so I signed up for the course. After completing the course, I created an ethnography unit for my social studies curriculum as a new teacher at Harwood Middle School, and taught it by myself. The summer after that, during the Middle Grades Institute in Burlington, I convinced my team English teacher to teach the unit with me in an interdisciplinary fashion. We re-built the unit as our action research project, integrating the three pillars of Act 77, and taught it in the fall of 2017. The unit concluded with a community “Celebration of Learning”, where students got the chance to share their projects with each other, parents, teachers, the superintendent, and other community members. We both found that this unit was successful in increasing both engagement and personalization and presented it at the Middle Grades Conference in January 2018. The feedback we received from other educators was positive, with many requesting we send them our materials.

I realize now that the process I’m describing is “rallying the herd”, a process which was started by the Folklife Center, then continued by me and my team teacher. Switch says that “behavior is contagious”. “We all talk about the power of peer pressure, but “pressure” may be overstating the case. Peer perception is plenty” (p. 227). As part of our presentation at the conference, we shared samples of our students’ work. Afterward, a teacher asked us if these samples were randomly chosen, or if we chose the best ones. Of course, we chose the best ones as a way to demonstrate the success of the unit. Many students did not reach this high level of success. I wouldn’t say we oversold the unit, put perception is key.

If we wanted to make a real change in our school, I think we would start by giving a similar presentation to our fellow middle school teachers. Since we have access to the same technology resources, we could brainstorm the best ways to meaningfully integrate the methods of ethnography into our curriculum.