It’s the funniest thing…Up until this Faculty Staff Forum, the course offerings and the sign-ups have been offered through the Trinity School Faculty Staff Forums website.  Since this is an experiment, we chose to build capacity through visual communication in a common space.  This worked great for the first step of asking I want to learn… and I can teach…, but our community expected to sign-up using the website.  This is a point of growth for our team.  We are excited that our community is asking for the use of technology.

At 12:30, six sessions are offered and three are filled.  The learners available for the 12:30 time slot registered for All About Dyslexia, Power Writing, and The Kinesthetic Classroom.

At 3:30, eleven sessions are offered.  We are not sure how many sessions will run on Wednesday afternoon.  Several of the sessions had 1-5 community members sign-up.  We’ve decided to take this as an opportunity for communication and collaboration.  We want the facilitator and the potential attendees to decide together if the session will run.  After all, this plan is about learner choice, right?  The sessions that we know will take place include: The Kinesthetic Classroom, Making iMovies on iPads, Teach the World to Sing, Technology Smack Down, Power Writing, Using Fun Review Games, Using Primary Resources,  and Using Strategy Groups during CAFE Reading. 

There is a another side to this experiment.  We have fielded several complaints – good complaints.  We’ve been told that there is not enough time to attend all of these sessions. We’ve been told that facilitators hoped their session would not make because there were sessions they wanted to attend.  It is a good day when the complaints concern not having enough time to learn from and with each other.

My favorite feedback comes from Jenny McIntosh.  She writes:

I would love to take every single one of these classes.  As far as I’m concerned, these are the best offerings we’ve ever had.

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The experiment is working in many positive ways.

We have removed the sign-up sheets from the board and have given them to the individual facilitators.  Each facilitator has been asked to email their participants with any pertinent information for their learning session.

From: Molly Flavin
Date: Monday, February 25, 2013 4:17 PM
To: All Trinity
Subject: Wednesday Workshop 2/27/13

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Hello All,

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Tomorrow you will be getting information from your instructor regarding your Wednesday class.  If you did not sign up, please see Jill.  If you have any questions, feel free to email me, Erin, Laurette, or Jill.  Thank you!

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Molly

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In my next post, I’ll offer some of the emails from facilitators to the learners to share the richness of the learning experiences planned for our community by our community.