If, as a school, we are interested in student-directed learning, how are we investigating, practicing, and modeling?  Our Faculty/Staff Leadership Team (FSLT) forwards the practice of learner-directed learning by having a Faculty Forum committee.  This committee is charged with organizing peer-to-peer professional development six times during the school year.  This is professional development done with faculty not “to” faculty.

This year the Faculty Forum leadership includes Erin Lindsey, Amanda Thomas, Marsha Harris, Stacey Goss, and Laura McRae. This amazing team chose to use Haiku, our learning management system, to model online learning resources. If we use Haiku, we must provide enough experience that our teachers can confidently use it with us.

During the sessions offered above, this team asked our faculty to complete a Google form on topics they wanted to learn and topics they were willing to teach.

As a team, we met as sifted through both lists.  Would we be able to find overlaps in what we wanted to learn and what we wanted to teach?

What we want to learn:

Armed with this information, we looked for match-up with what we want to teach:

We also intentionally planned sessions around our faculty work in assessment and reading.

Each faculty member that offered to teach what we wanted to learn was sent an email similar to mine.

Awesome! I cannot wait to see how the peer-to-peer (learner-directed) professional development offerings line up.

I wonder how often we ask our student-learners what they want to learn and what they want to teach their peers.  What if we used this idea in our classrooms with young learners? What if we risk and model this type of c0-learning with our students? It’s just one hour a few times a year.

What if we try?