Student Centered Learning, Professional Learning Communities and the Collaboration Curve

These are notes I prepared for the Summer School TA and Faculty Orientation that happened today.

Orientation talk June 12, 2009

This morning I am thrilled to welcome you, the faculty, staff and teaching aides to the 2009 Academy summer program.

There are a number of things that are really special about the summer school program, one of them is the working community that exists. In the room right now we are teachers, staff and teaching aides. Each of you has a unique and important role in providing exceptional educational experiences to the students in summer school. Some of you have been teaching for decades, and some of you are still in high school yourselves. What we bring to our classrooms this summer is a diversity of knowledge and world views, that bridge the divides of several generations. Each of you have something essential to contribute to the education of our students this summer and each of you is an equally valued professional.

I thank you, on behalf of the students, for being here.

This morning I am going to try to weave together three things that I have been thinking about a good deal this past year:

Student Centered Learning
Professional Learning Communities
Collaboration Curve

I Hope that I can make some sense of them all and encourage you to think about our work this summer (and perhaps beyond) in a helpful way.

This is an amazing place to work both during the year and in the summer time. In the academy we hope that our classrooms evidence student centered instruction, meaning the students take responsibility for their learning and their voice and inquiry is the driving force behind the pace of the class.


In a student centered class, teachers model learning and become part of a group of learners, more like a expert learner or mentor than traditional models of teachers-student power in which the teacher is all powerful and all- knowing and the student is the passive sponge of the information that the teacher communicates. In a student or learner centered classroom, students are active, they have control of their learning and they have choices about how and what they learn.

In a student centered classroom, learners are placed at the heart of the learning process and they are able to learn what is relevant and has meaning for them in ways that are appropriate.

As a teacher, this is exciting to me, and scary. To relinquish "control" of the classroom can sometimes be terrifying. To create an activity or assessment in which I don't know what the students will come up with is something of a leap of faith. Also, if, as a teacher, I acknowledge that I would like to meet each student where they are, I am taking on a huge responsibility in that students are at so many different places, and they all learn in a variety of different ways.


Many of our students know why types of learners they are and will advocate for themselves. Perhaps not as transparently as this child, but it happens. It is awesome that our students are embracing their multiple intelligences. Now it is our job to do our best to meet them where they are and pick them up from there. If we agree that we aspire towards a student centered curriculum, then we need to reach out and figure out how to make that work for EACH and EVERY student.

In this room we are all educators, at varying stages or our careers and we represent just about every type of learner. Our collective knowledge knows how to best support nearly every student that will work in our classes this summer. Together, we can figure out how to meet the needs of each and every student.

(Professional LEARNING Communities SLIDE)

Here is where the Professional Learning Community comes in. This term has been a buzz word in education for decades now. Research has shown that schools improve and teachers feel better about their work when they feel that they are part of a group, have a voice in the direction of the school and are working collaboratively towards common goals. Research is unequivocal that Professional Learning Communities improve schools.

In the summer school, our chances for casual conversations about our work are reduced because we are all in class, one class, for the bulk of our working day. We don't pass in and out of offices as often as in the regular school year and we don't tend to linger over lunches as frequently. In order to increase the frequency of these conversations and collaboration, we have set up an opportunity for us to communicate and initiate conversations electronically using a web service called yammer.

In a sense we are going to force an on-line professional learning community. Participation is voluntary, but I encourage you to at least check in and see what is being said. Some of you have gotten emails about this from me. Anyone with a school account can join, so if you are a visiting faculty member, you will have to wait to get your account from IT.

Yammer is a micro-blogging service similar to twitter. The major difference between twitter and yammer is that with yammer, you have to have a school mail to access the discussion. Within the school site I have started a thread, or group called Academy Summer School.
Here, if you choose, we can have a place to share what is going on in our classes this summer, what we are trying, what we are struggling with, what is working well.

The prompt that yammer provides is "What are you working on?" You can also use this forum to ask questions about teaching and learning of others in the community. I am hoping that using this tool will initiate conversations and collaboration. Maybe someone will post that they are having debates in class and another class might challenge that class to a debate on a topic that crosses curriculum. Or maybe the printmaking class and their new eco-friendly printing methods would provide an interesting exploration for chemistry class. I don't know. . . that is the great thing about this.


I have gotten pretty hooked on Twitter this year and have built a Professional Learning Community which includes members of this community, but also people from all over the world. I learn so much from these educators every day through personal insights, links they share and discussions initiated in blogs and other forms of communication.

Which brings me to my final topic here today, the collaboration curve.

In early April three businessmen and authors who specialize on the intersection of technology and business coined the phrase "Collaboration Curve". They begin their explanation of this idea by reminding the readers of the network effect which is a common theme in technology and business. The idea is that some things, like fax machines, become more valuable the more people that have them.


If you have a fax machine but no one else does, you can't use the tool to its full potential because you can't fax stuff to anyone. But as the network grows, with each additional machine, the value of that tool increases.

They then ask the reader to imagine that with the addition of each new fax machine to the network, all the existing fax machines don't just become more valuable, but become BETTER at what they do-- the papers don't jam, the transmissions always go through. etc. .. Problem is, machines don't work like that, yet.

But, the authors remind us, people and institutions do. People gain knowledge and learn when there are more voices in a conversation, more faxes on the network if you will. The power of this fact is the collaboration curve.


Sometimes as teachers, particularly in the summer school set up, we can be an island. It can be hard engage in a value building network, to collaborate.


To demonstrate the power of the collaboration curve , the authors describe the online role-playing game World of Warcraft (WoW) which has more than 11.5 million users worldwide.

Apparently you gain points, or status in this game in a currency know as experience points for managing challenging situations

In around 150 hours of game play one generally earns the first 2 million experience points But even as the game gets more difficult, after this point, most in the next 150 hours of game time the "average" user will earn another 8 million experience points. So even with more challenges they develop experience 4 times faster than when they started.

They do this through what we could imagine as a Professional Learning Community for gamers. The authors describe a "wide and deep knowledge economy" which supports these gamers: a "broad set of of discussion forums, wikis, databases, and instructional videos that exist outside the game"

These tools allow the users to share, collaborate and learn from each other about how to conquer challenges in this on-line role playing game and their collective knowledge makes them much more successful much more quickly than if they went at it alone.

The is the Collaboration Curve-- it is a steep learning curve based on the leveraging of networks of knowledge in learning communities. As more participants are engaged in the conversation, value is created in each voice. The knowledge economy is developed. The idea that we are greater than the sum of our parts is not new, but this notion directly related to dramatic increase in performance has hugely positive implications for us as educators.


So this summer we are going to see what value we can add to our work by increasing the avenues for communication within this community. Not to compare the academy summer session to World of Warcraft, but, like the gamers, we all have a common goal. Our goal is to meet the needs of all our different students,


and all the ways that they learn,


in student centered environments.


And we are going to do our best to do that by using the tools that we have and also leveraging this professional learning community here on campus, and beyond. The suggestion, and hope, is that the more we participate in these discussions, and share and collaborate, the more we will learn from each other, and the better educators we will become.


Ideally, we will use professional learning communities and the power of the collaboration curve to make the most out of our learner-centered environments to do the best we can for our students.


I look forward to these discussions.