Connected Learning

I am very excited to share my final make! ED677 has been a great learning experience for me, and I have been fortunate enough to find a plethora of ways connected learning principles can and should play into my work as an educator.

My final make is a semester-long, leadership development program for college students called Connecting for Community Impact.

From the linked document, this is a description of the program:

Using the connected learning principles, this semester-long workshop series encourages students to discover their strengths as leaders and utilize them to do meaningful work in their community. Beginning with leadership and interest inventories, students will learn to be more cognizant of the ways that they lead and what they are passionate about. After learning valuable communication and collaboration skills students will begin a long-term project to develop their skills in a cause that matters to them. This is meant to be a workshop series for people in any stage of their leadership journey - whether they know nothing about their leadership style or they are experienced community leaders.

The linked document also includes a schedule for the series, which includes 7 meetings/workshops for the students involved. There are also learning outcomes and a more in-depth outline which includes activities that could be done at each meeting. This is meant to be a little vague because each facilitator will have a different group of students with different interests and experience levels, so it is meant to be adaptable depending on the needs of the group.

As I was creating the curriculum for this program, I was able to pull together my knowledge of leadership training and development (my passion) and the connected learning principles (super interesting). I found that the two things complemented each other almost seamlessly, and I couldn’t believe I’ve never come across a leadership program that intentionally uses these principles. Below is each connected learning principle and how I infused them into my final make. They are ordered by the degree to which I feel they are incorporated into the program I created.

Interest-powered: The core of this program is allowing students a space to find and develop their own interests. The first few meetings of the program have students brainstorm things they are passionate about, take interest and career inventories, and discuss ideas with their peers. This is all done so that students are able to discover an area that they are truly interested in. The project allows them to further knowledge and skills related to this area that can help inform a later career choice.

Peer-supported: This program was intentionally designed to have multiple opportunities for peer support and relationships. Small group discussions and brainstorming are used in almost every group meeting. Additionally, accountability partners are a main feature of the program. The facilitator will choose a partner for each person to work with throughout the semester. Each pair will be responsible for helping one another through challenges, offering ideas, and providing encouragement. They will hold one another accountable for meeting goals and working through the long-term project.

Production centered: Another facet of the program is the project that is infused throughout. This is meant to make the experience extremely production centered for the students. They are working to create community-focused projects that will have a positive impact. By working on this project, they develop transferable skills that will benefit them throughout their lives while also finding what they are interested in through a project-based approach.

Openly networked: This project is meant to be openly networked in the way that it encourages students to connect with members of the community to help them complete their projects. This is meant to have them meet and form relationships with people outside of the school, and particularly people who are in their field of interest.

Shared purpose: There is a shared purpose among the students and professionals who work within the program. The basis of the program is to develop leadership skills which are valuable to any person. Beyond that, the program encourages everyone involved to truly understand the importance of contributing to their community. Ideally, everyone in the program would have a shared purpose of making a positive impact on the community and becoming better leaders for their community as well.

Academically oriented: As it is meant to be hosted by an educational institution, the program uses a learning and development approach, meaning that we do not expect the students to know everything, but instead set goals for themselves. Students may or may not want to explore a project that pertains to their area of academic study, and that is okay, it remains academically oriented in the way students are encouraged to set goals for themselves and direct their own learning.

Please feel free to explore the document for my final make! It is a Google Doc, so that if I want to make any enhancements to it in the future, it will automatically apply to this post. The document holds a lot of useful tools, even if you don’t want to fully implement the program, such as links to leadership style questionnaires, interest surveys, suggested reading, and other resources related to connected learning in this context.

So I have had the opportunity to work on Flipgrid Consultancies over the last few weeks! This was a very interesting experience for me, as it was the first time I’ve done a Flipgrid (or anything like it really). It kinda reminds me of a video version of a discussion board.

Overall, I really enjoyed the experience of doing the consultancies over a Flipgrid. I think it was a little easier for me to get my thoughts across, both about my project and my suggestions for my group mates, using a video format. Additionally, it helped me feel a little more connected to my classmates than I would just typing to them over a discussion board or even via our blogs that we use for class.

I also just really liked the guided consultancy experience. I feel that I gained some super helpful tips, knowledge, and tricks to help me think more critically about my final project as we move into our final week of the course. I hope my groupmates (and everyone else in ED677) feel that they got as useful information as I did. 

For my final make, I think I want to begin to develop a leadership curriculum using connected learning principles. I also want to infuse aspects that will help to develop resilience (my inquiry question asked how connected learning could help develop resilience). 

This project is really meaningful for me, especially at this point as I will be starting in the leadership office at UConn in June. This could possibly be a program/curriculum that I could implement during my time at UConn.

Right now, I am thinking an outline for a semester long series. It would begin with students learning more about themselves and what type of leader they are, what their interests and passions are, and how they can use those interests and passions in the real world. I see the program ending with a culminating project in which students will do something to help their local community. Preferably in the community extending beyond their university. 

Some challenges I foresee:

-Fostering community partnerships can be difficult logistically, but students will most likely need support in finding areas of the community to work with for their final projects. 

-Some students might have passions and interests, but not understand how to transfer them into a meaningful project to benefit their community. This could pose a challenge, but it would be exciting to brainstorm ideas with students or share resources.  

Today’s find is all about empathy:

1. This is an interesting read which poses the question, should we develop empathy in higher education settings? It presents interesting points. For example, in the most selective universities economically advantaged students out number economically disadvantaged students 25:1. Does this make it harder for more advantaged students to empathize?

2. This resource describes the value of empathy as it relates to school culture and community. It provides steps schools can follow to foster empathy building, the first one being modeling (which I find to be crucial). It also poses realistic barriers to consider when doing this work. 

3. This is a book that I’ve worked with a little bit in my line of work. It is a leadership based text to teach emotional intelligence to college students. I have used it to help develop leadership programming, and I have partaken in workshops based on these ideas. It definitely ties in well to empathy and ways to teach and learn it. 

4. This resource, from Virginia Commonwealth University, provides 5 ways to incorporate empathy building into the classroom, using experiential learning and reflection as tools.

5. This guide is geared more towards traditional classroom settings, so I think it may be more helpful to some of my ED677 peers. It provides real activities that you can use to tie empathy building into already existing lessons and curriculum. I also see ways they could be adapted for use in a higher education setting.

I really enjoyed the opportunity to work on a document with all of my ED677 peers. I know we have all been posting to our blogs and looking at each others thoughts and ideas, but there is something really cool about actually working on the same thing, towards a common end goal or purpose, if you will. Additionally, it was really neat to see how we have all come to conceptualize these two ideas, equity and connected learning, in so many ways. While we each conceptualized these topic(s) in slightly different ways, you are able to see common themes woven throughout. 

I think it will be really cool to share this online because others will be able to see what equity and connected learning are, how they interact with one another, and how these ideas can be understood and applied in different ways depending on individual interests, experiences, and professional/personal values.

The context that I have decided to explore this week is... 

Higher Education

1. This is a cool video that explore connected learning in a higher education context. 

2. I picked up this book, Sustainability on Campus, from the library by accident a couple months ago (I thought it was about something different). But, it turns out it’s actually really relevant to this course. It’s about how students, faculty, staff, administration, and community members worked towards the common purpose of increased sustainability. 

3. This is a link about a webinar that took place a while back. The description mentions discussing ways to infuse connected learning practices in college. Mimi Ito was on the webinar too, which is pretty cool, because we’ve explored quite a bit of her work for this course. 

4. There is one particular part of this ‘About Connected Learning’ page that caught my attention this week. The relationship graphic mentions that relationships help students persist through challenges and setbacks. This relates really closely to my inquiry question.

I decided to structure my map as a word cloud, with the most salient parts of my learning journey the biggest. I intentionally made the largest part of my map the word “mentors” because I feel as though my mentors have been my biggest influence throughout my journey of K-12 and college education. Whether they be teachers/professors, coaches, administrators, or supervisors they have all shaped, encouraged, and inspired me to work towards who I am today. 

Another huge thing during my learning journey has been experiential learning. I highlighted this especially through my study abroad experiences, an internship I did last semester, but also my extracurricular in orientation and presenting workshops. These experiences have been so valuable in helping me learn more about myself and my interests. Additionally, they have forced me to take risks and try new things in collaborative, challenging, and supportive environments. They have helped me discover what I am good at and what I want to pursue in the future. I also feel as though my experiential learning opportunities have been the most meaningful educational experiences I have had because they really had a true purpose and meant something to me and the people I was working with. 

Very sad I missed my classic (and favorite) Find 5 Friday this week. Unfortunately I have been bed ridden with an awful bout of the flu for the past 3 days and now I’m playing a game of Sunday Catch-Up.

Anyway, I’m excited about this week’s theme of Shared Purpose because this is something that we explore a lot in leadership development settings and I have a few cool resources and ideas to share!

1. Start With Why by Simon Sinek is a book based around inspirational leadership. How do we inspire others to do their best work? He introduced the golden circle which places the “why” or purpose in the center of the leadership model. Unfortunately, I haven't read the entire book, but I’ve heard great things so I definitely want to in the near future. 

2. I recently attended a leadership workshop about common purpose, and the facilitator highlighted the success of the company Apple. They mentioned that Apple has become the most valuable company of our time because of the way they brand themselves on a common purpose and vision that their leadership, employees, and consumers believe in. It makes them successful because people stay invested and keep coming back for more. Here is Apple’s vision statement:

“We believe that we are on the face of the earth to make great products and that’s not changing. We are constantly focusing on innovating. We believe in the simple not the complex. We believe that we need to own and control the primary technologies behind the products that we make, and participate only in markets where we can make a significant contribution. We believe in saying no to thousands of projects, so that we can really focus on the few that are truly important and meaningful to us. We believe in deep collaboration and cross-pollination of our groups, which allow us to innovate in a way that others cannot. And frankly, we don’t settle for anything less than excellence in every group in the company, and we have the self- honesty to admit when we’re wrong and the courage to change. And I think regardless of who is in what job those values are so embedded in this company that Apple will do extremely well.” 

3. This may seem silly, but all throughout my younger years when I spent a lot of my time doing cheerleading, I always felt very invested and as though my team had a sense of shared purpose around our work. We always knew we had to show up and never give up because we were all working towards the same end goal and we were relying on eachother. We cheered for one another, cried with one another, caught one another when we fell, and we were constantly striving for an end goal which consisted of performing better than we had the time before. We always said practice makes “permanent” NOT perfect. I feel like that is a time I felt really connected to what I was doing in a group with a shared purpose. 

4. This is a group of fifth graders who came together with the shared purpose of collecting enough bottle caps for their school to get a recycled bench, but they ended up being so committed and doing so well they collected enough to get a picnic table and a bench! I also love this video because it’s only the students talking, so you can really see how much ownership they feel over their project.

Passion, Drive, and Equity in Meaningful Work

I have found that interests play a huge role in my learning. I do my best, most in-depth learning when I am genuinely invested and interested in what I am learning. As I mentioned in a previous post, I am very passionate about the field of education. This is a field I am extremely interested in and I recognize there is almost more to learn. Not only do I recognize this, but I thirst to gain new knowledge about the field. I feel as though because I am passionate about what I am learning, it feels much more purposeful. When I learn something new, I feel like I am that much closer to changing the world. All students, younger and older should have the opportunity to feel this drive to learn and be successful!

Interest-driven learning feels purposeful, and so does production-centered learning. Honestly, I see these two things going hand-in-hand. Learning environments should provide an opportunity for students to produce meaningful work centered around their interests. For example, I had an amazing experience just last semester here at Arcadia. I was able to complete my required internship in Student Life at Montgomery County Community College. As I have alluded to in many of my previous blog posts, I am very excited to pursue a future career in Higher Education & Student Affairs so this was an amazing opportunity for me. In addition, I took a course along with my internship experience in which we had to find an area at our internship site that needed to be enhanced or improved upon. We were tasked with doing extensive research to create a proposal of a program that would help to alleviate the issue we observed or enhance an area of the site’s operation. After all was said and done with the proposal, we also created a mock grant application to ‘fund’ our programs. This is one of the most meaningful projects I have ever done. Why? Because I was genuinely interested and I created something that mattered. In the end, despite that it was a mock project for my class, I was excited to give my 23 page proposal to my site director at the conclusion of the experience. I hope they will apply my recommendations to their office.

Obviously, this is not something that would be super engaging and meaningful for everyone, but for me, this is a learning experience I know I will never forget and it resembles the values of connected learning, production-centered learning, and interest-driven learning etc.

To my future professors:

I found out 3 days ago that I was admitted into your program! Words cannot describe how excited I am to be part of this Higher Education Student Affairs Master’s program. I am so excited to learn alongside amazing faculty scholars and peers! As I prepare to begin my degree there in the fall, I think there are a few things you should know about me and my interests and passions within the field.

When I began my undergraduate degree almost 4 years ago, I thought I was going to be a doctor. I had thought that since I was a young child, and I continued to think that was my career path until the first semester of my sophomore year. This was the year I realized that I was not putting the effort in to my coursework that I should, and that Biology was not a field of study that I was invested in and passionate about. After some soul-searching and guidance from my incredible mentors in student activities, I decided to change my major to education. I look back on this decision as being one of the most important and life-changing decisions I have ever made. I am so passionate about and invested in my coursework. I have realized that education, but higher education in particular, has had such a positive impact on my life. I know I want to be able to give back to this field.

Fast forward to senior year, completing 2 theses/capstone projects, while applying to graduate school and completing interviews. I thought I didn't stand a chance. I guess you all saw something in me when you invited me to travel to campus for an interview and eventually decided to offer me admission into a program which had less than 20 openings for the incoming class. It still doesn’t feel real.

You are all doing such amazing research, and I am looking forward to learning and completing my own research to advance the field of higher education to a place of increased access and equity. I’m also a huge advocate for experiential learning, and I am so excited to be in a program with such a strong focus on theory-to-practice. 

I am incredibly passionate, and I cannot wait to put every ounce of effort into my work during my two years in this nationally-recognized program.

Thank you for seeing my passion and potential, and thank you in advance for playing a part in me becoming the professional I strive to be in the future. I am so excited to get to know you over the next few years.

With all of my excitement,

Alexis

This world is lucky to have some really, really amazing youth making a difference in their communities and spreading some positivity!!

March for Our Lives - Check out these amazing youth and this incredibly successful movement they have started! I am inspired by their meaningful work.

Kid President - Although this a little old I think he is awesome. I especially love this video because its about awesome girls, and today is international womens day. Yay!

SUBOG @ the University of Connecticut - This is an incredible group of student leaders who completely oversee programming for the undergraduate population at their school (over 20,000 students!!), and they are full time students themselves. I am in awe of them.

Grace Vanderwaal is a singer/songwriter who won America’s Got Talent when she was only 12 years old!! She is incredibly talented, grounded, and she writes her own music. I have been a huge fan since she was on America’s Got Talent 3 years ago.

Since I am not a practicing teacher I have been working to identify my wobbles that I face as a student, future professional, and leader. One of my main wobbles I am noticing is that I am not great at dealing with conflict. I have taken note of this on a few occasions in the last week whether it be my careful interactions with my friends and family or questions in interviews that ask me to describe a time I dealt with conflict. Overall, I have found that I am a true conflict avoider. I think that sometimes this is a good thing, but other times conflict cannot be avoided, so I am exploring ways to develop this skill. It’s tough though!

Thinking about my inquiry, I used the loop writing technique when our class met last week and it brought me to a very interesting up-and-coming inquiry question that I’m feeling pretty jazzed about. I started off writing about things I am excited and passionate about and breaking down why I am passionate about them. Loop writing is a peculiar thing, though and I ended up somehow reaching the topic of resilience. I’m really not sure how that popped into my head, but it did and I am very excited about looking into this as an area of inquiry with which to base my final assignment for ED677. I shared some resources that I have been playing around with in my Find 5, but overall this inquiry is still in the beginning stages. The question I want to explore is: ‘How can connected learning be used to teach and/or enhance resilience in college students?”

This week’s focus related to my budding inquiry is..

Resilience

Here we go...

First, let’s define resilience. Resilience is an ability to recover from or adjust easily to misfortune or change, according to Merriam-Webster.

Next, this page explains Why Resilience Matters, particularly for college students (which is my population of interest for my inquiry).

In my next find, Peter Gray, PhD explores Declining Student Resilience. This article is really interesting because it mentions quite a bit that students in this day and age are super uncomfortable with mistakes and failures, but in fact I have found these are often the best ways to learn.

This article suggests 5 Ways to Promote Resilience in the Classroom. I feel like this is important to include because it offers usable strategies for teachers that I feel can be applied across all levels of education. 

It’s Friday... you know what that means!

Here’s what I have for this week with a focus on P/W/F and supportive communities:

Stirring Up Justice: Writing and Reading to Change the World - this was a source presented in “What it Means to Pose, Wobble, and Flow.” The title sounded interesting to me, so I decided to read the abstract/summary of it and it sounds very interesting. The idea that using skills such as reading and writing as a foundation to make positive changed is something that I feel is overlooked. While this isn’t a person to connect with and help me when I wobble, finding sources and books that people write which challenge my thinking really inspire me to continuously learn and grow through the wobble. 

NOT about an endpoint! I loved this important idea presented in What it Means to Pose, Wobble, Flow. There is no endpoint in any realm of professional development, especially in any profession that deals with people! There is always going to be changes, new personalities, and things to learn. Sometimes we might be able to face the wobble before it even happens to us by working with our networks which leads me to..

I really loved Jullette’s Find 5 which is focused on mentors and networks. I am sharing a professional network that has really helped me through my ‘wobbles’ in regards to applying to graduate programs and summer internships for higher education. It’s actually a Facebook group with professionals, graduate students, and prospective students who want to go into higher education. It’s been such a great resource for me at this point in my life, through all my wobbles, thank you Jullette for making me realize what a great resource this truly has been for me!

City Fit Girls is a group that I recently got involved with which is helping me through my wobbles on my fitness journey. Right now, I am training to run a 15k, so it is really important for me to stay on my training schedule. When I’m feeling really un-motivated, and like I will never reach my “flow” I connect with people in this group over social media and it encourages me to keep pushing forward and provides me with tips and advice to progress in my journey.

Make, make, make, make, make, make (to the tune of Rihanna’s song, Work)!

Check out my Find 5 for this week:

Curriculum Lab in Landman Library! - The School of Education at Arcadia  has a sort of makerspace right on campus in the library called the Curriculum Lab. This is a space with a ton of great teacher resources that we have access to. If you are in the area, I definitely encourage you to check it out and make based on what you find!

“It’s about the meaning we can make” -  I really appreciated this quote from this article about the 4 myths of maker education which we were assigned this week. I think it’s important to remember that in maker education, it’s not necessarily about what is made but the connections created and the meaning attached to what is made. That is how true, lasting learning takes place!

Higher Education Makerspaces: Engaged Students, Hands-on Skills, Interdisciplinary Connections - This article, from Spring 2017, addresses the use of makerspaces in higher education, and how these spaces provide opportunities for interdisciplinary learning and application.

Makerspaces: The Future of Education (TEDx) - This video is from 2013, so it is a little old, but the speaker pushes for more makerspaces in order to innovate the way that we teach and learn in the 21st century. I also appreciate that the speaker brings up the benefit of using makerspaces as a space where students can learn to fail. So important!