The everyday challenges teachers face, ranging from planning lessons to preparing students for assessments and marking, mean we lose the ability to experience the learning opportunities we pose our students. If you took a learning walk around any school, you will witness many amazing ideas being communicated between teachers of different subjects and ages continuously – whether it is a teacher providing the spark for the next real world focus to another’s lesson, or an actual physical teaching resource being shared. As an educational body, we should seek opportunities to harness and expand these isolated bubbles of sharing best practice into structured conversations that happen on a wider scale, hence the role of a “TeachMeet” within my school.
Behind a TeachMeet lies the core values of “share, explore, inspire and learn.” They provide a structured face-to-face approach to sharing teaching resources/ideas, either within your immediate school community or within a wider education region. 2016 saw the first TeachMeet at BISC-SL, and since that point it has evolved in response to staff feedback and grown into a core part of our Continual Professional Development for staff. Originally, it was an optional evening event, which transitioned into a twilight CPD session, and now a sequence of focused department meetings, climaxing in a celebratory evening event.
The model of the evening is always the same: provide staff the opportunities to experience a new teaching concept and then selected staff share a teaching idea within a 5 minute slot. 2018’s “Big Idea” pre-starter saw staff having to self-organize themselves based on which MIT learning characteristic they promote most naturally during lessons before completing a quick-fire list of activities they have used in the last week which link to it.
Then the staff were categorized into 'like-minded' teachers, resulting in an interesting response to the teaching activity, Data Sculptures as shared in the 2017 MIT teacher training by Rahul Bhargava. They had 6 minutes to build a sculpture to represent a set of data – no 3D bar graphs or pie charts allowed! Under their seats were secret missions for them to complete during the group activity, which included taking on roles such as Observer Server and Cheerleader. Building in this activity enabled numerous teaching and learning ideas to be shared, while also allowing staff the opportunity to take the place of student and experience what it is like to face these open-ended, creative, no right or wrong activities. Sometimes we all need to be taken out of our comfort zone, just as we do to our students every day, in order to make mistakes, feel the emotions and understand the benefits from the learning that occurs.
The enthusiasm and laughter that accompanied this starter was the perfect launch into all the amazing teaching ideas. A safe space had been created so everyone could learn from one another without judgement. A TeachMeet is one example of how we, as a teaching community, can incorporate the concept of a “Lifelong Kindergarten” in our own professional development, and ultimately practice what we preach.
TeachMeet – celebrating creativity in Teaching & Learning
Jennifer Taylor
Head of Science and Regional Lead for the MIT Collaboration,
British International School of Chicago, South Loop
“The rest of school (even the rest of life) should be more like kindergarten. To thrive in today’s fast-changing world, people of all ages must learn to think and act creatively.”
Taken from the foreword by Sir Ken Robinson in the book “Lifelong Kindergarten” by Mitchel Resnick (MIT)