Connected Leaders: Tools to Grow Collaborative Conversations

Last week I attended NCTE, and couldn't escape the power of social media in growing my professionalism. As soon as I arrived I was happily catching up with colleagues from across the United States that continually push my thinking.  Gone are the days when we have to feel isolated in our classrooms.  While I still learn so much from my colleagues next door, my professional community has grown exponentially as a result of social media networks, blogs, and connected communities.

What do connected leaders need to consider?

As our district's elementary literacy instructional leader, I have come to also appreciate the power of social media and other digital tools to grow collaborative conversations across our fourteen elementary buildings.  While we are still finding our voice as a collaborative community, here are a few tools I find essential in communicating and growing a collaborative conversation.

Three tools I can't live without:

1.  To Share Our Story:  A Blog.  Every group needs a hub.  A digital hub helps us connect our community, curate resources, and build our narrative. Our literacy coaches are working to grow a literacy website.  On our site we share links, professional development opportunities, resources (still growing), as well as a weekly blog post.  (Need a space?  Try Weebly.)

2.  To Connect Our Community:  Twitter (or some social media outlet).  Our district has a growing number of classrooms on Twitter sharing their stories of learning and connecting with others.  We use Twitter to share professional learning opportunities, tweet blog updates, and pass along information helpful to teachers.  Additionally, we use Twitter to tell the story of literacy in our district by retweeting the celebrations of classrooms across the district.  Twitter allows us to learn from one another and step inside each other's classrooms.  (Our account:  @HCSDElemLit)

3. To Curate Links & Information:  S'more.  S'more works in a way that is similar to a newsletter, pamphlet or brochure.  I find S'more to be perfect for sharing resources around topics or for particular groups.  It is easily shared on social media or via email.  Often I create a S'more for a group conversation and then as others contribute ideas and resources we can easily add them to the original S'more.


More Possibilities:

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DigiLit Sunday: Digital Connections with Poet, Amy Ludwig VanDerwater

Poetry Across Spring

So It Began
It began in a poetry unit planning session.  It was one of those team conversations where one person says something, then another person adds to that, then another person links the ideas, and before you know it all of the talking and adding and linking creates an unbelievable plan.  This was the way poetry planning went with first grade teachers Carolyn Carr, Deb Frazier and Marie Nixon.  Though I have moved to a primary intervention role, these three still let me crash literacy planning parties.  (The benefits of this, both personal and professional, are a topic for another post.)

As we were planning the learning for the poetry unit, we began to talk about how we would create excitement around poetry.  What would hook readers from the start?  Many ideas were discussed, but in the process we began to talk about a Skype session with Amy Ludwig VanDerwater, author of Forest Has a Song and contributor to many other poetry books.  Amy's poetry is often used in first grade with students as Amy shares poems daily on her blog in addition to writing about her process in her poetry and sharing tips for poets.  Amy's Poem Farm is often a part of our mini-lessons and shared reading in our workshops.

Planning a Skype Session 

Amy Ludwig VanDerwater her decisions
as a poet.  Will she write about, to, as
or with?

Having a surprise Skype session would be fun, but we wondered if there was a way to help students get more from talking with Amy Ludwig VanDerwater.  We knew she had much she could teach us.  So we talked and crossed our fingers and hoped we could make this work.  In conversations between the four of us and Amy it was decided that instead of one session, we'd arrange three sessions.  The sessions would stretch across the spring to give us time to work from what we had learned in between our learning conversations.   We wanted the sessions to accomplish these things:

1. Session One:  get students excited about poetry and put the sounds of poetry into their ears  
2. Session Two:  help students to understand the craft of writing poetry
3. Session Three:  to celebrate student work  

There are no words to describe how grateful we are to Amy for taking on this role in our poetry study.  There are no words to describe how excited we have been to learn from a poet with such experience.  There are no words to describe the way it unfolded even better than we had hoped.  Every time we talked with Amy, her words carried into our lessons and inspired our young poets.  

As I reflect I think these things helped to make our Skype sessions a success (this is not an exhaustive list -- and I am sure Amy would have different points to add -- these are just parts I noticed from my point of view):

Learning with Amy Ludwig VanDerwater

Learning from Experts

Digital literacy is changing the way we learn, communicate, and live in our world daily as adults, but it is also making huge shifts in the way we work in our classrooms.  Digital learning gives students a voice today.  Digital learning provides new opportunities to connect with experts, collaborate with others, and learn in new ways.  When I was in school, communicating with an author was rare.  If you did get to touch base with an author, it was often by sending a letter and maybe - just maybe - getting one back.  

the entire first grade in a session
with Amy Ludwig VanDerwater

In our work with Amy Ludwig VanDerwater, we were able to move beyond the excitement of talking with an author to using our time on Skype to learn from her.  Amy helped us to see the fun in reading poetry and playing with words (lesson 1), in ways to think about our poetry (lesson 2 writing about, to, as and with --- point of view of a poem), and in celebrating our work (lesson 3 listening for the parts of poetry that catch us and make us pause).  

There was also the additional advantage of being able to follow her blog and tweets to continue to learn from her.  We were able to continue our conversations between Skype sessions on Twitter and in student blogs.  Students enjoyed, and learned a lot from, her Sing That Poem! project in April.  They learned about topics, rhythm, rhyme, and craft (and a little about music too).  Students were able to share their poems digitally and comment on the poetry of their peers.  Digital literacy opens new doors and creates new opportunities for young learners.  

A HUGE THANK YOU TO AMY LUDWIG VANDERWATER!  XOXO

As part of a continuous collaboration among educators interested in digital learning, Margaret Simon hosts a weekly Digital Learning round-up on her blog:  DigiLit Sunday.  Stop by Reflections