The Dangers of Traveling and Learning |
Little did I realize it, but I set myself up for some unnecessary and uncomfortable challenges throughout the short time of this semester. While I pleaded for more time and apologized for running behind, I learned a lot about myself as a student, a woman, a leader, an employee, and a human. In essence, I realized that self-discipline is not just what you see yogis executing when they stand on their heads and tell you how much closer it brought them to a feeling of peace. It is also not just what the Karate Kid learned in Mr. Myagi's "wax on, wax off" exercise. Self-discipline is the ability to create order in the inherent chaos of being human. I learned the power of sitting still in a cafe, even if it was in a new city. I learned that in pausing and taking myself out of summer tourist mode that I could start to enjoy places like the locals do. I also learned that my professors are godsends and remarkably patient women.
In ITEC 7305 more specifically, I grew to learn how to take what I already know about using data for educational improvement and apply it in a focused manner to promote student growth. So yes, as a data leader-in-development, I can come up with a grandiose plan to use something like using Kahoot to create formative assessments for students, but without a clear sense of direction and a plan on how I wish to make that data useful, it would just be me playing around with an online technology tool that happens to record student data.
Through our textbooks, Data Wise and The Data Coach's Gide to Improving Learning for all Students, I learned that it is important for those further up the ladder of power and decision-making to well versed in the Data Team process. They do not have to be the next educational researchers to be published through an Ivy League school, but they do have to be able to recognize the strengths and power of others as a part of the Data Teaming process. In doing so, they create an environment of collaboration so that the schools they lead embrace innovation in helping students achieve their best as well as change resulting from the data collected instead of running away from it.
In traveling so much this summer while balancing summer classes I put myself in a bit of danger...academically and intellectually. I did not realize how much I would learn from the experience as a whole, beyond just my classes or my travels in isolation. I realized that the day-to-day changes of new locations and landscape are much like the changing landscape of instructional technology and education itself. There are some things, like raw numbers, that tend to stay the same. But, as we dig deeper, even the information gained from numbers can change their resulting meaning once we start to aggregate and disaggregate it and pair it with other data. Beyond this, we do not have to know everything that exists and is up ahead (it is quite literally impossible to do so), but we do have to recognize the success and greatness in others so that together, we can lead our districts and schools to improving student success.