It has been a whirlwind weekend…. my brain hurts!! 
Annelies, Nicole, Shauna and I have been taking all of our learnings home with us and continuing the dialog over dinner and a few drinks.
What we want to do, what we aim to do, what we can do…. and the reality I suppose of what we will actually get accomplished. Some initial thoughts….. Annelies and I return to ISB next week and start a VT group with interested teachers. We continue to meet as a group throughout the year in our culture of inquiry action group, trying out VT thinking routines and gathering data to check if they have enhanced student learning. Meanwhile, we are collaborating across the ocean with Nicole Davies, Junior School Assistant Head at Havergal College, Toronto, and helping our students makes thinking visible while making connections in a global world. The catch? Presenting our findings at the World Thinking Conference in Kuala Lampur, Malaysia in June 2009. Wow!!!
That’s the global side of just one possibility…. another question I have is how could we get our Middle and High Schools here at ISB involved in the VT thinking? How could we get Ron and Mark from Project Zero over to ISB to run some VT workshops? How could we make ISB a VT school?
Finally, on May 2nd, our school wide Leadership Team is having an all-day think tank session to ensure that we have a common understanding of learning and how we move our school forward. I have volunteered to organize the agenda for the meeting. Annelies and I see this as a perfect opportunity to model some of the ideas we learned at the VT conference to shift our school leaders. Perhaps this will be the “tipping point” we need as a team to really examine what is learning, what does deep learning look like and how can we shift our teachers to be challenging all our student daily to goo deep with their learning? We, as leaders, need to understand this first and then MODEL it, practice what we preach, before we will shift our school.
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