Crowd-Source, Collaborate, Cross-Pollinate
For years now at NBCS our professional development has been almost entirely in-house and almost entirely consisted of cross-pollination and crowd-sourcing. We have no IT integrators. We have an executive structure but the emphasis is on distributed leadership and spontaneous "DO IT NOW" collaboration and innovation.
Our full-staff PD day last week included this creative collaboration:
And then the next day staff grouped themselves up and selected their own mini passion project, to be completed in a whirlwind within 4 hours.
Our Stage #3 team were inspired by Yayoi Kusama's "Obliteration Room", and managed to whip up their own in no time (Skender ran home to get an old table... someone must sourced white paint from somewhere):
The students will add stickers all over the place (earning each one, mind you, via a gamified structure).
Elsewhere, Ben Hedstrom, Amanda Hill and colleagues are redeveloping the music rooms to an open-plan student-directed structure. They will crush the distinction between year groups: different classes and ages will share the space simultaneously, forming a semi-professional studio, the older mentoring the younger.
Another team made a boredom buster station:
I'm not sure what this was but it looks fantastic:
Some Visual Arts staff recycled their own previous works, I believe by cutting it into strips and mashing it up again. Their vision for the art spaces is busting them open into a Parisian studio, with no clear distinction between the inside and a creative, rive gauche esplanade in the open air.
Tim Barrett and colleagues made some new furniture, and videoed the process!
The day ended with some crowd-sources post-it thoughts:
The crowd-sourcing of teacher development is the most powerful PD you can offer. Teachers have limited need for outside experts - a more pressing need is space to collaborate, then cross-pollinate.
Two weeks ago I worked with two Brisbane schools for a day. Walking in as an outsider to a new context, I took a hunch on the crowd-source/collaborate/cross-pollinate processes and allocated three sessions in the day for them. It worked a treat, and I don't see why it won't work anywhere. I think it's fine to have top-down leadership: we all want to look up to a leader to help steer the ship, BUT what joy and power there is in grassroots, bottom-up collaboration. No one controlling, no one waiting to act.
It's beyond the scope of this post (it's dinner time) but it's fascinating watching the business world shift in the same direction, to the same distributed-leadership model. All about agility, flexibility, contextual-leadership etc.
And on that note I will abruptly finish this post. I have a roast waiting!