Networking & Working Hard

With the holiday last week, and the amazing temperatures this week (and my new pool), it is so hard to stay motivated. Makes me think of all of those people who claim teaching is easy because we get summers off. Actually, summers are spent hard at work, and that's not always easy, especially when the kids want to go out and play! So I am easing myself back into this week, after a 5 day staycation with my family. We start out this week with a networking event, an UnConference on PBL. 

The UnConference style is meant to allow educators to collaborate and come up with issues that we think are important to discuss and attack as a group. Last year, some of my team attended the UnConference, and it worked really well. We had so many people with so much more experience than we had, so we were able to bounce ideas off of them and hear the good and the bad of what was going to come on the long PBL road ahead. This year, however, my team and I were the most experienced PBLers out there. This made it much more difficult for us to bounce ideas off of other people, and gain valuable insight ourselves. Instead, we were the experts and we were answering people's questions and addressing their concerns. I am hopeful that they had a more meaningful experience than we did. 

On the other hand, we had experts there who create the management system that we use to track competencies, and course credit, and mastery levels, so we did get quality one on one time with them, in which to get our technical concerns addressed. That was possibly the most beneficial part of the conference for us, and for me in particular, since I am the go to guru of that system in our school. It was nice that my whole team was able to see the vision of the program, and the changes that were coming down the line. 

Back to the real world next week, planning out Geometry is my next goal. Wish me luck!