Reflection 6: EdCamp

Collaboration

I was absent from this class due to illness. This meant that I had to ask my peers about this class, and look at the blog posts from my classmates to inpsire me on what to write for my blog post. This inspired me to think about collaboration in classrooms with students, and also collaborating with fellow teachers. We’re always being encouraged to share resources with one another and not gatekeep what we find or create. Teaching is not meant to be a competitive field, when we collaborate and share resources we can spend more time and energy creating relationships with students. I’ve heard that teaching can be a lonely profession, but it doesn’t have to be. Working together to create meaningful learning experiences for our classes expands our knowledge as teachers. I chose the picture above because my driving question for L2P is about nature-based learning. I believe that nature-based learning is the perfect environment to teach our students about working together. Nature is extremely interconnected and is constantly collaborating with eachother. The soil collaborates with the roots of the trees to help them grow, and the branches create leaves, which in turn fall off and enriches the soil, a cycle. Which is a lovely metaphor for when we collaborate with eachother. Okay, but what does this have to do with EdCamp?

EdCamp and Professional Development

EdCamp is a great way to collaborate with like-minded indviduals. From what I understand from our class, we chose topics that are interesting to us and formed groups based on the most popular topics. Everyone got to show case what they know about these topics, and discuss with their peers about them. I personally learn the most through discussion, and I thrive when things are explained to me in different ways from different people. As someone who loves learning in a lecture based classroom, this first semester in our PDPP has been anything but that. I’ve found through collaborating with my peers, I’m learning about different perspectives and ways of thing, as opposed to facts and academic content. This has really helped me grow as a person, and opened my mind. I have always struggled with the concept of having a growth mindset. I don’t react well to constructive cristism, but when this feedback is given to me, not in a grade based sense, I’ve found I digest it so much better. Being open to changing your perspective and admitting you might have had the wrong idea about something is super valuable as an educator.