Prior to investigating significant learning environments, I felt confident with my disruptive innovation plan. The idea was to improve upon the current state of our school's professional development approach with teachers. But after reading the first introduced text in EDLD 5313, A New Culture of Learning by Douglas Thomas and John Seely Brown, I understood that a simple improvement would not be enough to achieve the goals I wanted to accomplish. I was trying to manipulate enhancements within the traditional educational framework, or as Thomas & Brown would say an "old culture of learning." Improvements to a broken system do not fix the system. Creating a significant learning environment is the shift in the model of education that is needed to foster an atmosphere in which students can engage in deeper learning. Passion, imagination and a structure are all needed to produce such an environment. I knew immediately that something was wrong with my plan and I needed to adjust in order to move forward. 

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Reconsidering my innovation plan caused me to wonder about my views towards learning. Had this new information caused a shift in what I believed about how I operated as a learner? I constructed a new learning philosophy, connecting my own experiences to established theories of learning. I believe that learners are constructors, building new ideas and concepts as they form connections to their prior knowledge and experiences. It is the role of an educator to create and facilitate a learning environment in which learners have the freedom and the constraints to explore while engaging in a social setting to build new knowledge. Through this process, students become independent learners.

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So now what? I had broken down and reconstructed my beliefs about learning, while still wrestling through this idea of needing to replace traditional classrooms with significant learning environments. I decided to put into practice what I preaching (or blogging) by creating my own SLE for teacher-learners as the way to implement my innovation plan. First, I needed to look at this overall unit as a big picture. I crafted a Big Hairy Audacious Goal (BHAG) and utilized Fink's 3 column table to outline the desired outcomes, activities and assessments for the teacher-learners. All the while, I was making sure that these were aligned to the BHAG. I found this tool for instructional design to be most effective as it continually forced me to focus on the learning and goals for the unit.

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Next, I went more granular and detail-oriented by taking this same unit and built an Understanding by Design (UbD) template. In this model, I began with the unit's goal and then worked backward to create outlined activities. I found this tool useful in the sense that this will be the model in which the teacher-learners will design and build their blended learning environments and Project-Based Learning units. The overall structure that the UbD template provides will allow teachers to achieve the creation of a significant learning environment through a familiar means.

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While this course has felt like a sprint in many ways, I was able to end it by revisiting my growth mindset. It was interesting going back to where this journey started and to see the ways in which I have fallen short and the ways in which I have thrived. I have definitely struggled to consistently adopt a growth mindset, especially during these stressful times of school closures amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. But what an opportunity. I am most excited to continue to pursue my growth mindset plan in more of a collaborative effort. As I go on this journey of creating significant learning environments with my teacher-learner colleagues, it will be imperative that we all commit to growing, learning, and believing that we can develop as educators and as people.

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