Second Meetings of the Year - Getting Started

DY Prep and the Art Center had their second in-person Learning Portfolio meetings of the year last week, both with similar and jam-packed agendas. It's been a treat (it's Halloween, pun intended) collaborating on agendas with Rudy. It seems like we often think alike and bounce off each other's ideas. It's hard to remember the order of putting together the agendas but based on what the educators need one of us comes up with an idea, the other runs with it, and then sometimes we build on them from there. This time Rudy came up with an amazing agenda and worksheet for the DY Prep meeting, so I used parts of it for our Art Center meeting and it worked well.

 

DY Prep

At the DY Prep meeting, one of the best parts was starting off with educator elevator pitches. Each educator had to come up with a pitch that was less than a minute to convince their students to get on board with the Learning Portfolio Project. The educators really rose to the occasion and got into it. Here are some examples: 

Then the educators worked on their plans to align 2-3 units with posting to the student or class blogs. Some educators worked in their teaching pairs and the returning educators moved around the room as needed to help out the newer educators. Rudy used Google Classroom again to organize the whole session, which is really showing itself to be a useful tool.

Here's a link to the worksheet the educators used to plan. 

Rudy is also working on his "Push-In" schedule with the teachers to figure out the best classes for him to support this semester.

 

Art Center

This time at the Art Center we focused most of the meeting on working time. This is something the educators have asked for because they don't have a lot of extra time for planning or trying things out. Our project this month was to clean up and beef up the "First Five" document. This is the template for how to get started with blogging in the Art Center programs. Each class is different (in terms of content, time, age level), so they might not follow the plan exactly, but it was very helpful for the educators to address concerns as we went through and share best practices from previous experiences.

Here's a link to the First Five document they created.

One exciting development since the last meeting is that programs have officially started and George from Carla's BAC class last year (and current Parsons student) has come back to be an intern with us on the Portfolio Project. He will be starting by assisting Carla in her class and hopefully help Austin and the ACTION participants as well. We are still working on getting an intern for DY Prep.

Next meeting everyone wants to dive into learning more about tumblr as a platform. I'm going to spend some time learning more about it myself and then walk them through a little workshop in November.