This past weekend, I had the opportunity to attend EduCon in Philadelphia, PA. Principal – and friend – Chris Lehmann asked me to participate in the opening panel. Traditionally, the first panel has a set of big picture thinkers around a specific theme. This year, it was human-centered education, appropriate given the ascent of artificial intelligence, social media, and deeper polarization.
Later that night, I started to think about the workshops I’d like to attend the next day. For anyone who has seen me do a presentation at a conference, you may know that I also participate in the conference as well. When I was a full-time classroom teacher, I took advantage of the opportunity to learn from and listen to others. Now that I’m no longer in the classroom, I still want to get a sense of how teachers think about learning and sharing their practices. Yes, my research interests center social science, but I’m also finding the nexus between teacher practice and research.
As it stands, researchers rarely attend the professional development sessions of the teachers they study except when they’re presenting. But that’s another discussion.
For EduCon specifically, I’ve attended the gatherings frequently. Only recently did I finally get why I kept coming back. After re-learning the history of EduCon, participants returned because, for them/us, it was a sort of pedagogical home. In too many of our schooling places, we have an abundance of compliance measures, tiers of bureaucracy, and petty arguments that don’t have real effects on student learning. What if, for a few days, we could create space, specifically a school, where we could develop that vision for a school or, at worst, make better problems? (That’s Chris Lehmann’s phrasing, by the way.)
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