symposium – Networks of Inquiry and Indigenous Education

2018 NOII Symposium – May 11 – 12

noii — Sun, 17 Dec 2017 22:58:00 +0000

We’re gearing up for the 2018 Symposium on May 11 – 12^th, 2018 at the Westin Wall Centre, 3099 Corvette Way, Richmond, BC. Please join us another event showcasing presentations from leading local and global educators, practical school-based sessions, flash chats, ignites and lots of time for networking.

REGISTRATION

The cost for the 2018 Symposium is $350 (including gst). We do not offer 1 day rates. Please register online here.

Please share the Symposium Flyer with your colleagues.

SYMPOSIUM LOCATION

Westin Wall Centre (Airport)
3099 Corvette Way, Richmond, BC
www.westinvancouverairport.com

ACCOMMODATION

We have arranged for a limited number of rooms at the Westin Wall Centre at 3099 Corvette Way, Richmond, BC.

To qualify for the group rate of $155 CAD+tax, book early and prior to April 18, 2018 using the information below:

On-line: NOII Symposium – May 2018

Phone: 1-866-716-8108 indicating “NOII” or “Networks of Inquiry and Innovation” Symposium.

Visit our website for more information.

Making Things Right

noii — Tue, 06 Jun 2017 22:38:00 +0000

What an action packed few weeks of learning and sharing it has been for the Networks. There have been a number of regional celebrations taking place over the last few days or coming up soon, with school teams sharing their inquiry learning and celebrating how connected learning matters and how this has the potential to “make things right” for our students and communities.

Those who attended the 2017 NOII Symposium (or followed us on Twitter at #noii2017) will surely remember the significance of “making things right” and how Kaleb Child explained this as being our collective responsibility for our children, as well as recognizing the “racism of low expectations.” Indeed, many of the presenters, school presentations, ignite sessions and flash chats addressed this challenge throughout the 3 day event.

And this is what the Network is all about – and what the Symposium hopes to accomplish each year. It’s about coming together and working hard to address how to improve the outcomes and lived experiences of our learners. It’s about EVERY learner crossing the stage with dignity, purpose and options. All learners (kids and adults) leaving the school more curious than when they arrived. And ALL learners gaining knowledge and respect for Indigenous ways of knowing. We hope you felt these “reverberations” as you participated in the Symposium this year. Here are some comments we received through our feedback survey:

“As for ideas that resonated with me… so many! My biggest one that I came back with and spoke with my District Principal about was the fact that Spirals brings the focus back to the students. It isn’t about teachers’ professional “development”. Instead it is about being reflective educators engaging in “professional learning” in responsive ways to meet the needs of our students. It places the students at the centre of all learning, including the teachers.”

“The power of grassroots, teacher-led development of practice is a force unstoppable. It was a great first experience with the Symposium. One veteran participant described it as coming home to a family of like-minded educators.”

“What jazzed me was the diversity of ideas, the push to go to the next level. Only my second time attending, but by the end exhausted and invigorated at the same time! The importance of keeping it up, pushing through the moments of exasperation and helping each student believe they can be successful, then helping them find that success.”

“The symposium was so inspiring and energizing – it has really given me the push I needed to finish the year off strong, and to plan for the year ahead. I have already begun making connections with other educators and outside groups in order to get our outdoor classroom, and outdoor education program as a whole, rolling for next year.”

“I am changing my job description to inquiry and innovation leader, along with my 2 new teaching partners!”

“Every single person who came was genuinely on the paddling team – from the Yukon, BC, Alberta, New Zealand, Australia, Oakland, Montreal… it was spirit lifting to know so many people who care so deeply – and also who know how to play.”

“I left in a state of awe, gratitude and wonder. My learning will reverberate for months and years to come. Thank you all!”

“Excellent arrangement of speakers, musicians and story tellers. Food was lovely, venue was fabulous, content was rich and evoked curiosity. I have indeed left more curious than when I came – and I came in with a dozen questions! Thanks for the fabulous sessions! Well done.”

We are extremely grateful to those who contributed their time to the event through presentations, leading flash chats, volunteering, and being fully engaged in lively discussions over the course of 3 days. Several presentations and highlights from the Symposium have now been posted on our website here. Some shared comments are also captured below and through #noii2017.

Pre-Symposium Seminar – May 11th

noii — Thu, 16 Mar 2017 02:38:00 +0000

We are very pleased to announce the NOII Pre-Symposium Seminar with Dr. Helen Timperley and Amelia Peterson.

This seminar is designed for educators:

determined to strengthen professional learning in schools and districts
curious about what other jurisdictions are doing to help all learners thrive
interested in how professional inquiry is helping to change the life experiences of learners

When: Thursday, May 11, 2017

10am – 2:45pm

Where: Westin Wall Centre

3099 Corvette Way

Richmond BC

Cost: $150 (including GST) – Enrollment is limited

Registration is online by credit card:

westvancouverschools.ca/noii

Dr. Helen Timperley, University of Auckland, New Zealand, is widely recognized for her work in professional learning. She has published widely, including her most recent book Realizing the Power of Professional Learning (2014).

Amelia Peterson is completing doctoral studies through Harvard University’s PhD in Education. She is currently studying the development processes of innovative education policy agendas, and working on Thrive: Why 21^st Century Skills Are Not Enough (with Valerie Hannon, forthcoming June 2017).

Join us for an engaging session with two international scholars! Please share the flyer with your colleagues. Not registered for the NOII Symposium on May 12 & 13th yet? Registration is almost sold out: www.noii.ca/symposium.

Welcome back! Videos, resources and programs for 2016 – 2017

noii — Tue, 06 Sep 2016 19:02:00 +0000

Welcome back to school, everyone. We’re excited about all of the possibility that this new school year offers and hope you are too!

While it may seem like a long way off (and it kind of is…), we are planning ahead for the Network Symposium in May 2017. Save May 12 – 13, 2017 in your calendar for what is already shaping up to be a great event. Take a look at this awesome video, filmed and produced by 3 videography students from the Argyle Secondary School from the 2016 Network Symposium. Not only does it give you a sense of what happens at a typical Symposium, but it also provides some great thinking from our Network both in BC and around the globe.

Two key resources to revisit early in the school year, in addition to the full text for the Spirals of Inquiry, include the Guide to the Phases of the Spiral of Inquiry and the Four Key Questions that Matter. These serve as good tools for one of your first staff meetings. You may also want to check out the Resources section of our website. Here, you’ll find links to texts, articles, and other tools to support inquiry and deep thinking over the school year. For instance, many school teams have found the Aboriginal Understandings Learning Progression Rubric – developed by Laura Tait – to be an invaluable tool in their teaching and learning practice.

Stay tuned for more developments as we add an international section to the website, including case studies from around the globe with others involved with the Spirals of Inquiry. Both the Whole Education Network in the UK and groups of schools in Australia are intimately involved in Network activities.

There is still time to apply for the 2^nd cohort of the UBC Transformative Educational Leadership Program (TELP) which begins in October. This post-graduate program, led by Judy and Linda, was a huge success in its first year and aims to bring together individuals from across the K – 12 system interested in transforming themselves and their communities by exploring and engaging in dialogue and debate about major challenges and opportunities facing school districts. But don’t delay if you want to be involved this year – applications are due on September 11^th.

For those schools and teams specifically addressing school health, check out this new physical activity documentary featuring Josh Ogilvie – a CIEL and VIU graduate from Burnaby School District, as well as Dr. John Ratey from Harvard. Deep thinking to start off the school year!

We’re once again grateful and impressed at the caliber of work that network school teams are leading. Case studies that were submitted over the summer are almost ready to put up on the website. We’ll post a link here when these are accessible. We are also preparing templates for submitting your 2016 – 2017 Inquiry Focus – more to come!

We’re grateful to the Ministry of Education, the Irving K Barber Learning Centre at UBC and the Annual Foundation for their funding and support of the Networks. Book sales from Spirals of Inquiry also continue to support the exceptional work of network schools.

Looking forward to another great year of learning, teaching and inquiring together!

Network Symposium….Aussie style!

noii — Wed, 03 Aug 2016 15:38:00 +0000

This week our colleagues in Australia are hosting their own network “symposium” of sorts, inspired by our Network event every May. David Sim (who was a presenter at this year’s NOII Symposium) and Natalie Mansour have arranged to have Judy and Linda lead a Spirals of Inquiry Masterclass for 100 Australian educators. How exciting to be rapidly expanding our inquiry network down under, as well as sharing stories of learning from BC! Check out their program for the event on Thursday – if you attended the NOII Symposium you’ll notice some neat similarities.

Have an event you are hosting that you think our Network should know about? Contact us or send us a note on twitter so we can spread the word!

Our reason for living

noii — Wed, 25 May 2016 17:24:00 +0000

What a wonderful couple of weeks it has been for the Networks. There have been a number of regional celebrations over the last few days – from the Lower Mainland to Prince Rupert – school teams are sharing their inquiry learning and celebrating the purpose, passion and persistence that kept us afloat and paddling forward together over the last few months.

We’re still brimming with energy from the success of the 2016 NOII Symposium. We are extremely grateful to those who contributed their time to the event through presentations, leading flash chats, volunteering, and being fully engaged in lively discussions over the course of 3 days, beginning with Dr. Helen Timperley’s pre-Symposium event, continuing with engaging speakers, igniters and school presentations, and then culminating with Ted Cadwallader’s metaphor of the wayfinders – as we work together to ensure that every child in BC crosses the stage with dignity, purpose and options.

Several presentations and highlights from the Symposium have now been posted on our website here. We’ll also have video coming soon, thanks to our student videographer volunteers from North Vancouver School District. Some shared comments are also captured below and through #noii2016.

Thanks to speaker Kaleb Child with SD 85 Vancouver Island North for sharing so many new words and ideas with us through his presentation at the Symposium. We’re struck by the concept of Tlayu’la gaxans gwi’gwala’yu – “our reason for living” and collectively making the change for our children. This is indeed the most important journey we can embark on together, and we are so honoured to have the opportunity to share together in the passion, purpose and persistence needed to continue paddling and wayfinding together.

Spring Newsletter and more

noii — Fri, 22 Apr 2016 17:38:00 +0000

The Spring 2016 Network Newsletter has just been released, with news about:

Next steps for AESN
Key initiatives for 2016/2017
New publications – very exciting!
International connections
Learning opportunities

Please check it out and share it with your colleagues.

We are also very excited about the upcoming NOII Symposium on May 13 & 14, as well as all the related events. We took a chance at expanding our capacity this year to accommodate 300 participants, but even this is not enough as we now have a long wait list! It will be a tremendous few days of learning.

Please also see this great video – with Judy describing the Spirals of Inquiry. Perfect for anyone just joining the Network or intrigued to learn more.

UBC Professional Learning Opportunities (and more…)

noii — Sun, 20 Mar 2016 15:55:00 +0000

We have quite a number of opportunities for professional learning coming up in the next few months. Many of you already know about the 2016 Network Symposium taking place in Richmond, BC on May 13 & 14. The program will be finalized in the coming months and we’ll post it here when it’s available. We’ll have quite a few visiting speakers, including Helen Timperley, who is also providing a special pre-symposium session on May 12^th. This pre-symposium event requires separate registration and seats are very limited – please register early!

There are also two upcoming opportunities through UBC. The 2^nd Inquiry &Innovation Summer Institute will take place on July 8 & 9 at the Vancouver Point Grey campus. This is a two-day intensive working session for teachers, principals, cultural workers and district leaders looking to making inquiry-informed practices a way of life in school and district settings. The registration deadline is May 26^th – please share this poster with your colleagues.

The 2^nd cohort of the UBC Transformative Educational Leadership Program will begin October 2016. Through a blended, multi-access approach, participants will experience an opening weekend at UBC Vancouver in October, followed by a series of weekend retreats and online interactions, concluding with a capstone event in July 2017. The Transformative Educational Leadership Program is ideal for leaders in the K-12 system and other connected sectors, who are interested in system transformation. This cohort-based program is for exceptional individuals who already have post-graduate degrees and want to expand their world-view, gain new experiences and raise their academic credentials to new levels. We are currently accepting applications. Please join our mailing list to be notified about upcoming program information sessions.

Lots on the go, as usual! Please contact us to learn more about any of these opportunities.

Register Now for the 2016 NOII Symposium

noii — Thu, 04 Feb 2016 02:14:00 +0000

Register now for the 2016 NOII Symposium on May 13 & 14, 2016 at the Westin Wall Centre in Richmond, BC. The 2016 event – Purpose, Passion and Persistence: Making it Real – will showcase innovative educational leadership through local and international speakers (see below for the amazing line-up!), school presentations and flash chats for sharing actions that are make a difference. Please share this flyer with your colleagues.

2016 NOII Symposium
Friday, May 13, 2016 – 8:30 am to 4:00 pm
Saturday, May 14, 2016 – 8:30 am to 12:00 noon
The Westin Wall Centre, Vancouver Airport
3099 Corvette Way, Richmond BC

Online registration for the Symposium is now available at westvancouverschools.ca/noii. Registration is $350 (including gst). If paying by cheque, please see instructions on the flyer. Contact Donna Weaving, Network Coordinator, with any questions: dweaving@dccnet.com.

Symposium Accommodations:
Book your room at the Westin Wall Centre, Vancouver Airport:
On-line: https://goo.gl/H0fGqe or Tel: 604-303-6565 / 1-888-414-2010
To qualify for the group rate of $139.00 (s/d) call prior to May 2, 2016 and indicate you are attending the “NOII” or “Networks of Inquiry and Innovation” Symposium.

Speakers and Events:
This year’s event will feature a number of speakers, including:

Deborah Butler, University of British Columbia
Kaleb Child, Vancouver Island North
Alison Davies, BC Teachers’ Federation
Catherine McGregor, University of Victoria
Nancy Perry, University of British Columbia
Amelia Peterson, Harvard University
Shane Pointe, Vancouver School Board’s Knowledge Keeper/Elder in Residence
Leyton Schnellert, University of BC Okanagan
David Sim, NSW Department of Education and Communities
Terry Taylor, Arrow Lakes School District
Helen Timperley, University of Auckland, New Zealand

We’re also extremely excited to once again feature a number of school presentations from both elementary schools sharing their learning around bringing passion and purpose to life in service of their learners, and secondary schools actively engaged in the AESN Transition Study (Dr. Catherine McGregor will speak more to this as well!). We’ll also, once again, be joined by a group of student ambassadors who will challenge us to think deeply about our practice and provide feedback on how we are doing so far.

We promise a very memorable, networked, inspiring event! Please register early as there are limited spaces and we fill the venue every year!

Amelia Peterson – Harvard Graduate School of Education

noii — Sun, 31 May 2015 17:44:00 +0000

Today we are excited to feature Amelia Peterson on the blog, with reflections from the NOII Symposium and other international learning ‘convenings’ she attended this month. Amelia is currently a PhD candidate at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Her comments are brilliant and helpful – read on!

Four convenings and a principle

(with apologies to Richard Curtis)

Last week, I was fortunate to attend the Annual NOII Symposium as part of a little consort of British visitors there representing the Whole Education network in the UK. I was travelling with the group in my role as a doctoral student, where I’m in the wonderful early stage of being allowed to follow my nose to seek out interesting things to try and learn from (hence ending up in BC).

As a student, the start of May means the end of the Spring semester and a pile of Finals papers. This year, however, it coincided with four events that took me to four different cities to learn directly from and with practitioners in schools, district and state departments, and school partner organizations. My reflections on the Symposium are now enmeshed in these other experiences, and thinking across them I am struck by what progress there has been in designing adult learning: none of these was a typical conference (and proudly so: alongside the Symposium, the events were a ‘gathering’, a ‘design convening’ and a ‘learning festival’). Each placed an emphasis on creating space for informal interaction, for practitioners to present, and for authentic conversation about education work. More strikingly, three of the four included students among the participants – although given the quality of their contributions, we could have had more.

At the Oppi Learning Festival, I was lucky to be on a panel with students from City-As-School and a Big Picture Learning school in New York. Nothing can convey the spirit of the personalized learning these schools aim to provide better than seeing these three very different students tell very different stories about how their teachers had helped them reconnect with learning. Hearing these students reminded me of another I had met at the Symposium, who was worried his dyslexia would hold him back from higher education; this same student had founded a start-up, aimed at helping students find passions and develop a future pathway (I won’t mention his name to protect his privacy – and because I want to keep this investment opportunity to myself…) Traditional schooling still struggles to allow the level of personalization these students need and thrive on; inquiry, however, can open up the space for it.

I’ve been grappling with this possibility since wrapping up my finals and returning to England this week. The motto of Big Picture schools is ‘one child at a time’. In England, it is more everyone at the same time. As in the U.S., our system is full of structures to ensure that ‘no child is left behind’: principals and teachers are under extreme pressure to demonstrate that everyone is progressing at the required pace, or faster, regardless of what else is going on in their life – or whether the destination is somewhere they want to reach. It is when I am able to talk with students that I feel most sharply the limitations of the deterministic edge of value-added measures and of mandated progress towards standardized goals: as the U.S. student and author Nikhil Goyal has written, ‘One Size Does Not Fit All’.

Yet the last few weeks have also been a stark reminder as to why such systems emerged. One of the events I attended took place in Durban, South Africa, where one legacy of apartheid is lingering inequality in school provision. Likewise in the U.S., where I live for most of the year, we are reminded on a daily basis why ‘different but equal’ is treated as a hollow promise, and the possibility of promoting diversity and equality simultaneously is looked upon with some skepticism. As long as we do not confront racial biases – and engage in the serious work of coming to understand and really appreciate the cultures that make up our countries – different will not really be equal. This is as true of beliefs about intelligence as it is about race: in B.C. I did not hear the fixed-sense language of ‘ability’ as I do in England, and I can only hope that in the future we will look back at that as an outdated form of prejudice.

While these biases stand, it is understandable that some systems can only interpret equality as standardization, and pursue it at all costs.

This brings me to my (design) principle. It was with interest that I read a speech this week by Scotland’s Secretary of State for Education, Angela Constance. She spoke of teachers who ‘[see] the children they teach not just as pupils or learners, but as individuals with foibles, weaknesses and challenges but importantly too, strengths, opportunities and enthusiasm – all the qualities that make each of them who they are.’

From that perspective, everything becomes so simple. If all system leaders believed that teachers saw students in this way, they would design systems where practice is driven by the needs and enthusiasms of each child, and where standards exist just as useful tools – way-markers to take into account on the way to some larger goal.

Many, many educators already hold this perspective and its accompanying beliefs. The accountability structures in England and the U.S., however, assume otherwise; that the system must enforce adults to care for every child, in the only way that systems know how. Jal Mehta, my teacher, has written about the importance of replacing ‘bad man’ education policies that assume non-compliance, with ‘good (wo)man’ theories that assume people want to do good work and to get better at their work. In B.C., I saw what a system based on good person theories can look like. Not one that blithely assumes we will all be good all the time, but knows that with the right structures of support and mutual accountability we can try to get better. Spirals of Inquiry seems to be shaped by that spirit of optimism, and, as a process, by starting with the experience of students and planning adult actions from there. Scotland’s government, in various ways, and sometimes haltingly, is promoting the same philosophy. England and the U.S. have many strengths in Education, but we also have a lot to learn from our northern neighbours.

So what can we do about it? This, for me, is the role of convenings that bring together participants from different parts of a system and different countries: they provide opportunity for people to talk with others who see the world from a different perspective; to question some of their own assumptions; and maybe, over time, shift their beliefs. For this to happen, convenings need to continue to bring new people into the fold, and to bring in the voices of a generation who are – sometimes – not as weighed down by some of the assumptions we are still shaking ourselves out of.

But now I am just preaching to the converted.

I look forward to seeing the networks continue to grow, and thank you again for letting me learn from you.