April 25, 2017

Reflection –

Our Learning Launch Challenge

Challenge: I am a High School English Department Chair. Our challenge is to review and  potentially replace literary texts that we suspect are not connecting with our students. This is a  key part of our English curriculum and we want to provide the most engaging texts for optimum  learning.  We are ten English teachers with 1200 students. The key stakeholders are, of course,  the students. However, we teachers, as the ‘experts’ also feel that students should be exposed  to certain texts, but this may be biased by our love of literature and penchant for the classics.  We would like to focus our research on what the students, teachers, and administration see as  the key criteria for our literary texts in order to make thoroughly informed curricular choices. If  we do find a solution to our perceived problem, this would require a syllabus review for each  grade level. This would involve much work, but no cost. (Our students purchase their own  literary texts or we use online versions in the public domain.)

Selection: We are an innovative school and are therefore familiar with the design process, but  the Learning Launch method (as explained in Eric Kohl’s video) seemed to be the best way to  get a plethora of ideas (or a snapshot of stakeholder thoughts) in order to make an informed  decision about our curriculum. It meant we could quickly test or survey the school  community—we want to establish what’s out there and not simply assume that we always  know best when it comes to providing learning resources and opportunities

Application: Our first challenge was to work as a department to identify and test our  assumption that our texts do not always work; we would then work to see if a review is needed.  We met as a department to brainstorm and also invited an administrator (to act as the ‘skeptic’  Calin recommends in his video) to counter our confirmation bias. This kept us balanced. For  our first learning launch meeting we listed all our literary texts and gave brief ‘gut’ feedback on  whether we should keep or discard the texts. We also kept a separate list of texts to add to our  program if needed. We saw what we thought was a need for change. We realized that this was  not really ‘hard’ data, however, and therefore decided to get a survey snapshot of stakeholder  thoughts in bulk, rather than a collection of opinions. This survey involved students from each  grade level and teachers to test our assumption and reach the truth. For example, we asked  students to identify their favorite texts in each course and give other feedback, for example,  how appropriate they perceived the texts to be (see partial data below).

Insight: The data informed us that our assumption was partly correct. Students are mixed about  their responses to the literature. What was clear, however, was that a sufficient number of  students (even our most outstanding students) would like to see a review of our texts. The  department plans to spend a session to consider each of our texts to assess worth. Based on  survey results and a number of concerns that not enough classic British and American literature  was occurring at the lower grade levels, we will work through each course to reassess the texts  and align them with our learning standards and students’ development. This is still a work in  progress; we have many courses and many teaching personalities! The learning launch tool  helped us to get together to establish our assumptions and find ways to test or challenge them  with data from the community. Our assumption was only partially correct, but the data we  received helped to use what we had learned to effect a change for the benefits of our students.

Approach: Although we are already familiar with the mind-mapping tool of the design process,  the learning launch was definitely the best tool for this situation. In this way, we got many,  many ideas from more sources, rather than simply brainstorming the value (or lack thereof) of  our current literary texts. This was a quick and easy way to test our assumption and make  informed confident decisions in the best interests of our students.

