Work Projects

Another opportunity for our NISD students to present and showcase their learning happened this past week at the Night of No Limits hosted at Byron Nelson High School. Over 1,000 students had live and gallery style presentations throughout the evening. 

Working with the curriculum department, we decided to streamline the process for registrations, invitations, and even door signs and name badges. Several different technologies were used, but overall we collected the data from the teachers and populated our database. Once we had the information I was able to automate all of our individualized materials, write a mobile application with advanced search features and even got the opportunity to sit and enjoy some student presentations during the evening. It was quite the event to begin wrapping up the year!

Some say the third time is a charm so it is no wonder the fourth was even that much better. I am so excited about the outcome mainly because I made some changes that ended up being very positive for the evening. 

I firmly believe that this night is ALL about our students. In the past few years, I have seen classrooms where students were presenting that had 1-2 audience members while next door the room is packed with standing room only. The difference between the two rooms is that one was a high school student and the other was an elementary presentation. This was the root of my first change. I decided to move away from campus based rooms and mix up elementary, middle and high school presentation throughout the rooms. Long story short, the crowds were larger and the comments were very favorable to see the multiple levels of students.

The other major change this year was to focus on the room facilitators as more of an inquirer and a learning coach versus someone passing out tickets to attendees. We treated them as educational leaders, and the response was overwhelmingly positive. Facilitators felt like the true leaders they are, and the students were probed about their learning thus enhancing the presentation as a whole. Wins all around!

Well this was my first “real” major change that I devised and set forth in motion. We had found from past few summer professional development sessions that teachers were coming in, learning some tools and forgetting what they learned before the school year started. This was not only a waste of their time but a waste of our efforts as well. We needed to make a change.

I proposed our first course (Integration Academy) be reworked to put the learning back in the hands of the teachers. We changed our focus to concept-based approach so instead of teaching tools we were taking learning concepts and having teachers find the tool that they thought was best for the work. Previously we were pushing teachers to base their lessons on inquiry and discovery yet we were spoon-feeding them the information during their learning time. By aligning our modeling with the classroom expectations, the teachers were put in the seats of the students, allowed to struggle and truly learned more during those sessions than ever before. The transfer to the classroom was obvious and teachers were retaking the course from previous years because of the change.