Micah Shippee, PhD

Book Micah

Tag: book about teaching

  • Finding Your PLN #WanderlustEDU #Teacher #Change

    If you are feeling lonely in your teacher journey… you are doing it wrong. Teaching is about sharing, collaborating, and growing. The concept of closing the door and focusing only on your own teaching in your own space is not what our profession is all about.

    As a second-year teacher, I remember the excitement that ran through me about leading my students to participate in a certain project-based learning activity. I bolted down the hall with great enthusiasm to share my excitement with a veteran teacher I greatly respected. Unfortunately, the teacher’s reaction was cold and even negative. He seemed offended I was trying a strategy he did not believe was worth the time it took. As I thought about it further, I realized this teacher would be the only one not using this new strategy, and perhaps he felt a loss of solidarity as I crossed over to “the dark side.” That encounter taught me a couple of things. First, I realized out-of-the-box thinking can be received in two ways: with fervor or hostility. Each response depends on the person we are sharing the new idea with. I realized the same goes for enthusiasm. While some colleagues find the enthusiasm to be infectious, others perceive it as a threat.

    The colleagues that we see face-to-face, I like to think of as our Professional Learning Community (PLC). Our PLC can be a powerful group to grow and change with, but change takes time. Sometimes we need to find a group more in alignment with who are in the moment, social media provides us with the venue to customize our very own Professional Learning Network (PLN). These are people you can connect with at any time about some very unique teaching strategies and concepts that are most meaningful to your growth in-the-moment.

    Who are the people in your PLN? Compose a post on you favorite social media site (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc…) and tag your top 5 PLN members. Use #PLN and #wanderlustEDU to share with other readers. Here are a few of my favorite PLN members (there are MANY more).

    Understanding who you are in the change process is important. More about you PLC and PLN can be found here… better yet check out Chapter 4: Helping Others Along and Finding Your PLN in WanderlustEDU: An Educator’s Guide to Innovation, Change, and Adventure.

    Let’s Do This!

  • Who are you? #WanderlustEDU #edtech #teacher #change

    Sounds like the makings of a 70’s rock song… 

    Well, who are you? (who are you? who, who, who, who?)
    I really wanna know (who are you? who, who, who, who?)
    Tell me, who are you? (who are you? who, who, who, who?)
    ‘Cause I really wanna know (who are you? who, who, who, who?)

    …but I digress. 

    You can take a personality test, a learning style inventory, or even a which-character-are-you quiz, but I would argue the power of meaningful self-perception. Perhaps a better title for this post would be “Who do you think you are?” It is extremely important that we recognize our strengths and weaknesses in our professional practice, such recognition can lead to real, positive growth. While you may take up the role of champion as a general way of perceiving your fit within your school system, we may find ourselves identifying with one adopter category or another when discussing emergent technology. We call these categories: Innovators, Early Adopters, Early Majority, Late Majority, and Laggards. Adopter categories can be illustrated on a bell curve on the basis of innovativeness.

    If you were to identify yourself as an adopter of innovation, where do you think you would fit in?

    Image originally illustrated in Rogers, E. M. (2003). Diffusion of innovations. New York: Free Press. 

    Make a mental note about what you think your “adopter category” is.

    Now let’s try one of those tests. Think about your overall approach to innovation or change, compare all five words in each row and rank the words from 1 to 5.

    1 = not me at all
    2 = not very much like me
    3 = sometimes like me
    4 = often like me
    5 = most like me

    You may want to do this on a piece of paper and list out A – DD. Then tabulate your responses in the “TOTALS” row… and keep reading for the interpretation of your results.

    Now that you have gone through this check the results here.

    Understanding who you are in the change process is important. More about each of the categories and understanding people involved in change can be found here… better yet check out Chapter 3: Who Are You? in WanderlustEDU: An Educator’s Guide to Innovation, Change, and Adventure.

    Let’s Do This!

  • Navigating a successful teacher journey #WanderlustEDU #teacher @edtechteam

    Let’s be honest, there are times in our teaching careers when we feel anxiety, frustration, trapped, and/or apathetic. These are hardly the hallmarks of a successful, well-loved career. So then what can we do to navigate our teacher journey successfully? First, we need to understand what is going on… and lucky for us there is a field of study that can directly address our needs: human performance technology. I know sounds a bit nerdy or overly scientific-y (that’s a word, right?), but from this field, Dr. Joe Harless developed the Performance Success Model, that I have framed this way:

    Charting the impact of each of these areas is the first step in understanding more about how we work and what we need to be the best version of ourselves. There’s more on the topic developed here… better yet check out Chapter 2: Setting Up Your Journey For Success in WanderlustEDU: An Educator’s Guide to Innovation, Change, and Adventure.

    Let’s Do This!

  • Why did you become a teacher? #WanderlustEDU #teacher #Change

    Now is the perfect time to reflect on this very important question…

    Why did you become a teacher? Or why did you get involved in education?

    Perhaps it was a person that made a difference in your life. Or maybe you just really like working with children or young adults. Take a minute and just think about your WHY (it’s a really big deal).

    Equally important is to identify what it is that keeps you teaching day to day. 

    Once you feel good about your answer(s), SHARE them with the world! Go to Twitter and tweet your response using these two hashtags: #whyiteach #wanderlustEDU

    I will tweet nice things back to you… better yet, will you join me in commenting on what others have to say about this?

    Let’s Do This!

    Available now on Amazon.com in paperback and Kindle.

  • Education is changing because the world is changing. Are you ready for change? #WanderlustEDU #innovation #teacher #change #edtech @edtechteam

    WanderlustEDU: An Educator’s Guide to Innovation, Change, and Adventure is the perfect book to guide you in change.

    Available now on Amazon.com in paperback and Kindle.

    Our journey in education is one of constant iteration, managing change both personally and professionally is what we have to do because the world is changing. WanderlustEDU is a book about that change. In WanderlustEDU we learn to appreciate the journey we are on in education by revisiting our core purposes for doing what we do, and by learning about what lies ahead. Navigating change is difficult for anyone, but when it comes to navigating those changes on behalf of our students’ future there is a special onus to do it right. WanderlustEDU is a great read for anyone who works in this state of change as a teacher, a coach, or as an administrator. This book focuses on the most important aspect of change: the people… who together form a culture perfectly capable of innovating. No matter the scale, successfully innovating means understanding the effects of change on ourselves and those around us. Without a clear understanding of what change does to people, we can end up surrounding ourselves in an anxious, frustrated, trapped, and apathetic school culture. We must understand that to successfully innovate, it is always about the people who have to embrace a new situation and carry out the corresponding change.

    Let’s Do This!