“It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to.”
I have struggled to start this post. Part of the reason is that “I just don’t wanna,” which became an anthem this semester. Try as I might, my motivation waned, alongside that of my peers. I think when you can see the finish line, each step forward becomes harder and harder.
However, the biggest reason that I keep putting this post off is that it signifies an end to this truly unexpected journey. While I know that it’s not an end to the relationships that I made along the way, I recognize that the relationships will change. We won’t create new inside jokes about what we’re doing in class. We won’t have the shared struggle of graduate work. Finally, we won’t have a need to talk to one another, rather our relationships will wax and wane because we have a desire for friendship. And while I can’t imagine a life without my new friends – particularly Stephen and Kim – a change in a relationship is always difficult.
On the other hand, if the Applied Digital Learning program at Lamar U taught me nothing else, it taught me how to learn, change, and grow like it’s my life’s work. Because it is life’s work.
Key Contributions
Glows & Grows
Glows:
I think this semester, my greatest pride stems from continuous movement forward. As I mentioned earlier, each step toward the finish line has gotten harder and harder. It is like I’m walking through mud. As I lift my foot, I have to pry it loose. Then, mud gets stuck to my shoe. When I go to plant my foot again, it’s even harder to dislodge because of the weight of the accreted mire. At any rate, slow and steady is name of the game. Or, as my husband liked to say, “Just keep typing.”
Regardless of my motivation or pace, I continue to have pride in my work. In 5318, as I created my digital course I carefully included accessibility features. I also expanded my knowledge and experience with Canvas. Finally, I used a new tool – Camtasia – for video recording! In 5320, I reflected until I could reflect no more. However, for the final assignment, I tried something new – I created a comic about my journey with voiceover for added zhoosh.
Grows:
The workload this semester helped me to reflect on my main goals as I work through the ADL program:
Reflect on my confidence: I really did enact pieces of my Innovation Plan! Did it go exactly as I expected? No way! Did I learn along the way? More than I could ever imagine.
Increase flexibility: I am going to listen to feedforward regarding my innovation plan for the paperless office. It will keep me from getting stuck. I definitely have room for improvement here.
Both goals were consistent with my work in each course. As I grow as a leader, I will continue to build confidence in my abilities. Also, I will continue to hold my ideas loosely that I am open to change. That way, I can refrain from getting stuck.
Collaboration
I continue to be a proud participant in two collaborative groups for 5318 and 5320. The larger group consists of Charlie, Kelvin, Ileana, Erica, Andrea, Kim, Stephen, Danielle, Pedro, Andrei, and others. I am a self-identified empath. That is, I enjoy helping others so much that I have to work to identify my own needs. This semester, I continued a high level of involvement in the larger group even more than last semester. Not only did I share my class with everyone in our chat, but I also heavily supported my peers with questions. Finally, I shared my assignments with my larger group of classmates.
In our smaller group, I continue to grow my professional and personal friendships with Stephen and Kim. The three of us – coined by Stephen “The Three Amigos” – rarely go a day without chatting. I continue to grow with each assignment we share. I found it interesting that all three of us struggled with our motivation this semester. Regardless, without their moral and intellectual support, I am certain I wouldn’t have performed as well. I’m grateful for their friendship on this path.
Revisions
I made revisions constantly based on comparison and feedforward from my peers and from class and feedforward from Professors and their
As I tighten up my ePortfolio for my final grade, I improved my front page.
I made minor improvements on each assignment for 5318 and 5320.
Finally, my drafts were continually changing with the support and feedforward of my group.
This semester, I read every book, watched every video that I found, and read most of the other required readings listed in the Classroom Modules in Blackboard. My intention in grad school – and in life, really – is to keep learning, reading, reflecting, and connecting as long as I can. I see this as a constant need for improvement. I met all of the various course deadlines.
Supporting Contributions
Leadership Responsibility, Participation, and Communication
I’ve mentioned my love of writing in the past Contributions to Learning. My blogs continue to be the basis of my learning in ADL – the opportunity to reflect and connect “dots,” or big ideas. By modeling my learning process, I believe I help others grow. Not a week goes by without a comment on one of my discussion board posts about how much someone enjoys my writing or how much they learned. That’s not to brag, but more to reflect the importance of the active role I take in my own learning. Really, the active (or inactive) role any of us takes in our learning.
As I said, I love to write. However, I feel like I am unable to put into words how much the ADL program means to me. The connections I make – from people to ideas – continue to push me to be a better leader, communicator, and person.
“Well, I’ve made up my mind, anyway. I want to see mountains again, Gandalf – mountains; and then find somewhere where I can rest. In peace and quiet, without a lot of relatives prying around, and a string of confounded visitors hanging on the bell. I might find somewhere where I can finish my book. I have thought of a nice ending for it: and he lived happily ever after to the end of his days.”
Much like Bilbo Baggins, I know that my journey isn’t truly over. I will use the tools and skills I honed in grad school to continue to learn and grow and change in our ever-changing world. I will also continue to write and reflect and make connections that I contribute to a growing collective knowledge base. Finally, I will continue to work to make our world a better place alongside my peers.
I will never forget my first day of grad school. I had already started reading Horn and Staker’s Blended: Using Disruptive Innovation to Improve Schools (2015). Also, I decided to take a long weekend by myself to one of the Getaway cabins outside of the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex. While I knew my learning would be very different than it had in the past – I am in my 40s, and the classes were 100% online – I had no clue what I was getting into. Our first class meeting left me in a state of shock and excitement, as it felt chaotic compared to my context for “doing school.” Little did I know – that was COVA. And it wasn’t just peaking its head out to say hello. It was standing tall, wild, and free, challenging me to ask what I was supposed to do and what was the correct answer. I still didn’t realize it; however, I subconsciously knew something was happening. I had a vivid dream that night that I detailed for my ePortfolio immediately (Stateler, 2021).
As I lifted my foot to dip my toe into the ADL program and the tenets of COVA, I blogged about learning WordPress. After reading Dr. Harapnuik’s (2021) post, How to Create Your ePortfolio, I thought, “I finally have an answer to something! I am supposed to use WordPress.” Little did I know that not only was I wrong, but that was also the last time I would confidently believe that there was a “right” or “wrong” answer in this degree program (Stateler 2021).
I think the first time I sat in cognitive dissonance was during my first one-on-one meeting with Dr. H. Recently, I had proudly submitted my idea for my innovation proposal about working with administrative assistants. I was excited to meet with him! Even though he didn’t think my concept was broad enough, I was confident that editing my proposal would be a matter of a few tiny adjustments. However, in our meeting, Dr. H – while kind – spared no feelings about my innovation proposal. My idea wasn’t broad enough for the scope of the ADL program, nor did it include meaningful stakeholders such as district leadership. I started to worry and said, “Dr. H, I was just such a bad student in undergrad, and I don’t want to repeat that here.” I expected grad school to be similar and was ready to put in the hard, if meaningless, work. But H looked at me with a knowing smile and said, “This isn’t undergrad. These courses are nothing like that.” How right he was (Stateler, 2021).
With that said, I developed a broader proposal to work toward a paperless environment with the Digital Learning team and Central Administration. The intention was to support adult learners alongside technological change. This would result in a top-down model for a paperless blended learning environment for the whole district (Stateler, 2021).
I was most certainly surprised by the concept of this program. Despite my recent growth – I had started a job on the Digital Learning team in a brand new role that I was defining – I suffered from severe imposter syndrome. As a result, I constantly questioned myself. Am I a leader? An innovator? Will people listen to me? Will I be able to make meaningful changes? Other people, including Dr. H, could see my desire to change the world, but I could not see it in myself. Early on, I found blogging cathartic and a great way to process my thinking. This post on promoting change captures the tug of war inside my mind (Stateler, 2022).
In this post, I connected that “to enact change requires moving beyond the facts and the frontal lobe and reaching into the feelings and limbic brain of the people you serve” (Stateler, 2022). I could see a path, and my compass pointed directly at the trailhead.
I’ve always enjoyed writing. When I was young, I used writing to process my feelings. As I aged, I continued the habit; I have journals full of my hopes, dreams, and fears. Because of this, finding my voice, especially in the form of a reflective blog, was easy for me. However, I struggled to connect my words to my actions and organization. For example, when I developed my “Why,” I still didn’t fully understand the connection between a paperless learning environment and blended learning.
Meanwhile, we just started the second semester. I felt confident about how to “do” grad school and was ready to go. Still, I didn’t quite see the deeper learning taking place and expected that my same behaviors from the first semester would translate perfectly to the second semester. At any rate, regardless of how well I thought I was doing, my Why assignment was the first of two “Bs” I received in my grad school career. “Through blogging, reflecting, discussing, reading, and connecting” (Stateler, 2022), I found clarity on my why for going paperless and how it could support blended learning by changing the environment.
As I said before, I had confidence in my voice. But could my actions support my words? I knew I could “talk the talk,” but could I “walk the walk?” While I grappled with this, I completed two significant assignments. These assignments gave me the structure I needed to implement meaningful organizational change. They were:
Meanwhile, I still wasn’t 100% confident in my leadership ability.
Getting back up
This style of learning was far more complex than sit-and-get learning. Specifically, it is personal, like singing in front of an audience or presenting to a peer group. Fortunately, we were concurrently taking a course on the growth mindset. This course helped me to adjust my thinking. That is, I learned how to stop doubting myself by adopting a learner’s mindset. This post from a later course details my journey with the growth mindset and how I can bring it to the organization where I work and serve (Stateler, 2022).
Meanwhile, I read Crucial Conversations (Grenny et al., 2021). This book allowed me to reflect on using research and structure to implement organizational change. In my blog post about this book, I shared how I was surprised that even with all of my hard work becoming the master of my story, it is still my most notable area of need. I feel that it will always continue to be an area of growth, however, shining a light on it is the first step to getting back on my feet (Stateler, 2022).
When I picture a leader making change, I see a significant, sweeping movement all at once. Through the ADL coursework, I learned that actual structural change rarely happens that way. When I think about me making change as that leader, I have a hard time picturing myself as a “big sweeping change-maker.” What I realized, though, is that I have it backward – it’s not that I am unable to lead; instead, my view of what a leader looks like is wrong. That is, meaningful change is painstaking, intentional, planned, and continually shifting. Therefore, we are all change leaders, or at least we all have the capability to be change leaders if we are strategic and use proven methods. Also, we have to be willing to change.
Is my project authentic? I still doubt my ability to enact change when I consider this question. However, I created my project with the intent of authenticity, and if I keep at it, I believe that creating a paperless environment is possible. As far as my role in the project is concerned, I think I have to realize that, as with anything, it comes back to the question, “How do you eat an elephant?” In this post, I explore the messy middle, also known as Act Two of the Hero’s Journey (Stateler, 2022).
I’m making tiny shifts in my organization and making meaningful changes will take a lot more time. However, I am confident that it can happen.
Flying free
The more we learn, the more our perspective grows. Throughout the ADL program, I gained more knowledge, confidence, and clarity in my beliefs. Particularly in my learning philosophy. As I reexamined my learning philosophy, my ideas adjusted with new information. In particular, I had never heard of Connectivism. Between the book A New Culture of Learning (Thomas & Brown, 2011) and these new concepts, my learning theory expanded to include the ideas of a collective, ever-evolving knowledge base created by – yet separate from – the human mind (Stateler, 2022).
In the end, I have more questions than answers. I continue to reflect on the importance of the role a learner’s mindset plays in this new world (Stateler, 2022).
I know that my learning philosophy embodies the COVA approach and Creating Significant Learning Environments (CSLE). “Because learning is as much about the environment as it is about a person and the environment evolves, I posit that learning theory must continue to evolve too. Humans learn similarly – inquisitively, always exploring their environment – but in a different context. As humans, we change our environment, so what we know about the environment changes. What was true has changed. As we connect through technology, knowledge no longer exists in a vacuum. What we know exists in ourselves, others, and non-human appliances” (Stateler, 2022).
“Learning must be about creating a meaningful environment for knowledge construction that goes beyond what we see as capable now into a realm that explores what might be capable. As I explore what I believe, I notice the importance of the evolving knowledge of the collective combined with the individual learner. I also notice the importance of creating an environment that encourages individuals to follow their passions, to know where to find the information, and where learners have autonomy, mastery, and purpose” (Stateler, 2022).
Knowing what I know about the COVA, I plan to continue to use the COVA approach to create significant learning environments in GCISD. I will create an authentic learning environment through choice, ownership, and voice. That is, the ADL program will become “doubly meta” as I bring it to my learners: “In my Professional Learning, I intend to guide administrators and admin assistants to create an authentic, cross-department, professional goal. Then, they will use this goal to create an action plan to improve digital systems within and across departments. Finally, my team will coach them throughout the year as they work to meet their goal and make meaningful systemic changes. The ultimate goal is to devise systems that we can use to model a blended learning environment for teachers and students.” (Stateler, 2022). As you can see, they will create authentic projects, find and flex their voice, and have a choice in how they learn, grow, and create. Learn more about how modeling will help guide this process.
How will I do this?
Part 1: Both my Instructional Design and Effective Professional Learning plans collide as I create and outline resources to implement my goal to support central administrators and their assistants in making systematic shifts toward a paperless work environment.
Part 2: Good ideas also rely on meaningful collaboration. My Action Research plan details how I will use and assess the effectiveness of digital collaboration, such as professional learning networks.
I think that preparing my learners and colleagues for the COVA approach and CSLE will require a bit of reflection. How can I connect this shift in thinking and make it comfortable for them? When I consider this, I think about my conversations with my dad about how he unintentionally used COVA to fix a clock. For starters, he lived on YouTube to solve his problem. He also got in, got messy, and made mistakes. Finally, when he got stuck, he looked to the professionals. Is he a clock professional now? Not exactly. But he figured out how to find the “where” of the information he needed (Stateler, 2022).
I will encourage tiny shifts and practice explicit modeling of growth and the learner’s mindset. Read more in my plan, Growing a Growth Mindset in Grapevine-Colleyville ISD.
I foresee challenges in implementing the COVA approach and CSLE. For starters, the teaching profession is undergoing tremendous change. Our district is not immune to the teacher shortage, job stress, or politics flooding the news and social media. Also, we all struggle to accept change in our lives, quite notably in the industrial education model. However, I can support the people I serve by:
Finally, I can focus on my journey with the learner’s mindset. Can you fully adopt the learner’s mindset? My friend once said, “Perfection is a unicorn – it does not exist.” My quest to embrace the learner’s mindset may never be perfect.
I can certainly keep trying.
References
Grenny, J., Switzler, A., Gregory, E., McMillan, R., & Patterson, K. (2021). Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes are High, Third Edition. McGraw-Hill Education.
Harapnuik, D. (2021, October). How to Create Your ePortfolio. It’s About Learning. Retrieved September 10, 2022, from https://www.harapnuik.org/?page_id=6065
Horn, M. B., Staker, H., Christensen, C. M., & Kim, A. (2015). Blended: Using Disruptive Innovation to Improve Schools (Custom EditionÂEducation Element). Wiley.
Roosevelt, E. (1960). You Learn by Living. Harper.
Stateler, K. (2021). My Proposal. Karin Stateler – Cookies N Cache. Retrieved September 10, 2022, from https://karinstateler.com/?page_id=95
Stateler, K. (2021, October). Already Dreaming of You. Karin Stateler – Cookies N Cache. Retrieved September 10, 2022, from https://karinstateler.com/?p=5
Stateler, K. (2021, October 28). I Love You, I Hate You: The Story of WordPress. Karin Stateler – Cookies N Cache. Retrieved September 10, 2022, from https://karinstateler.com/?p=102
Stateler, K. (2021, October 31). Winds of Change. Karin Stateler – Cookies N Cache. Retrieved September 10, 2022, from https://karinstateler.com/?p=118
Stateler, K. (2022). A New Culture of Learning. Karin Stateler – Cookies N Cache. Retrieved September 11, 2022, from https://karinstateler.com/?page_id=870
Stateler, K. (2022, January 16). Promoting Change: Perception is a Gamble. Karin Stateler – Cookies N Cache. Retrieved September 10, 2022, from https://karinstateler.com/?p=427
Stateler, K. (2022, February 21). From Cog to Metacognition: My Story. Karin Stateler – Cookies N Cache. Retrieved September 11, 2022, from https://karinstateler.com/?p=619
Stateler, K. (2022, March 8). Lizard Brains and Long Threads: Making Connections to Identify “My Why”. Karin Stateler – Cookies N Cache. Retrieved September 11, 2022, from https://karinstateler.com/?p=767
Stateler, K. (2022, March 9). Crucial Conversations. Karin Stateler – Cookies N Cache. Retrieved September 11, 2022, from https://karinstateler.com/?p=789
Stateler, K. (2022, March 27). Grandpa’s Clock, Coaching Data, and What His Hands Knew. Karin Stateler – Cookies N Cache. Retrieved September 11, 2022, from https://karinstateler.com/?p=828
Stateler, K. (2022, April 8). April Flowers: Thriving in the Right Season. Karin Stateler – Cookies N Cache. Retrieved September 11, 2022, from https://karinstateler.com/?p=897
Stateler, K. (2022, April 20). Creating a Culture of Comfort with the Uncomfortable. Karin Stateler – Cookies N Cache. Retrieved September 11, 2022, from https://karinstateler.com/?p=965
Stateler, K. (2022, April 29). Strike a Pose: Modeling Effective Practices. Karin Stateler – Cookies N Cache. Retrieved September 11, 2022, from https://karinstateler.com/?p=1015
Stateler, K. (2022, May 3). What is Water? Creating Significant Learning Environments. Karin Stateler – Cookies N Cache. Retrieved September 11, 2022, from https://karinstateler.com/?p=1041
Thomas, D., & Brown, J. S. (2011). A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform.
