Inaugural LLI Atlantic Conference Draws Scores of Teachers

"If you're not uncomfortable, you're not learning."

 

With those words, educator Kevin Jarrett helped kick off "Gaining STEAM," the inaugural LLI Atlantic educational conference held April 22 and 23 at National Cathedral School. Effective teaching, he said, requires embracing innovation, to push beyond the familiar and easy habits. It also needs an environment of trust, where participants are able to rely on each other for support, encouragement, and feedback.

 

Jarrett, named a FabLearn Fellow by Stanford University in 2016, gave the audience of teachers a series of metrics to help place themselves on an innovation spectrum, and he highlighted "thrival strategies" to help create what he described as "a safe place to fail." The keynote culminated in a "design challenge," where audience members had 15 minutes to team up and create prototypes using common household odds and ends. The creative energy resulting from the flow of ideas was palpable, setting an excited tone for the sessions that followed.

 

More than 80 faculty members from 10 states took part in the two-day conference, which featured more than three dozen sessions on science, technology, art, engineering, and math instruction, as well as on innovations that reach into every facet of educational life. Each session was led by an educator, with some presenting new approaches to familiar tools and topics and others serving to introduce new technologies. The goal for each was to provide information that the participants could take back to their schools and quickly put into practice.

 

One opening-day session, led by NCS teachers Deborah Virtue and Christopher Snipe, showed how the ubiquity of video technology gives educators a powerful new tool for professional development, and they introduced a video system that NCS is using to allow teachers to review their classroom practices.

 

The system is called Swivl, and through the use of electronic "markers" and microphones, it allows a teacher to record a class lesson far more fully than would otherwise be possible.

 

Both Virtue, NCS's science department chair, and Snipe, the Middle School drama teacher, have used Swivl for months, and they told their session that they now have much more information about class engagement and interaction, as well as better insight into what their students see and hear. Teenagers used to the presence of tech devices took right away to Swivl's presence, Snipe and Virtue said, and now often forget that a camera is running. "Sometimes I hear more than I want," Virtue said with a smile.

 

Swivl is a robotic system, but even by placing an iPad in a corner of the room, any teacher can gain new insight into how her class is proceeding, Snipe and Virtue said. Reviewing the footage can be hard, since effectively you're reliving the same class, Virtue acknowledged, but the takeaways are significant and make the time investment quickly worthwhile.

 

On the conference's second day, NCS's Frances O'Connor led a packed session on "design thinking" that cuts across academic disciplines. Through the pursuit of design challenges, O'Connor said, faculty can inspire better collaboration among students and promote a more joyful classroom environment.

 

Just as with Jarrett's keynote design challenge, creating a prototype that solves the challenge is one of the exercise's goals, but it's not the only one. Design thinking involves several other steps, too, and typically the exercise serves to challenge pre-existing thinking and require a strong team dynamic, O'Connor said.

 

The LLI Atlantic conference was presented by Lausanne Learning, a Memphis-based nonprofit dedicated to educational professional development. Lausanne Learning teamed up with the NCS Upper School and the NCS Technology Department to host LLI Atlantic. Helping lead the effort at NCS were Associate Head of School/Head of the Upper School Denise Brown-Allen, Director of Technology Martin Yancey, Director of Special Events and Leasing Danielle Capecchi and, especially, Director of Academic Technology Tommie Hata.

 

Thanks are due to each for this successful conference, as well as to the more than a dozen NCS faculty members who presented sessions.