Voices+of+Experience

=Voices of Experience= This page captures some thoughts and lessons from folks who have been working with CFGs online. What's your story?.What have you learned?

From Donna Isaacs, Islesford Maine, donna.isaacs@gmail.com:

Julie--Thanks so much for starting this wiki! I think it could be a great tool for us, and I'm so happy we finally have a place to build and store our experience! I wanted to share with you and the group how powerful the online i-cfg work has been for me and how it has contributed to my current practice:

I got involved with you and this group before the first WM pre-conference session, when I started a new job on an island in Maine. I was attempting to start an on-line CFG for a group of Maine outer-island one and two-room school teachers. While we shared very similar dilemmas and worked in similar environments, similar island cultures with similar social and cultural issues and identities, each of us was completely isolated. The i-CFG you, I and the original veteran group started two years ago as an outcome of that first WM "Moving CFGs online pre-conference session became very much my support for attempting to work with this group of teachers. My biggest challenge was that initially, nobody in the island teachers group had any experience with CFG work, didn't know one another well, and many also struggled with the technology.

Since that fateful start to our inter-island group three years ago, much evolution has occurred. We've gotten several grants to develop our work. Two of our members have gone through coaches training. Many members attended Winter Meeting last year. We've experimented with different on-line tools, adapted many protocols and extended our work as a CFG to create an inter-island Teaching and Learning Collaborative (TLC) initiative, that now includes our students. This project involves aligning our curriculum so that all the one and two-room schools on our islands are working on the same topics and learning standards at the same time. Our students now can also feel less isolated, because they have the opportunity to collaborate with other students across islands via technology. I should mention that a wikispaces site like this one has become integral to our work, too, for book discussions and other inter-island collaborative work.

All of our curriculum development and project planning is done using SRI protocols. The protocols streamline our work, which is crucial for three reasons: 1) we are creating it as soon as we need it--always with a time crunch; 2) we have very limited time together online due to scheduling challenges, and only a few opportunities a year to get together face-to-face; and 3) our work is truly collaborative and includes input from everyone using it--including our students sometimes. I think it has helped that the core constituency in our group (there's been a little bit of turnover) started out as a CFG. From the start, we already had a clear set of shared norms about how we would conduct the work (the how) along with our shared vision for the project (the what).

I would love to hear from anyone who has any experience or interest in connecting teachers and students who want to overcome geographical challenges and collaborate using technology.