Cohort 21: Season 10 - Ten Years of Professional Growth, Inquiry & Action

On Saturday, October 2, 2021 at 8:30 a.m., 38 educators from across our community of CIS Ontario schools launched the 10th Season of Cohort 21. It is hard to believe that this Professional Learning Community is now in its 10th iteration. We feel so fortunate to be able to continue to provide such a highly personalized support experience because of the collective effort and commitment of our 24 volunteer coaches and 6 facilitators. This support ratio speaks to the continued demand for rich professional development that brings together like-minded educators under a structure of project based inquiry and action. The structure of Season 10 builds on the tried and tested recipe of first establishing “support groups” where participants initially connect to build relationships and trust, in order to challenge and support one another throughout the year. In our first F2F session our group explored the notion of Urgency vs. Importance, inspired by Ray Kurzweil’s quotation: “What we spend our time on is probably the most important decision we can make.” This diagram helped frame our discussions:

 

We then asked our participants: “When it comes to Student Learning & Wellbeing, what is important / urgent ?”

 

 

Having established some shared language in this protocol, we reviewed our four strands for Season 10. Building on the success from last year, we have created 4 Strands as a launching pad for further, personalized inquiry and action planning:

 

Participants self-selected into the “Strand Groups” and explored the question “What is urgent and important for you and your school within this strand?”

Though our online F2F sessions are only 3 1/2 hours in length, we surfaced some incredible patterns both in what is urgent and important for our CIS Ontario students and educators, but patterns of challenges and opportunities that our schools are facing.

Our next F2F session is on November 20, 2021, and we look forward to the connection, community and generative deep-dive on that day.

 

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