I enjoyed hearing about the many different passions and values of educators who are coming together to connect, learn and collaborate. In these EdCamps, teachers work to personalize and self regulate their own learning to then implement in their own classrooms. The camp looks like an engaging, inspiring and inclusive day of professional development where teachers can learn from open conversations, sharing with others and learning from the experiences of others. I like this model of a participant driven conference in contrast to a session structured conference. It allows educators to be productive in their unique learning goals and to find the learning that is best suited to their individual needs and goals. Connected to the idea of inquiry based learning the co-developed session topics allow for a focus on what the learners want to learn and it allows for everyone to be interested in the topics and have a say in their learning outcomes.
Doing the EdCamp in class was an interesting experience to see the common interests of the class. Having the learning based on the knowledge and experiences of the discussion groups felt personal and generated deep concepts. In my group, we discussed our own experiences with mental health and focussed on how the strategies we were given to cope and manage our health as children could have been improved as well as things we plan to reinforce as educators. This model of learning allowed for genuine connections with each other and allowed me to see different perspectives and ideas surrounding this issue. Within the 15 minutes my group built off of each other’s ideas and related to each other’s experiences but with more time I feel like we could have expanded our ideas much more. I am looking forward to being a part of an extended version of our class EdCamp in November where we can have more time to elaborate on some of our discussion points and explore in more depth some of our common passions.
