Moving from ‘shiny object’ to Observable Impact

With evolving technologies, ever-changing social media platforms, increasingly diverse students and heightened expectations from our communities, the challenges for schools and the educators within to keep up (or even catch up) with the latest and greatest innovations available to schools have never been greater. And now here comes AI…groan! How are teachers and leaders supposed to stay ahead of the curve and not feel like they are constantly chasing the next shiny object?

While the rate of change will likely continue to increase and the dazzle of ‘educational bling’ will continue to tempt us, it will become increasingly important for schools to think less about what these things will ‘look like’ in their schools and focus more on what we want them to LEAD to for our students. In other words, what is the observable vision of the learner and the learning we want to create in our schools? And how can we use this vision to help us filter shiny objects for busy teachers and leaders through the lens of IMPACT that we can see in our classrooms?

Join Cale Birk, recovering ‘shiny object’ addict, Imagineer of the Observable Impact Model and the author of “Navigating Leadership Drift”, “PLC 2.0 - Collaborating for Observable Impact” and “Changing Change Through Learner-Centered Design” for this fun, highly interactive, hands-on session. OI is a simple, step-by-step framework that allows new or experienced district leaders, educators and teacher teams to determine and increase the impact of everything from their staff meetings and collaborative team meetings all the way to the impact of any initiatives or actions that are being implemented in their school’s context. Rather than being ‘one more thing’, the Observable Impact Model allows us to streamline our time and efforts by connecting our actions to impact where it matters the most, in our classrooms with our students and our educators.

Host or Publisher Manitoba ASCD