"Sowing the Seeds of Learning" Meeting Report, Pt. 4

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Farmers Market: The Promising Practices Marketplace

Myron Rogers set up the Promising Practices Marketplace. Each of the 22 school teams set up their “stalls” with artifacts that would help tell their story. The team then split into two. Two farmers stayed in the stall to tell the story of their Promising Practice while two shoppers from the team explored the market place with the task to see and hear as many of the 22 practices represented as they could in the 45 minutes allotted. At the end of the first round, each pair of shoppers indicated their top 5 choices of practices they would like to explore more deeply on the preference scorecard.

After the first round, we switched roles - the farmers from the first round became the shoppers and repeated the process. Using his superior powers of deduction and the criteria that people get to investigate practices of their own choosing, Rex Babiera created the groups that would work together in the afternoon Seed Exchange.

For more on the practices found at the farmers market, click here.

The Seed Exchange

After lunch, Myron organized us into groups that included members from 3 of the promising practice teams. Each pair was in a group with 2 other pairs representing promising practices they either chose or were chosen by.

Invoking Carl Ball and his passion for ideas, Myron offered that passion is in the connection with ideas that matter to us, and in our desire to learn from each other.

Joann offered some thoughts on how to dive deep into the inquiry we were about to undertake. Her suggestions included:

• Listen and notice what are the questions that come up.
• Look for connections and differences.
• What are we noticing? What surprised us? What pushes our buttons?
• How does this story connect with me/my children/classroom/school?
• This is a peer to peer exploratory conversation.

Before we got underway Connie Pitter reviewed our agreements for working together. She highlighted the fact that we are practicing the process as we are doing the process. She suggested that we watch where we make assumptions and encouraged us to be willing to risk. It is in the risking that we have the opportunity to change. Even monkeys fall out of the tree sometimes!

We were each given an Inquiry Guide with some questions to help us have a deeper conversation. The three major questions we worked with were:

• How does this Promising Practice work?
• How do you work this Practice?
• How do you know if this Practice works?
  

We did two rounds of the Seed Exchange. The first went for 90 minutes. We then moved into different groupings and repeated the process for another 60 minutes. Teams were encouraged to note the lessons learned from each promising practice. The flip charts reflecting those learnings are reproduced here. After the second round, we moved into our School Teams to connect before closing for the day.

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