Four Days?

Everyone has Beef with PD!

Boring, irrelevant, passive, inconvenient, inflexible, coercive, time-wasting, silly, condescending – just some of the terms educators use to describe traditional professional development sessions. School leaders worry that PD is ineffective while teachers are tired of childish icebreakers and endless brainstorming.

Learning at CMK is active, personal, and exciting. That makes Constructing Modern Knowledge unlike any other professional learning experience for educators. CMK is not a sit ‘n git workshop. Its results are as undeniable as the experience is unpredictable.

“Knowledge is a consequence of experience” – Jean Piaget

But, Four Freakin’ Days?

We understand that a four-day institute requires sacrifice on the part of you and your school, but know the investment is worth it. Educators participating in Constructing Modern Knowledge develop new skills, fluencies, as well as developing fresh perspectives on teaching and learning. Educators leave CMK ready to change the world and amplify the potential of their students.

Four days go by in a flash, but we find that to be the optimal time required to inspire the personal transformation educators experience.

Quality work takes time.
Time is the scarcest resource in schools.
Educators rarely enjoy the luxury of time required for meaningful learning.
Community must be cultivated and nurtured.
Collaboration is based on trust and interdependence.
Learning is personal, unpredictable, and rooted in experience – serendipity, debugging, course correction, contemplation, and reflection are all critical.
To create new, more productive contexts for learning, educators need to inhabit an alternative world unencumbered by bells, assignments, tests, and curricular mandates where anything is possible.

Given what CMK participants accomplish, during the institute and beyond, assures us that four days is a worthy investment. That may be one of the reasons some educators have returned to Constructing Modern Knowledge, 2, 3, 5, even ten times. Year after year, the projects created at CMK demonstrate a breathtaking level of educator confidence, competence, creativity, and capacity

“You can’t think about thinking, without thinking about thinking about something” – Seymour Papert

Trust the Process

Little has changed in the Constructing Modern Knowledge process since the first institute in 2008. Our open-ended flexible approach to professional development emerged from decades’ worth of experience leading immersive retreats in the United States and Australia. The learning objective is learning.

“The project should be a teacher’s smallest unit of concern” – Gary Stager

While each learner’s path and ultimate destination is highly individual, educators learning at CMK follow a predictable narrative arc over four days. Curiosity, exuberance, and a devil-may-care attitude are followed by unforeseen challenges, exhaustion, and concern. By lunchtime on Day Two, the solution to bugs reveal themselves, things begin to click, friendships solidify, and project development accelerates, and before you know it, you wish CMK could last longer.

“The best projects push up against the persistence of reality” – Seymour Papert

Learning at Constructing Modern Knowledge is what you do. It is not something done to you. Your talents, questions, and needs are respected and celebrated. Solutions to problems are found within the community and ourselves. Debugging teaches us, “The question to ask about the program is not whether it is right or wrong, but if it is fixable.” (Seymour Papert)

CMK is based on the promise of educators doing the impossible and inventing the future of education. The CMK experience reacquaints each of us with our ingenuity, resilience, and ability to chart a new course for our students and ourselves.

We sure hope you choose to spend four days with us this August!

CMK-at-a-Glance

The secret sauce of Constructing Modern Knowledge is four largely uninterrupted days of personally meaningful project-development – collaboratively or solo. That work will be supported by our faculty and your colleagues with just-in-time mentoring.

There will be conversations with inspirational guest speakers and time for reflection too, but the focus is on learning-by-doing.

CMK begins with a suggestion to take of your teacher hat and put on your learner hat. Being selfish with the experience pays great dividends for you and your students.