It’s about Fit, not Fidelity.
We published our first blog in 2015. It’s still relevant today.
As educators, we’re all concerned with growth. We care about the growth of learners, and we know that our growth is the potential difference in their learning, year after year. As educators, we at Project ARC have relied on authentic, relevant, community-connected learning experiences to move beyond personal plateaus in our teaching and careers. Together, we forged a common arc of professional growth that capitalized on the assets we had mastered. That defines the experience of learning and any well-defined learning experience. As a result, we facilitate professional growth for learners, educators, and community partners.
But that doesn’t mean we have a model for your professional growth! Each of you comes to ARC Learning on your personal learning arc. It’s our job to work with the relevant questions to support the authentic and community-connected work you want to do as a learning community. We work with you to design what is best for your community. For our first blog, we think it’s fitting to make three commitments:
Every educator comes to ARC Learning from a slightly different space that defines what is authentic for them. This is true no matter how standardized their exposure is to the various initiatives underway in your community. Some will want to move forward despite obstacles because they’ve invested emotionally in their learners. They just want to get a new approach into their learners’ hands. Others are more concerned with understanding an approach before they implement it. They care about their learners, too, and believe learners will be empowered if their teachers do their jobs well. The truth is that you need both of these kinds of educators, and these kinds of educators need each other. That’s why the vision of Project ARC is to empower educators with community connections that make the potential difference for learners at all levels.
It’s also important to remember that individual educators will have different goals depending on what aspect of education is most relevant to them. Those visions can be the potential difference in a school or district initiative. Some will see ARC Learning as a way to foster the complexity that leads to deeper learning and stronger academic mastery of the content they love. Others will see ARC Learning as an opportunity, not just for workforce training but also for training a thinking workforce capable of meeting tomorrow’s complex challenges. Put together, that means ARC Learning is about getting learners to discover how to be managers of their relevant talents. That’s why our mission is to harness the power of authentic learning experiences in a relevant context for educators, learners, and community partners.
When these two commitments are brought together, ARC Learning opens the possibility of thinking about what education means in your school or community. It opens spaces for collaboration that go beyond school walls and can go beyond district boundaries or even beyond national boundaries. That’s why we often say that the work of Project ARC is global in reach but local in scale. How far your educators will go is really up to the conversations you’ll have as a community, and your educators must have a strong voice in those conversations precisely because their growth and that of their learners will be at stake. ARC Learning is about the fit with your community and its unique assets, not fidelity to a model. Ultimately, we think that’s the potential difference in teacher’s professional development. That’s why our purpose is to empower professional educators to become the potential difference in the arc of their learning and those of their learners.
